Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

by Anna Quindlen

When prejudice, bigotry, and injustice are entrenched, egregious, and sanctioned, we’re looking at big-muscle-group remedies—the lawsuit, the amendments, the marches. But we’re now more often in the small-muscle-group area, the business of personal behavior and attitudes. After Sandra Day O’Connor was chosen to be the first woman on the United States Supreme Court in 1981, one of the letters she received read, “Back to your kitchen and home female! This is a job for a man and only he can make the tough decisions. Take care of your grandchildren and husband.” The truth is that that sort of nonsense made the early movement for women’s equality simpler. Fighting that kind of flagrant bigotry requires less finesse than sidling around tokenism or dealing with entrenched custom. Young women today encounter the subtle sexism of far-enough rather than the raw stuff of no-way. At the sort of firms from which the job-seeking O’Connor was summarily turned away after her graduation from Stanford Law at mid-century, there are now plenty of female lawyers. But most power is still concentrated in white men, white men who hire those who remind them of themselves when young.

  The next generation of women may bust past that as they move into the second stage of this revolution, in part because they’re growing up with, befriending, and marrying young men who have been raised in this new world by mothers who have been living its precepts. Raising feminist boys was the great challenge of my life, and it wasn’t easy for them; it wasn’t about dolls instead of trucks—both of mine preferred Lego blocks—but about getting them to refuse the easy assumption of privilege and the unconscious assumption of superiority, which, let’s face it, is challenging for anyone. But, as our son Chris remarked once, chicks dig it. My sons like and respect women, which women, unsurprisingly, find attractive. My daughter likes and respects herself, which means at some seminal (ovular) level, my work here at home is done.

  But our work in the world is not. I’m struck by the plateaus inherent in great change, especially at the most basic level. All the times I’ve been asked on college campuses about balancing work and family, I’ve never been asked the question by a young man. Young women, even with their own mothers’ successes, wonder how they will manage job and kids; young men still figure they’ll manage it by marrying.

  Even though we no longer have to rush out of the office with some lame excuse about a family emergency when what actually happened is that our fifth-grader threw up onto his math book, we’re still feeling that double standard for women. And we’re feeling it at both ends of the family life continuum. Recently I got an email from a friend that was representative of an entire shift in the way we live now: “In Boston getting our daughter settled in her apartment then on to Vermont to move my mother into assisted living.”

  We are the first generation of women who are intimately involved in the lives of our children and in the lives of our parents while trying to hold down jobs outside the home at the same time. Someone even came up with a name for this: the sandwich generation. It is yet another way in which the actuarial charts make us distinct: while a hundred years ago fewer than 7 percent of those in their sixties had a living parent, today that number is almost 50 percent. At the same time, many more children over the age of eighteen are still living at home. The irony is rich—the women’s movement taught us we could be more than caregivers, and now we’re caregivers to more people than ever before. When it was first coined, the phrase “having it all” designated the doctor who went from the office to the soccer field to watch her kids play, then went home to a dinner cooked by her husband the architect. Now it more often means the doctor who is moving her mother into an assisted-living facility, monitoring the meds of her husband’s parents who are still trying to get by in their own home, and waking in the middle of the night as her college graduate stomps up the stairs, partying off the strain of not being able to find a job, or not being able to find one that pays enough to rent an apartment.

  We’re working this out on the fly, with the help of other women, just as we did with the balancing of work and family, having the baby and keeping the job. Today the same women who called to ask one another how they were handling reading-readiness, early puberty, and SAT prep classes find themselves swapping advice about bone scans, nutritional supplements, and nursing homes. “You should call her,” I heard one woman say of a mutual friend at lunch. “She knows everything about Alzheimer’s.”

  The changes in the lives of women over the last half century and the extension of life expectancy have both coincided with a great migration. Extended families are scattered, easy access to aunts and uncles a thing of the past. My family didn’t care for my kids while I worked; my paid family of sitters did. What the women’s movement has often meant is the hiring of other women to do some of the work for us, from housekeepers to home health aides. Here was what passed for a retirement community during my childhood: after his wife died, my grandfather Pantano lived in a bedroom in a house with my aunt Mary and uncle Angelo, my cousins Maurice and Mary Jane. He tended tomato plants in the backyard wearing a white dress shirt, his iron-gray hair slicked straight back with some fragrant oil. It never occurred to me to ask if all involved liked this arrangement. It was how things worked. It was a smallish house, where they all lived. Today we have much bigger houses, but there is no room for grandparents to live there. Nor, in many cases, would they want to.

  I don’t remember hearing the phrase “assisted living” until I was well into adulthood. Sun City in Arizona, the first retirement community for “active seniors,” is slightly younger than I am. Places like it now fill the landscape of the exurbs, planned communities to which those under fifty-five are cordially disinvited, where overnight visits from grandchildren are curtailed in duration of stay. Americans are people who prize independence and autonomy. But for the aged, the infirm, and the enfeebled, that prize is often out of reach. Taking up the slack for them is no longer a mission, it is a business. “Huge growth in the nursing-home sector,” one businessman said to me at dinner one night, and I shivered.

