Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  If women assume they can do whatever needs to be done in the domestic space better and faster than men can, they are likely to be better. Conversely, as Rutgers professor Stuart Shapiro puts it, “If a man is told repeatedly he is not good at child care (or cooking dinner), or that the family is better off if the woman does more of it, he will probably start believing it (as he is probably predisposed to anyway).” Writer and co-founder of the Fatherhood Institute Jack O’Sullivan agrees, arguing that one reason men are so silent in debates about work and family is that “even the most senior male chief executive often lacks confidence in areas that might be defined as personal, private or family.”

  Just think about how we all continually reinforce this stereotype: when a child starts to fuss and a man is holding him, many women in my generation, at least, will immediately reach for him with the assumption that they know how to handle a baby better. And almost all the men of my father’s generation and a fair number in mine are likely to look around for a mother, grandmother, or aunt.

  Once again, biology rears its controversial head here. Women produce big doses of the “love hormone,” oxytocin, during labor, which plays a part in that magic moment when you look into your baby’s face and your world shifts under your feet. Men don’t. Women breast-feed. Men don’t. In nature only 5 percent of male mammals are engaged fathers; the other 95 percent inseminate and depart. Surely then, even if we feminists deny it with our dying breaths, women are “naturally” customized for child rearing.

  But not so fast. It is true that women get that dose of oxytocin and that they breast-feed. Neuroscientists Kelly Lambert and Craig Kinsley have shown that motherhood makes rats smarter, more emotionally resilient, and physically agile. It turns out, however, that similar changes, and the same hormones, are found in the brains of male California deer mice, one of the species in which both males and females care for the pups. And deer mice are not the only species in which the male is affected by parenting. Endocrine systems and neural circuitry are altered in a manner “strikingly similar to that in mothers” in male marmosets, owl monkeys, and, of course, human beings.

  More recent neuroimaging research on new fathers has indeed shown structural changes in their brains—not just increased activity at the sight of their infants but longer-term changes in the parts of the brain associated both with nurturing and with anxiety. This work is at a tentative and early stage, but one new father of twins, writing about this research, says, “When you become a dad, it’s like a plate has been set spinning in your brain (or two in my case)—suddenly, no matter where you are, or what you’re doing, you have this restless vigilance for your fragile offspring. And then there’s the time spent playing and feeding, when you’re alert to every flicker of emotion on their little face, every tiny hiccup or cry.” Sounds just like a mother to me!

  I don’t know that Andy ever thought very much about having children before we were married; he certainly didn’t think about the details of caring for them. But because he was a professor, he could be around as much as I was in those early days of parenthood. I was ten when my younger brother Bryan was born and I had taken care of him plenty, so the habits of rocking, burping, and diaper changing quickly came back. Mostly, though, we had to figure out this baby with the equipment of this era. Andy was much more likely to read parenting books and research various products. Even when I breast-fed, Andy would take the last feeding of the day with a bottle. He was in charge, testing and discarding multiple methods of trying to fill Edward up as much as possible to buy us an extra hour or two of sleep. They bonded early and fast.

  We are entering a vast new age of knowledge about our brains, our bodies, our biology. What we should assume above all right now is how much we don’t know about what men and women can do and about what we are programmed and conditioned to do by both nature and nurture. Are we different? Of course. But different in ways that constrain our abilities and possibilities as either breadwinners or caregivers? We have no idea.

  It’s worth remembering Kelly Lambert’s words of wisdom: “If nature teaches anything, it’s that those species flexible enough to adapt to changing environments are the ones that survive.”

  WE DON’T WANT TO GIVE IT UP

  I VIVIDLY REMEMBER THE FIRST time one of our sons woke up in the night and called for Daddy instead of Mommy. My first reaction, to put it politely, was deep dismay. I’m his mother. Kids are supposed to call for their mother. If he’s not calling for me, then I must not be a good mom.

  All this is racing through my head while my husband is sleeping soundly next to me; I, after all, was the one who woke up when our son called out. (Andy swears that he wakes up when I’m not there; I’ll never know! But our sons have never complained of crying out and no one coming when I’m away.)

  On that particular occasion, I got up and comforted my son, telling him Mommy was here and that Daddy was sleeping downstairs; all was right with the world. Over the years, on the many other occasions when our sons turned first to Andy rather than to me—for homework help or advice on subjects ranging from music to girls—I have had some tough conversations with myself. Even if, as my mother would say, I have always wanted to have my cake and eat it too, I simply cannot have all the rewards and satisfactions of my career and expect to be the person my sons call for first.

  I have also reflected on my emotion that night. Was it guilt? That ideal of the good mother as the person who is always there when her kids need her? In the United States, at least, we’ve beaten that subject to death in recent years, asking ourselves repeatedly why the standards of mothering have become so exacting and all-consuming. I have often wondered what happened to the mantra of “benign neglect,” which my mother used to quote as the best guide to child rearing. As one of my friends put it, nowadays “benign neglect would result in someone calling social services.”

