In short, even as a woman who was still working full-time as a tenured professor, I had suddenly become categorized and subtly devalued as just another one of the many talented and well-educated women who showed great promise at the start of their careers and reached the early levels of success but then made a choice to take a less demanding job, work part-time, or stop working entirely to have more time for caregiving. I continually sensed that I had disappointed the expectations of the many people in my life—older women, my male and female peers, even a few friends—who had somehow invested in the arc of my career.
All my life I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the ever so faintly superior smile in the face of another woman telling me that she had decided to take time out to stay at home or pursue a different, less competitive career track to have more time with her family. I’d been the woman hanging out with the dwindling number of friends from college or law school who had never compromised our career aspirations, congratulating one another on our unswerving commitment to the feminist cause. I’d been the one telling female students and audience members at my lectures that it is possible to have it all and do it all regardless of what job you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making women feel that it is their fault if they cannot manage full-time careers and climb the ladder as fast as men while simultaneously maintaining a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot). The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me profoundly wrong that the millions of women and a growing number of men who made choices similar to my own should not be affirmed and even celebrated for insisting that professional success is not the only measure of human happiness and achievement.
In 2012, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic, putting down all the thoughts about women and work that had been simmering in my brain. The article was called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a title I was soon to regret but that undoubtedly sold more magazines than the more accurate but decidedly less catchy “Why Working Mothers Need Better Choices to Be Able to Stay in the Pool and Make It to the Top.” Within five days, the online version had received more than 400,000 views; a week later that number had reached a million; today it is one of the most-read articles in the 150-year history of The Atlantic, with an estimated 2.7 million views. Clearly, it seemed, a sizable group of women and a growing number of men wanted another round of the now fifty-year-old conversation about what true equality between men and women really means.
In the months that followed, I received hundreds of emails from people who had been moved by my piece. Jessica Davis-Ganao, an academic who is raising two young children, one with a genetic disorder, while trying to get tenure, wrote, “I just read your article in The Atlantic and had to close my door because I couldn’t stop crying. You have articulated a struggle I have been waging for the past few years.” Another comment that has stuck in my mind came from a mother who said I had “given her permission” to stop working and stay home with her kids for a while, something that she had truly wanted to do but had not dared.
The welcome was not always warm, however. I was accused of perpetuating “plutocrat” feminism—that I’m only concerned with the high-class problems of powerful women like myself. Some critics took issue with the entire concept of “having it all,” calling it perfectionistic folly to imagine that we can have big careers and be highly devoted parents at the same time. Other critics claimed that my article would undermine the years of historic, hard-won gains of women in the workplace.
I soon got a chance to engage both criticism and praise directly as I traveled the country, gave speeches, listened to questions, and grappled with answers. Gradually, I allowed myself to break free from an entire set of deeply internalized assumptions about what is valuable, what is important, what is right, and what is natural. The process was like going to the optometrist and having her flip the lenses in that little machine, with the letters on the far side coming in and out of focus until gradually what had been a complete blur becomes sharp and startlingly clear.
Feminist pioneers like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem broke free of stifling stereotypes that confined women to a world in which their identities were defined almost entirely by their relationships to others: daughter, sister, wife, mother. The movement Friedan and Steinem led, following in the nineteenth-century footsteps of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their fellow revolutionaries, takes its place with the civil rights movement, the global human rights movement, the anti-colonial movement, and the gay rights movement as one of the great struggles for human freedom of the twentieth century.
But it is a movement that remains unfinished in many ways. And at the turn of the twenty-first century, I am increasingly convinced that advancing women means breaking free of a new set of stereotypes and assumptions, not only for women, but also for men. It means challenging a much wider range of conventional wisdom about what we value and why, about measures of success, about the wellsprings of human nature and what equality really means. It means rethinking everything from workplace design to life stages to leadership styles.
I want a society that opens the possibility for every one of us to have a fulfilling career, or simply a good job with good wages if that’s what we choose, along with a personal life that allows for the deep satisfactions of loving and caring for others. I hope this book can help move us in that direction.
But one step at a time. To get there, let’s start with the world as it is, not as many of us would like it to be.
Part I
Moving Beyond Our Mantras
When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, she titled her opening chapter “The Problem That Has No Name.” She described it as “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.” She began to believe that it laid in the “discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform.”
Friedan purported to speak for all women but was actually chronicling the emotional distress of millions of suburban housewives. Her audience was large enough to help launch the second wave of the feminist movement—no small achievement. Still, the world she described was certainly not the reality for millions of other women who had neither time nor inclination to grapple with an idealized vision of femininity. They were already in the workforce by necessity rather than choice.
