Women who don't value themselves except through work

Following on from the piece below, I’ve been thinking today about the film Julia and Julie which I saw over the weekend.

It gives two interesting examples of people (both women, incidentally) who can’t seem to value themselves in any other way than through work.
Julia Child (apparently well-known to any American for bringing the art of French cooking to the US) and her modern-day fan Julie (who devotes a year of her life to creating every recipe in her mentor’s book and blogging about it) both seem to need some form of public acclaim before they can be satisfied with their lives.
But being totally immersed in these projects isn’t enough: they both need more than that, they need to know that other people are appreciating what they’re doing before they can feel satisfied with it....or themselves.
Julia Child wasn’t satisfied with being an extraordinary cook. She felt a desperate need to get her work ‘out there’, to be published.
And during the course of writing her blog, Julie is forever saying to her husband, ‘I’m going to be a writer!’ It’s her husband who has to remind her that by very virtue of following all the recipes and writing about it, she is a writer.
But she’s clearly not going to be satisfied until she knows people are reading her blog. And then she’s only truly excited when she gets calls from agents and publishers who want to turn her blog into a book and publish it.
I believe many of us can relate to this, but it raises an important issue. How much is doing some intrinsically valuable...and how satisfied can any artistic person feel simply pursuing their art if there’s never any likelihood that others will get to see/hear/read/listen to it....and appreciate it?
And following on from that, can writers, musicians, artists ever achieve total satisfaction if their work goes unpaid? Or is it only by receiving a financial reward that insecure, artistic types can finally feel they’ve arrived? Does the fact that someone else is prepared to reward their efforts convey the final seal of approval they so desperately crave?