  In her 2014 bestseller All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, Jennifer Senior points to the confluence of several factors—Americans having fewer children, women having more control over their reproductive lives thanks to widely available contraception, and parents having children later than they did in my mother’s day—as reasons why benign neglect went out of style. From 1970 to 2006, the proportion of women having their first child after the age of thirty-five increased nearly eightfold. “Because so many of us are now avid volunteers for a project in which we were all once dutiful conscripts,” Senior writes, “we have heightened expectations of what children will do for us, regarding them as sources of existential fulfillment rather than as ordinary parts of our lives.”

  If I am honest with myself, the hardest emotion to work through when I heard our son call for Andy rather than for me was not guilt but envy. Even with all the rewards of my career, I would still like for them to call for me first. As the psychiatrist Andras Angyal writes, “We ourselves want to be needed. We do not only have needs, we are also strongly motivated by neededness.” Mothers have gotten that special rush for years when a child reaches for us and says no one else will do; the question is whether we really want or are willing to share that role with others.

  Katrin Bennhold is a young journalist whom I met over a decade ago. I was immediately impressed with her intelligence and drive; I then followed her columns in the International Herald Tribune and agreed to occasional interviews on foreign policy issues. Over the years she married and had two daughters. A year after I published my Atlantic article I was delighted but not surprised to read her reflections on exactly the question of who gets to be the most needed parent.

  Bennhold won a Nieman fellowship at Harvard, one of journalism’s most prestigious honors, which allows the recipient to spend nine months in Cambridge. Nieman fellows include a wide roster of the world’s top journalists in their ranks; traditionally a male journalist would pack up his wife and children, if he had them, and head for Harvard’s ivy-covered halls. In Bennhold’s case, however, her husband had a job in London that he could not leave, nor could she man
age to care for their two daughters on her own in Cambridge. So she did what I did when I went to Washington: she moved for her job and left her husband as primary caregiver back in London.

  On her trips back home, she found that her husband understood the challenges of parenting in a new way, including the “leaden fatigue” of staying up all night with a child and then going to work the next day. “But he also gets the power of being The One—of being the ultimate source of comfort for a child.” She, in turn, now knows “the sting of rejection when a child strains to be soothed by the other parent.”

  Bennhold also knows, as I do, the power of being liberated to pursue your career goals full-time, “the freedom of not being responsible on a day-to-day basis, of being the scarce parent, the fun-time parent rather than the one in charge of brushing teeth or disciplining.” She is honest enough to admit that she used to think “that because I gave birth, the bond with my children was something my husband—always a very involved father—could not quite match.” She has now concluded that “responsibility and time, not gender, determine the depth of the bond with a child.” In addition, she and her husband “have become more equal” by each “slipping into the opposite gender’s role.”

  I would agree on both counts. It is still unquestionably important to me that our sons turn to me first on some things; I specialize in emotional issues and moral dilemmas. My personal balance between competition and care meant that I came home from D.C. so that I could still be part of our sons’ lives enough to know when and how I could help. That’s simply part of what makes me whole, just as it is important to me to be there for my own parents, my siblings, and my close friends.

  Overall, however, I have to accept that if I’m going to travel as much as my career often demands, then Andy is going to be the anchor parent at home. I remind myself that my father was often gone when I was growing up, yet he and I are very close. But I also tell myself that our sons are lucky to have close relationships with both of us and that I am privileged to have both a career and a family I love.

  My experience, like Katrin Bennhold’s, can’t be said to reflect a universal truth. But being needed is a universal desire and the traditional coin in which mothers have been compensated. If we accept that trade-offs are necessary for women if they want to reach the top of their careers, even if they have money and choices, and if we’re prepared to let men be equal caregivers just as we insist on being equal competitors, then we have to be very honest about our deepest needs and desires. It is one thing to let go of the housekeeping. Quite another to relinquish being the center of your children’s universe.

  FIFTY SHADES OF CONFUSION

  SHORTLY AFTER MY ARTICLE IN The Atlantic came out, I met a young woman outside the CNN studios in New York who recognized me and thanked me for launching a conversation about work and family. We talked briefly about the importance of having an equal partner, but she then wrinkled her nose at the idea of a “house husband, a man doing the dishes.” Her reaction cuts to the heart of the continuing inequality between men and women. A woman can drop out of the workforce and remain an attractive partner. For men, that is still a risky choice. Though we may be more welcoming to stay-at-home dads than we used to be, we’re certainly not at full equality yet. In 2010, when Pew Research asked respondents if it’s very important for a man to be a good provider, 64 percent of women said yes; when they asked the same question about women, only 39 percent of women said yes.

