by Miriam Horn
Jan Dustman Mercer’s dream of a literary life lasted as long as it took to get her first job offer as an “editorial assistant,” which she soon discovered meant she would do secretarial work for almost no pay. She quickly changed course and entered management training in marketing at a large Boston bank. It was the only division where women could rise beyond clerical positions. “It didn’t occur to me to be angry about that. It was just a fact that we all accepted.”
For thirteen years, Jan was “gung ho” in her career. “I felt like a pioneer, forging new territory. It was great, but also uncomfortable at times.” She endured the usual hazings: the appalled stares when she first set foot in the officers’ dining room—a grand, formal club until that moment open only to men—the constant and explicit sex talk by a senior officer. “He would get himself titillated. He was clearly repressed; pathetic, really. And he wasn’t the only one. I was once at a dinner with my husband, Tom [who also worked at the bank], and another guy, also very senior, was fondling my legs under the table. I didn’t know what to do short of leaving. If I offended him, he was in a position to hurt both my and Tom’s career. Nobody really knew what the ground rules were; we were all floundering. It was the first time that men and women were doing things like traveling together for business. Was it acceptable to have a drink with the married men you were traveling with? There were a lot of illicit relationships going on: Women may have realized what power they had and that it could be used to their advantage, or feared the consequences if they didn’t. Anyway, at that dinner I finally just left the table. He visited me in my department after that, and invited me for drinks. I rebuffed his advances, which I don’t think had negative consequences. But I did not tell Tom until many years later, because he respected this guy and I knew he would get angry. I carried it around by myself.”
The insurmountable obstacle for Jan turned out to be pregnancy, an event she had postponed for several years. “All through my twenties I’d thought I’d have my first child at twenty-eight. Then I got to be twenty-eight and thought, Nah. In the early seventies it was very unusual for a woman to have a baby and continue working, and I didn’t want to quit working. But when I was thirty-one, Tom and I were struck with this powerful yearning.” They stopped using birth control, and Jan got pregnant right away. She also was promoted to vice-president. “It was a wonderful year. Here I was the youngest female VP in the bank’s history and I had this baby growing inside of me. But I thought, Oh my word, I wonder if they know I’m pregnant. I was certain that if they had known, I would never have been promoted. But I knew I was in uncharted territory anyway, and I figured that this extra little glitch—it wasn’t exactly a glitch—this glitch was going to have some unknown effect on me and my career. Little did I know how much of an effect.”
Having never before had a pregnant vice-president, the bank had no policy for officers taking maternity leave; when Jan finally broke the news, her supervisors proved totally inflexible. The senior officers agreed that Jan could take unpaid leave for six months. When, after two months, she wanted to come back two days a week and ease up from there, they said no. At the same time, one officer who was running the United Way campaign asked her to help from home. She felt obligated to say yes because he had influence over her career. “But I resented the immense amount of time I had to spend calling on people when they wouldn’t let me come back to work part-time.”
When Jan did return to work, the couple hired a full-time nanny, a woman from Trinidad. Tom’s job at the bank was also flexible enough that he could go home when he needed to. Still, going to work was for Jan “the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. I had such guilt about leaving Tommy; he had never even taken a bottle. And I had no flexibility. I wasn’t in an income-producing position, where I could be judged on the bottom line. In staff jobs like marketing and personnel, where women typically worked, performance is more difficult to quantify. How many hours you sit at your desk is the way they judge you. I didn’t want to stay really late. I wanted to get home and see my baby, and I felt tremendous conflict. But I also knew that there were people watching my every move to see if I was really committed, if I was at my desk as many hours as before.” It wasn’t only from above that Jan felt pressure. She recognized that what she did would have consequences beyond her own life. “I had one young woman come up to me and say, ‘I hope you understand how important it is that you do this well, because it will determine whether any of the rest of us can do it.’ And I was flattered on the one hand, but my overwhelming feeling was, Oh my gosh, this is not just me. I’m carrying this huge weight around with me, the burden of being a symbol. I was not just trying to forge my own compromise for motherhood and career. I felt I was doing it for all the women at the bank. If I failed, I failed for everyone.”