For my part, I grew up in a white upper-middle-class suburban household, albeit at a time when that still meant staying in roadside motels, riding Greyhound buses, and learning alongside the children of plumbers and electricians as well as doctors and lawyers. I have been well educated and faced a horizon of expanding opportunity as a member of the America that has steadily grown richer over the past three decades, rather than the America that has stagnated and fallen behind. I live in a version of the nuclear family—two married heterosexual parents, two biological children combining the DNA of both parents—that is now a minority of American families.
In the process of writing this book, responding to reflections, questions, and critiques from many different people from many different backgrounds, I have realized time and again just how much my own experiences inevitably shape my assumptions about how others think and feel. As I have tried to put myself in others’ shoes, I have confronted again and again the obvious but too often overlooked point of just how much money matters. Money gave Andy and me the ability to afford excellent daycare when the kids were young, a full-time housekeeper as they grew older, the comfort of living in a neighborhood with great public schools and libraries.
Money buys a safety net, relieving stress and providing resources and resilience against the buffets of fate. Yet millions of American families are working as hard as they can without the resources to absorb even one unlucky break. Their “family choices”—whether and how much to work versus whether and how much to stay home to care for children or parents—are no
t really choices at all; they are driven by economic imperatives. As I challenge my own long-held beliefs, I continually remind myself that my story is not theirs.
I emphasize this point because if we want to move forward—for women and men, for our workplaces, and for our society as a whole—we must first step back and take a hard look at what we reflexively believe to be true. We must question the conventional wisdom, aphorisms, memes, and stories that inform or justify our choices and shape our worlds. We have to ask ourselves why we are so certain of our often-buried assumptions about the way things are, both for ourselves and for millions of others whose lives we can only try to imagine.
We can only change and bring about change if we can genuinely open our minds to new thoughts and possibilities, for everyone.
1
HALF-TRUTHS WOMEN HOLD DEAR
As a professor who had thousands of meetings with students and gave hundreds of lectures over twenty years, the single question that I heard most frequently, hands down, was from young women asking me how I managed to balance work and family. Even after foreign policy talks at other universities, once the audience had thinned out a young woman would invariably raise her hand and ask me what advice I would give to women seeking to have a career and a family at the same time. I am hardly alone in this; any of my female colleagues would say the same thing. We understand why these young women ask us this question and feel proud that they are looking up to us.
But the answers are complicated. I could have told my students that the only way I had managed to have a high-powered career and a husband and two sons was by being a tenured professor at a top university married to another tenured professor at the same university. But that could be deeply discouraging, and it’s not the whole truth; drive, hard work, and good fortune each played a role in charting the course of my career. Moreover, many other women manage to combine careers and family successfully in less flexible and fortunate situations.
Later on, I could have said to any of the young women I met in Washington, “Look, I’m on the edge of perpetual crisis here. My teenage son is having all sorts of issues; my husband and I are desperately trying to figure out how to manage him while I’m gone five days a week; I’m torn up inside and asking myself daily whether this job is worth the personal cost.” But that too would have been pretty discouraging and, again, not the whole truth. My situation could have been very different if my kids were not teenagers; if they were not sons battling over every little issue with their father; if my oldest son had not found himself far too familiar with the Princeton police station. I could also look around D.C. and see other women who were doing what I was trying to do, including a commute, without the same difficulties.
So what to say? My truth has multiple parts, and it’s only my truth. Still, I’m a feminist, and one of the central tenets of my life has been to believe and live the proposition that women can have full-fledged careers just like men without giving up the joys of family life. For me, at least, that’s what it meant to “have it all.” (As we’ll discuss in chapter 2, I am now quite ambivalent about the phrase, but I will continue to use it here as a shorthand for this idea.) So it’s not surprising that I, like virtually every other woman I know in my generation, typically fell back on a set of standard mantras, as if chanting them enough would make them true.
Three of the most common are:
1 “You can have it all if you are just committed enough to your career.”
2 “You can have it all if you marry the right person.”
3 “You can have it all if you sequence it right.”
These are not lies. They are true in part, but they are not the whole truth. They offer the comforting illusion that having a career and a family depends on choices you make. In fact, though your choices are certainly important, life has a funny way of intervening. Look back ten years. Has your life gone exactly according to plan over the past decade? You also have a funny way of changing. At twenty-five, when I was married for the first time, I thought only about my career. If you had asked me, I would have said I wanted children, but in what seemed like the very far away decade of my thirties. At thirty-five, when I married again, having a baby suddenly became almost all I could think about. I spent two years agonizing that I might have sacrificed being a biological mother to my career—a choice that I never intended to make.