  Young men are keenly aware of the gap between what many women say they want and what they choose. In The End of Men, Hanna Rosin quotes David, a twenty-nine-year-old with a master’s degree, talking about the idea of a stay-at-home dad: “Yeah, he haunts me. It doesn’t matter how Brooklyn-progressive we (urban, educated men born after 1980) are, we still think he’s pitifully emasculated. I’m progressive and enlightened, and on an ideological political level I believe in that guy. I want that guy to exist. I just don’t want to be that guy.”

  Guy Raz, the host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, who doesn’t work the normal Monday to Friday nine to five, notes that he is often shut down by moms at the playground, where he is usually the only dad among mothers and nannies. “Even in the most open-minded communities, there’s always the snickering and the ‘Mr. Mom’ jokes,” Raz writes.

  Women define the nature of masculinity as much as other men do. If they are going to change, we have to find and embrace an image of a man who can care for children; earn less than we do; have his own ideas about how to organize kitchens, lessons, and trips; and still be fully sexy and attractive as a man.

  For the moment, however, we are sending mixed messages at best. While almost 3 million people went to the Atlantic website to read all or part of my article and more than 2 million people have bought Lean In as of March 2015, more than 100 million readers have bought at least one of the books in the Fifty Shades trilogy, a fantasy about a handsome billionaire who plays all sports effortlessly and owns houses, planes, cars, closets full of expensive clothing, and a playroom where he can dominate his girlfriends. He takes care of everything; the entire storyline of these books is about how the woman who will ultimately become his wife and the mother of his children pushes back, but only enough to be able to pursue a modest career of her own, to turn his lust into love, and to ensure that he’s kinky enough to arouse but not really hurt her. The media certainly presumes that the readership of the trilogy and the audiences for the movie are overwhelmingly female, but the men in their lives would have had to be hermits to miss the splash it created.

  As I see it, all of us, men and women, want to be cared for at various times; I have always said that one of the hardest things about being a mom is that when I get sick no one is there to tell me to stay in bed, to put a cooling hand on my forehead. I also certainly love the protective side of the men in my life and am more than willing to let them take charge at times. But the fantasy of a man with all the money in the world who can fix every problem and make everything all right is just that: a fantasy.

  It is not surprising that we are confused, just as many men are confused. But we can at least be honest about that confusion. As much as we say we want fully equal partners at home and at work, many of us resist the obvious: if the vast majority of male CEOs with families have wives or partners who are either at home full-time during the caregiving years or whose work flexibility allows them to be the lead parent, then women CEOs are going to need the same thing. We want our own careers. We want families. We want mates who are equal (or perhaps even slightly better) than us in every way. Something has to give.

  LEAVE SUPERWOMAN BEHIND

  THE FIRST THING WE HAVE to let go of is our insane expectations of ourselves. University of Chicago economist Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan show in a time-use study that women who outearn their husbands do more housework than women who do not. This sounds crazy until we consider the psychological factors. In Power Through Partnership: How Women Lead Better Together, Betsy Polk and Maggie Ellis Chotas write:

  Consider the women you know. How many are struggling to squeeze even more into already packed lives? How many are saying yes too often and no all too rarely? How many are trying to convince themselves that perfection is just beyond the horizon? All they have to do is work harder, sleep less, push more, smile wider, be tougher, and, then, maybe, they will get there, somehow, someday.

  These women—and Polk and Chotas count their past selves among them—“are striving to be superwomen, summoning up all their energy to reach a mirage of perfection, trying to scale mountains of exalted expectations (their own and those of others) as they struggle to lean in deeper and deeper.”

  It is this same superwoman perfectionism that led Debora Spar to write Wonder Women. She says, forthrightly, that her generation of women “made a mistake.” (Spar is only seven years younger than I am, but that means I came of age in the 1970s and she came of age in the 1980s, a crucial difference in terms of the feminist trajectory.) “We
took the struggles and victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal perfection.” Her entire book makes a powerful and often witty case for letting go of an entire “force field of highly unrealistic expectations” to be model mother and star employee, to “save the world and look forever like a seventeen-year-old model.”

  Spar and I disagree a bit on whether men will ever be able to step up and take the reins domestically as equal or primary caregivers. And I have to say that I personally am simply not a perfectionist; I’m comfortable with the fact that I don’t fit the image of the ideal mother because I always valued the side of my mother that painted extraordinary paintings far more than the baker of cupcakes. But to women who continually up the ante on themselves, believing that if they just got up earlier or used their time better or tried harder they would somehow be able to make it all work, I say, Stop. Let it go.

  LET THEM DO IT…THEIR WAY

  IN OUR STYLIZED ACCOUNTS OF the past, women were homemakers, confident and capable in their own sphere. Men owned the world of work, confident in theirs. Now women are rising fast at work, glorying in their ability to be all the things men used to be and to be just as good or better. A woman who manages to both “bring home the bacon and fry it up,” all while managing a calendar on the fridge that looks like an air traffic control chart, is a superwoman. She may be completely exhausted and less happy than she was forty years ago, but at least she has that.