Caught in a classic bind—between wanting to demonstrate her dedication and toughness and wanting to transform the workplace by pressing for more flexibility—Jan ended up feeling she had to prove that work came first. She stayed two more years at the bank, working fifty hours a week. “I was on a merry-go-round, and like lots of people who step on them, it never hit me how stressed I was until it stopped. Finally, in 1981, I told the bank I was leaving. No one asked me to stay, which was painful. No one even asked why I was leaving. The ranks closed quickly behind me.
“In the end, I went to the head of personnel and gave my unsolicited critique of their mistreatment of women with families. I finally shook off the passive stance of the patient good girl. I think a lot of women in our generation waited for outside forces to make decisions for us. We weren’t brought up to believe that women could control their own destiny. We grew up in the days when boys called you, and you sat and waited expectantly by the phone. We were taught to be passive, and that carried over to our early careers. We thought that if you were a loyal, good employee, the powers that be would take care of you. What we needed to do was take charge of life for ourselves.”
Jan worked in real estate for a year, and then Tom was transferred to Dallas. She hated the idea of moving, and briefly contemplated a commuter marriage. Instead, she quit her job, moved to Dallas, and became a full-time mom, giving birth to a second son six years after the first. “The move turned out to be a godsend. In Boston, it would have been difficult for me to drop out. We needed my income. And it would have been almost impossible for me to go against everyone’s expectations. In Dallas, no one knew me or had expectations. Most of our neighbors had no idea that I’d been a high-powered banker for thirteen years. They never thought to ask. It just wasn’t the norm. At parties I would sometimes say, ‘I used to be a banker,’ as if it were my real identity that I’d just temporarily given up. At times I longed for the sense of being somebody. But the compensation for this enormously long sabbatical is that I got to know my kids, their day-to-day stuff. And I’ve had time for friends, who are in ways even more central than your kids, who, after all, go away.
“When I got to enjoy Tommy with no pressure and deadlines, I realized how much I’d missed. I’m glad that I shaped my sons’ values, that they won’t feel they had absentee parents. And after a while, I got okay with being just another mom. We lived in a neighborhood with lots of mothers of young kids. There was a real support system for the mother side of me; if I was lonely, I could just walk out on the street. At first I felt kind of cut off intellectually, but fortunately I had Wellesley friends.” For her twenty-fifth reunion, Jan wrote to her classmates of her “decade of eating crow.… Who would have believed that I would abandon my hard-won banking career to raise two boys full time, live in the Dallas ’burbs, wash out the gray, appease my children with junk food and TV?… Making each day meaningful takes more self-discipline.… I’ve come to think maybe you can’t have it all at the same time, but you can have it serially. I proved I could do it all, but chose to do part of it even better.”
Jan’s decision to drop out in 1982 was a textbook case of the phenomenon that Felice Schwartz would famously name the “mo
mmy track” in a 1989 Harvard Business Review article, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life.” The article contended that women are more prone to “career interruptions, plateauing and turnover” than men, and that it cost companies money in lost training dollars and expertise when middle- and upper-level women retired, like Jan, to the nursery. Though Schwartz’s thesis would be misused as an argument against squandering corporate resources by admitting women to management ranks, Schwartz was actually arguing that corporations had to make it possible for women to pursue both serious careers and motherhood. It was not enough for the bank to treat Jan’s departure as her “personal choice”: If her only two choices were to work as if she had no family or not to work at all, the line between choice and coercion blurred.
