Having It All

Like a lot of people—at least according to Facebook, various blogs, and about fifty percent of the conversations I've had in the last month both on and off the playground—I recently read Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in The Atlantic called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."

(If you haven't yet read the article, I suggest you do that right now. We'll wait.)

Welcome back!

Slaughter argues that despite her generation having told my generation all these years that the feminist dream is alive—i.e., that a woman can work in a high-powered job AND nurture a family—that maybe, just maybe, this isn't actually true. Slaughter describes life for the women in the very top sector of the working world, which is to say, women in government positions, female CEOs (turns out there are about three), and the like, many of whom have begun to admit to the immense difficulty of having careers that required that much responsibility and time-commitment while also raising happy, healthy kids. Slaughter outlines some of the myths about why women "can't have it all"; namely that we're not working hard enough, being ambitious enough, marrying the right people (i.e., men who will put their own careers on hold for ours), or doing things in the right order (having kids early, and first, then focusing on careers).

She's right, and brave, to call out these myths, and I applaud her for it, and while I'm not in that sector of the working world, and I know very few women who are, most of the women I know who have read this article recently took away an important message. And that message is that, guess what? We moms feel really torn about our home lives and our work lives and how to make both what we want them to be.

I praise Slaughter for starting this conversation and outlining these myths, the most prevalent of which is that women just aren't dreaming big enough or trying hard enough to get ahead—a myth, she says, mostly perpetrated by women in her generation. Let's throw each other under the bus, shall we, ladies?

Her solutions to the problem of balance, though, are a little less inspiring to me. As it turned out, I read this article while lying on my bed in the middle of the afternoon (3:30, to be exact). L. was at daycare, and I'd gotten up at seven with him, made breakfast, gotten everybody dressed (actually B. can dress himself these days) and out the door. I wrote for an hour or two, worked on my online classes for three hours or so, did some bill-paying, puttering, and career development, cleaned the kitchen, and then got hit with a wave of exhaustion and the realization that my day was far from over: there was pick-up, afternoon playtime, and dinnertime-bathtime-bedtime all to go. So I rested with a magazine. And my prevailing feeling after reading Slaughter's article was not empowerment (I'm understood!) but exhaustion. And then guilt for being tired. While she suggests that work rules should change, so that women can work less time in the office, for example, she never advocates less work or taking time for ourselves or praising ourselves for even trying to have a career and a kid. The picture I came away with was that if you really want to be a successful careerwoman and have healthy, happy kids, you leave work at six, come home for family dinner, then sit down again at your laptop from 8:00 to midnight. Then you're up between 4:30 and 5:30 to check email or make the house come together before bolting out the door for another fourteen-hour day.

To say this life is my idea of a personal hell would be an understatement. I also don't believe it makes anybody healthy or happy. To be totally honest, with three classes, a book to finish, and a toddler to rear, I am just about at the edge of what I can handle. How on earth do these superwomen survive? I was flooded with questions: but when do you have sex with your husband? When do you sit down with a glass of wine and watch crap TV? Maybe Hilary Clinton, Karen Hughes, and Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg--all women mentioned in the article--don't have time for sex, TV, wine, or, my personal favorite, sleep. They just work harder.

Is that really the solution?

As I like to talk about the year I spent in Norway, I'll do that now. Say what you will about Norway's social safety net, it prioritizes families. Women take a year off with each child and don't lose their place in line for tenure, for a promotion, or for partnership at the law firm. At one, most kids go to "Barnehage" (which translates to "Kindergarten," which translates to "Kids' Garden"), and there's no stigma about evil daycare or high-powered callous career mothers. I think women feel much less of that pull that so many of us feel here: should I stay home? Should I go back to work now, or in a year, or in five years, or never? I happen to know well a woman who works in a very high-powered position in the Norwegian government. She just had her second kid, is taking her prescribed year off, and then will go right back to her job—a job that gives her enough time off to spend with her kids and partner.

Is that such a crazy model?

We just love to work here in the States, and while I prize productivity and hard work, it's not lost on me that we have an unemployment problem and a number of people working eighty- to one hundred-hour weeks. If some people did less work, not more, wouldn't there be more jobs to go around?

Slaughter doesn't suggest that we institute maternity leave or reevaluate our crazy American work ethic across the board. The onus for change is put squarely on women themselves: she calls on other high-powered female careerists to change the workplace culture to include space for family dinners, for one thing. Asking women to do this for other women is not necessarily a bad thing, for now. Women should be role models for other women, and someone like Slaughter—brilliant, accomplished, poised—encouraging other women to help their employees find balance carries a lot of weight. But I'm not sure it's enough.

Interestingly, she does speak to the role of men in child-rearing, and the ways that role is changing. After reading the article, I felt a little frantic, a little old, a little underachieving, and I said to B:

"You need to get a really high-powered job now, while you're young!" (My logic? I clearly can't handle it.)

His response?

"But I want to spend time with L. too."





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