  All great social movements exact a price from someone, for someone. We’ve created a new world that is still figuring itself out, and one of the greatest conundrums is how women who taught their daughters, by their example and their words, to be strong and independent, to take control of their own future and to take care of themselves, will navigate the dependency of old age. My internist, who has many older patients, says she frequently encounters those who have persuaded their middle-aged children that they are fine, that they need no help, that they are perfectly content living independently. “Except,” my doctor adds, “it doesn’t happen to be true.” Some of these women, she says, wind up moving in with one another for company and support. That sounds about right to me. My plan is that a group of us will move together into our house in the country, with a crackerjack cook and a couple of aides. We’ll repeat the same stories, trash the same absent friends, secure in the knowledge that none of us will notice the repetitions. Our children will call, male and female alike, working, busy, with too much to do, and we’ll say, “Fine, dear. Nice to hear from you. Have to go.”

  Or maybe it won’t be like that at all. Maybe we’ll yearn for the old days when one of the daughters-in-law would have been guilted into giving us the guest bedroom, when we would tuttut about how much time she spent lunching with her friends when she could be home cooking for her husband, who of course would be incapable of cooking for himself. That all sounds so antique, doesn’t it? Despite the trade-offs, things seem fairer now, even though the changes in women’s lives have caused so much upheaval. As my father once said to me feelingly, “Can you imagine what it would have been like if you had been born fifty years earlier? Your life would have been miserable.”

  Perhaps this will all work itself out for the next generation of young women. I hear a complaint all the time about them: They don’t get it. They don’t understand how hard we’ve worked to get here. They don’t understand how bad things were. They don’t understand that you used to have to keep your mo
uth shut if your boss made a grab at you, or that no matter how smart you were or where you’d gone to college the first question anyone asked at a job interview was, “Can you type?”

  But how in the world do we expect them to feel the utterly changed tenor of the times any more than I can truly feel what it was like for my grandparents to raise a houseful of children during the Depression? Of course I know the history, and at home I’ve heard the stories. But personal experience is the trump card.

  Progress is always relative. Sometimes it’s not even real. I once heard Claudia Kennedy, at the time the only three-star female general in the Army, talk about the question of critical mass, of how many members of any group you need inside the tent before you can speak up, speak out, make change, raise hell. But maybe there’s a critical mass at which it seems as though things are dandy when dandy is still a way off. Is it fourteen women in the Senate? Is it three women on the Supreme Court? It’s amazing how few women are required on a corporate board to satisfy the suits that they’ve done the woman thing. Actually, it’s not just corporations. For years I was a journalism show pony, trotted out to prove a point, at some conference, on some panel: John, Joe, James, and me, there to send a message that women were well represented, in newspapers, in opinion writing, and in the public discourse of the country. None of which was true.

  A few years ago there was a report from the White House Project that showed there was a lid on big jobs for women, a lid set at roughly 20 percent. Half the population and, on average, only 20 percent of the country’s leaders, in business, in journalism, in law, in politics. In many cases women’s participation had been stuck at that level for years while other countries moved ahead. The United States had dropped down the world’s ladder of female political representation to a position behind countries like Iraq and North Korea. At big law firms one study showed that women were a measly 12 percent of partners in 1993. Fifteen years later, that number was up to 18 percent. Hearts and minds may have been won, but bodies in the boardroom hadn’t followed.

  When you talk about that, someone always says that women opt out, for home and family or because they don’t want the punishing hours that partnership or high position demands. People have been saying that my whole life long, that women don’t run things because deep down inside they don’t want to. Instead of that excuse, I always wonder why no one wonders why the standard-issue top job is considered so heinous that a whole class of people, people who often manage to deal with explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting—occasionally at the same time—would pass on it. And maybe it’s the job that’s passed on them, not the other way around. I once had a boss who would praise any woman he considered especially promising by saying that someday she could be managing editor. He thought that was a big deal: in those days no woman had come close to a job that big. The only problem was that managing editor was the number two spot, and it was hard to believe that anyone would tell some guy that he was such a star that he might rocket to the second spot. One crazy day I said that. My boss looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. Lack of gratitude, sense of entitlement—that’s what he was thinking.

  Besides, I’m not sure whether the young women of today will hit the glass ceiling hardest in the office or in the world. They certainly won’t know what it is like to watch as their fathers and husbands go out to vote for president and they have to stay home. They won’t know what it is like to be denied entry to West Point or even to basic training.