The mommy track has been traversed by many in the Wellesley class of ’69. Half the graduates stopped work when they became parents, (compared to just 3 percent of the men of Harvard ’69). Some stopped more than once: Pathologist Linda Davis had to quit and find a new job after every one of her four babies, because none of her employers would grant her extended leave. A quarter started or resumed work only after age thirty-five. A majority believe they have “not fully fulfilled their potential” because of sacrifices made for child rearing. And nearly all who interrupted their careers to be with their kids paid a price: On average, they earn 20 percent less than their classmates who’ve worked nonstop since graduation. Those lower earnings, in turn, have often trapped them in a familiar cycle. As the gap between their wages and their husbands’ grew, it made more sense for the men’s work to take precedence and for the women to assume more responsibility for the kids. The problem was particularly acute for those like Jan, whose professions made the greatest demands on them at the peak of their child-rearing years. Eldie Acheson, who developed the first maternity policy at Ropes and Gray, watched female colleagues going crazy trying to time their babies just so: “ ‘Well, let’s see, I can’t do it in the first three years because I’m brand-new; but I can’t do it in my fifth, sixth, or seventh years, because that’s when I’m being assessed for partnership.’ It leaves a ridiculously tiny window. It ought to be safe for a professional to have a baby anytime.” (For some it is: Hillary Clinton was thirty-two and pregnant when she became the first woman to make partner in a major Little Rock firm. She was also the First Lady of Arkansas, which no doubt helped her colleagues overcome their doubts.) Thirty years after these women entered the workforce, having children still makes it harder to advance: In 1998, while just 5 percent of executive men had no kids, 37 percent of executive women were childless.
Many in Hillary Clinton’s class have enjoyed what Elizabeth Tracy Hayes, ’69, described as the “advantages” of flexible or part-time work—“such as a sub-living wage, and no benefits or promotions.” At Ropes and Gray, says Eldie Acheson, “women were definitely at risk raising questions on maternity and family-leave policy during their interview.” Though there were two women partners at the firm who were married with children, “they were making it happen by virtue of their personalities and their relationship with the boss. But it shouldn’t be something each woman has to work out for herself.” When drafting the law firm’s maternity policy, Eldie recalls, “we had fights over the tone. They wanted something that seemed less encouraging, more dour.” And even when the policies are in place, says Eldie, “it’s only a tenth of the battle. You’re still dealing with evaluations, and the one thing the boss always remembers is when that associate was out. That inevitably hits women hardest. There’s still the expectation that it is the wife who will produce the flexibility, especially at the last minute. If the husband has to, there’s lots of slamming of stuff into briefcases, an attitude that it’s a management failure on her part, and, afterward, a great sense of heroics on his part. There’s still the operating assumption that the husband is more important on the work front and less good at home.”
Perceiving the double bind—that good mothers are deemed bad bets for employers, and good workers are deemed rotten mothers—Mary Catherine Bateson proposed in Composing a Life the possibility that motherhood and work might enhance each other, offering “a different clarity of vision, one sensitive to ecological complexity, the larger whole.” Biopsychologist Martha McClintock, who gave birth to Ben in 1986 and adopted Julia in 1993, describes having children “as so profoundly important that it’s beyond words. It’s the most important thing. Before I had my children, I felt the strangest thing, as if I had no arms. I felt this metaphor viscerally. Now, with the kids, I feel whole. My arms are full. In fact, my life is full to the point of overflowing. It’s too much. But choosing between a life that’s too empty or too full—that’s a no-brainer.” Her graduate students describe her as tireless, but also as committed to going home for dinner with the kids and happy if they do the same. “I actually think having children has allowed me to do better work,” says Martha, “because they’re such a source of joy and fun that you have the energy to be creative and flexible.”
Satisfactory accommodations of work and home are not rare in the class of ’69, though they have often taken some time to discover or devise. Jan Piercy’s first marriage at twenty-four to an older man who was “very steady and certain in his convictions and direction,” brought her a measure of security after her mother’s stroke. But her husband’s encouragement and faith in Jan’s abilities coexisted with what she calls subtle acts of sabotage: When Jan was working on the McGovern campaign, her husband planned their vacation in France—before Election Day. “Like a lot of men,” says Jan, “he valued equal partnerships in the abstract but had a history which didn’t equip him to practice that.”