In my view, these mantras are not enough. It is important to encourage younger women, but it’s equally important to acknowledge the reality that many women have lived. To be honest about all the couples who assumed when they started out that both partners would have equal opportunities both to parent and to pursue their professional aspirations but then discovered that two full-time careers and two or more children, often together with responsibilities for older relatives, simply did not work.
By telling the whole truth, we can get those couples to talk much more frankly and directly about choices and trade-offs before they commit to each other. We can change what young women look for in their mates. And above all, we can map a more accurate landscape of obstacles and barriers to true equality, so we can then set about knocking them down.
HALF-TRUTH: “YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL IF YOU ARE JUST COMMITTED ENOUGH TO YOUR CAREER”
OVER THE YEARS, I’VE HAD a growing awareness that many older women, often in the pioneering generation just ahead of me, are increasingly judgmental about the choices younger women are making. The experience that crystallized this realization came after giving a lecture on foreign policy at a prominent foundation in New York. I was surrounded afterward by a small cluster of older women who complimented me on the lecture and praised my commitment to a foreign policy career. In the same breath, however, they lamented the seeming lack of drive of many younger women they knew, who were “dropping out” of their careers.
There it is. The assumption that women are dropping out because of a lack of drive or ambition rests on the deeper assumption that these women could have high-flying careers if they just wanted them badly enough. If they were really committed to their careers, they would work around the clock, no matter what the cost.
In other words, if you are prepared to do whatever it takes to advance in your career, including rarely seeing your children, then you can indeed have a career and a family too. Many male CEOs or senior partners would say that is exactly the sacrifice they have long had to make to rise to top jobs—jobs that demand constant travel and availability to clients 24/7. Walter Blass, who was the Peace Corps country director for Afghanistan in the late 1960s and then worked in strategic planning for AT&T, wrote me an email where he outlined the sacrifices he made for his career. “I was leaving most of the responsibility for raising our three children to my ‘non-working’ wife. She was quite explicit in criticizing me while we were overseas for my 12-hour days worrying about the volunteers, and not spending enough time with her or attention to our kids,” Blass wrote. Later, at AT&T, when he had crazy hours during a nine-month strike, “My then 12-year-old daughter wrote a poem about how she and her siblings knew they had a father because I left my dirty socks and underwear next to the bed.”
But here’s the rub. The men who have chosen to make that trade-off over the decades have almost always been supported in that decision by wives or partners who have either been full-time or at least lead caregivers, as Walter Blass’s wife was. That means that a rising corporate executive, consultant, academic, surgeon, or lawyer has been able to devote himself to his career in the knowledge that a loving parent is caring for his children and doing everything possible to ensure that they flourish. As much as he may wish he had more time to spend with them, or lament that his relationship with them is much more distant than he would like, he at least knows that they are in good hands. Moreover, the entrenched social structure of women at home and men in the office reinforces his choice. He is doing what he is supposed to do: supporting his family by providing for them financially and thereby allowing his wife to provide for them physically and emotionally.
A rising career woman with a family does not face the same set of choices. Relatively rare is the husband who agrees to stay home or be the lead parent so that his wife can advance her career. He may support her completely in her career goals, but not to the point of giving up or significantly compromising his own. But someone must take care of the children, or aging parents, or a sick relative. In the most frequent case, instead of being faced with the choice that ambitious career men have traditionally faced—working 24/7 and seeing little of their children but still having them cared for by a parent—an ambitious woman faces the choice of working 24/7 and having neither parent available for the children. Even if she can afford round-the-clock childcare, a big if, that means no parent is reliably available for school plays, sick days, homework help, and late-night hard conversations about everything from being teased at school to adolescent love.
That is a far harder choice. In that situation, knowing your presence might help a child, parent, or spouse thrive and that you are stuck in a meeting, or working another late night, doesn’t feel like choosing to sacrifice “time with your family,” something you wish you could have but are denying yourself, for the sake of your career. It feels like sacrificing your loved ones’ well-being for your own aspirations.
After my lecture in New York that night I went to dinner and sat across from two women in their early thirties who spoke to me about their inability to find role models among the older women they worked with, explaining that they did not want to marry their jobs. Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, two young New York career women who wrote Midlife Crisis at 30, made the same point in memorable fashion: “If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.”
Unfinished Business Page 2