  Maybe they will hit the glass ceiling at home, when almost overnight the world implodes, when they are transformed from junior executives with the world on a microchip to homebound mothers with two kids under the age of three and oatmeal in their hair, hit it when they realize that they have wound up with two full-time jobs and their male counterparts have not because of unfinished business about the division of those jobs formerly designated women’s work. Maybe they will hit the glass ceiling even later than that, when they realize that if their aged parents need help, the women of the family are still expected to provide it. My grandmother used to recite a little ditty: A son is a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life. I always thought it had ominous undertones. When my father demanded that I quit college to care for my mother when she was ill, I occasionally made bitter comments about the tradition of Irish Catholic households sacrificing their daughters for the greater good. But it wasn’t just my father, and it wasn’t just the Irish, and it wasn’t just then.

  Maybe, in tandem with this new generation of young men, women will develop real partnerships, real divisions of labor, on this front and so many others. I wish the women of my generation had, but we didn’t. In general we still wound up doing more, scheduling playdates as well as business meetings, listening to distraught colleagues at work and then listening to distraught kids at home. Of the work that needed to be done, women did much, much more than their fair share, either the woman of the house or the women they hired to be their surrogates there.

  I hope this changes for my children. I’m happy they were spared the decades of lousy contraception and forced pregnancies, spared the quotas at professional schools and the punitive laws that held, for instance, that a rape could only be prosecuted if a third party witnessed the attack (preferably, I assume, a police officer or a priest). I’m happy they live in a world in which it is regularly acknowledged that a man who hits his wife is a bully and a weakling, and a man who takes care of his own children is not babysitting, and a man who changes diapers is not entitled to be treated as though he’s just invented fire. So much seems normative for them: the stay-at-home dad down the street, the woman presidential candidate, the mother who does not defer, the father who does not insist on the last word. It’s not that all the problems of gender disparity have been solved—far from it. There are different problems now, issues of nuance and unspoken assumption instead of the blunt club of bigotry and supremacy. There’s still plenty to be done.

  But still, it is hard to explain to them how different the expectations have become, how utterly transformed our lives have been over their course. When I came to The New York Times as a reporter in 1978, at age twenty-five, I thought I’d been hired because I was aces at my job. It took me a few months to figure out that a small group of courageous women had sued the paper and that the hiring of a bumper crop of female reporters and editors, what I thought of as the class of 1978, was the result.

  Fast-forward to a June morning in 2011, when a woman named Jill Abramson became the first woman to run the paper. One of the women who had been a plaintiff in that suit wrote this comment: “Women of the NY Times who participated in historic 1978 sex discrimination class action suit—at last here is our highest reward.”

  Of course it wasn’t exactly their reward. In the way of these things, the women who brought suit didn’t prosper much. I did, and my fellow female reporters as well. We were hired, and promoted, and even considered suitable for the second spot on the masthead someday. And then, on one historic day, one of us was promoted to the top job. Perhaps the next generation will not even find that notable because it will have become so commonplace. Unremarkable equality, that’s what they’ve grown up with. What a legacy we’ve left them, male and female alike.

  PART IV

  The Be-All and End-All

  As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age; first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.

  —CICERO

  One day I asked my friend Steve, who writes music, why “Taps” makes you feel the way it does. I figured there was some combination of notes that gives us that feeling of exaltation and sadness each time a trumpeter plays those few short bars. Steve said he thought it was mainly a matter of tempo and association: that music played slowly in a funeral setting inevitably created the emotions I described. To prove his poin
t, he dum-dummed “Taps” in a much more sprightly fashion and it did sound different, more Sousa and less Elgar, more cheer and less mourning.

  Perhaps that’s the key to getting older, that how you feel about it has to do with context, the combination of past associations and current tempo.

  I believe that there are essential mysteries, things written on the body that we sense and still cannot quite figure out or define. The future is one of them. It’s not so much that it’s unknowable as that it’s unfeelable. It seems to be a country populated by vague characters who are Not Us. Thinking about it always reminds me of the scene in A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge is traveling in the future with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and keeps looking around for himself. He suspects he doesn’t see himself because he’s changed so much; it turns out he doesn’t see himself because he’s in the churchyard, six feet under. “Are these the shadows of things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be, only?” he asks the spirit.

  Well, that is the question, isn’t it? Is there a certain predestination to our lives from here on in, an existence that is inevitable because of all that has gone before? At what point is the clay set, the mural done and signed? Or does it all depend on whether we see our swan song as a dirge or a ditty?

  At age sixty I find myself poised between the inevitable and the possible, the things I know and understand and the things I hope to learn and perhaps unravel. But it’s still a bit of a mystery, the yet to come, with that greatest of all mysteries, mortality, at its very end.

  In her beautiful memoir of life after sixty, The Last Gift of Time, Carolyn Heilbrun writes, so sensibly, “Since we do not wish to die, surely we must have wished to grow old.” Aging, dying: both are a challenge to the human imagination. As the carapace of wrinkles and sag develops, we persist in seeing ourselves otherwise, so that when we peer into the mirror it is our own eyes we look into, the ones that have looked back at us since we were children. That child within each of us gives us hope that there will be more to learn, to discover, more to change and understand.