After a divorce and years alone, nearly forty and “in terrible travail over the biological clock,” Jan met Glen. They married and she was a mother by age forty-one, thrilled and terrified both. “In your twenties and thirties, people expect that you could become a parent and that will change you. But when you’re forty, people’s expectations of you are fixed and you’re at a point in your career of more responsibility and your life is organized around work. It’s the professional spurt years.” Though she was thoroughly satisfied at Shorebank—“I’d finally found my life’s work”—Jan could not find a way to limit the job’s time demands and felt terrible conflict at her long absences from her daughter. She finally left for the MacArthur Foundation and more flexible hours, but gave up that flexibility again when she joined the Clinton transition team and took her position at the World Bank.
Jan’s second marriage has supported her in all the ways her first failed her. It was her husband who pressed her to seize the rare opportunity afforded by her friends’ ascendance to the White House, though he had to make immense accommodations. Glen stayed in Chicago with their daughter, Lissa, while Jan commuted to the capital, uncertain whether she would stay in the administration; she did not feel well suited to the White House’s “ugly undertow.”
Finally, after several months of her equivocations, Glen packed a U-Haul and moved the family to D.C. “My husband loved what he was doing in his own law practice and managing properties, and left that behind to support what I was doing. It has not been easy or particularly fulfilling for him, and I’ve thought more than once, Wow, this is what women have always done. I don’t like seeing what it costs Glen, but you do it sometimes for a limited time. And I think Lissa has come out way ahead. She has more than most kids of her father, who loves her and believes in her so totally. She and I get to have complicated conversations about what it means to be a woman; when I travel, I tell her I don’t want to be away from her, and she says, ‘You have to, Mommy. It’s your job.’ We both tell her, ‘What you will be is inside you. Listen to your own desires, and resist others of us wanting you to be things you may not be.’ ”
While Jan and I were talking one afternoon in her office, Spain’s ambassador to the United States called, hoping to reschedule a meeting to Friday or Saturday morning. Jan told him that Saturday would require juggling on the
home front, and “since it’s easier to negotiate with almost anyone other than a five-and-a-half-year-old, I’ll try to change Friday instead.” She hung up the phone, apparently still slightly stunned that such calls were everyday fare. “I am the same person, so I have to laugh at how, overnight, it’s become so easy to make things happen. Things I could only think about before I now have the standing to do.”
Jan has used her standing to make children a more acceptable intrusion at work. “With colleagues I know it won’t annoy—and I think people without children have a right to be annoyed; you have to understand who you can do it with—I will blend the two and work around the edges.” When a high-ranking Treasury official dropped by, the women discussed their kids’ after-school programs and Halloween. “At seven o’clock this morning I was still in bed with Lissa coloring beside me. I was talking on the phone to my deputy, and at one point I said, ‘No, you can’t,’ and he said, ‘Oh, you don’t think I should raise this?’ and I said, ‘Oh no, I was talking to my daughter.’ I’ve brought Lissa to the office with me. You’ve got to create paths somehow.”
Having produced a son that Sports Illustrated has called “a cross between Michael Jordan and Mother Teresa,” Janet McDonald Hill has become a public paragon of working motherhood. The cover story in Essence magazine on Grant, a superstar with the Detroit Pistons, began: “Janet and Calvin Hill did something right.”
Janet was a senior at Wellesley when she met Calvin, an honors student in history and star running back at Yale, at a party at Harvard after the Ivy League championship game. Janet was one of the few black girls at the postgame mixer. She was leaning awkwardly against the wall “trying to figure out what to do with my arms” when Cal, who had just been recruited by the Dallas Cowboys, walked into the room. “Every head turned,” she remembers, “as if a spotlight had switched on.” Janet didn’t know that Cal had been injured in the game: In a fall, he’d badly split his tongue. Though nervousness churned her stomach as he crossed the room to ask her to dance, her flutterings ceased the moment he opened his mouth: All he could manage was inarticulate mumbling. To the amazement of everyone looking on, Janet coolly turned him down. He called a month later, mostly to prove, Janet says, that he could in fact speak.