Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  We need to step off our new self-created pedestals. When we are feeling overwhelmed, we need to let go and ask for help. It often takes much more strength on our part to acknowledge weakness than to pretend infinite competence.

  Some readers who have already abandoned superwoman aspirations are probably thinking at this point: Of course! That’s exactly what we have been asking for. We want the men in our lives to pick up the slack, to be equal partners as caregivers so that we can be equal partners as breadwinners.

  But that’s exactly the final place we have to let go. We have been asking for “help.” That means we decide what needs to be done and we ask the men in our lives to help us do it. It’s not going to work that way. Real equality means equality at home just as much as at work. It means a whole new domestic order.

  Gro Harlem Brundtland was the first woman prime minister of Norway. As she tells the story, when she was first asked to join the government as the environment minister in 1974, she was thirty-five with four children under thirteen. Her husband encouraged her to take the offer and said he would take care of the kids, on one condition: he would do it his way. She knew what he meant; they had both shared various domestic responsibilities, but she had taken the dominant role in the household. Now he was saying he would do it, but not with her telling him what to do. She recalls one of his innovations: when their kids learned to iron, they did it in pairs. He set up two ironing boards so that the kids could talk to each other as they did it, thereby making it a much less onerous task. He also put up a sign that he found in a Virginia airport: A HOUSE MUST BE CLEAN ENOUGH TO BE HEALTHY AND DIRTY ENOUGH TO BE HAPPY.

  It has taken Andy and me a long time to get to the same place. For years, I got upset with Andy about why everything domestic seemed to be my responsibility. Although he did lots of stuff, it was almost always when I told him what needed to be done, and he never seemed to feel the urgency or necessity of getting it done himself. He didn’t really get it until we realized how much the shoe is on the other foot when we travel. He does all the trip planning: the flights, cars, connections, hotels, itinerary. And he is always chivvying the rest of us to get up or hurry up or pack up. The boys and I do what he says but rarely as quickly or efficiently as he wants us to. We have the blissful sense that someone else is in charge, so we don’t really need to take responsibility to check the schedules, foresee possible contingencies, or worry about what’s coming next.

  When I pointed out to Andy that his frustration at our willingness to take instruction but not responsibility when we travel was the flip side of the way I so often felt at home, it made sense to him. But I also realized something else: for a long time I wasn’t really willing to let him take responsibility. I did feel, deep down, that I knew what I was doing in terms of running our household better than he did. I didn’t really trust him to be able to do it on his own, or certainly not to do it the way I would.

  As our sons would be quick to point out, that’s sexism, plain and simple. I was assuming, like almost all the women I know, that he wouldn’t be able to take care of the kids or run a household as well as I could because he’s a man. But of course if a man were to assume that I really can’t practice law or medicine or business or any other profession or job as well as he can because I’m a woman, I would hit the roof.

  So why won’t we let go? At least part of the reason why women assume that we are superior in the home, and that our way of parenting or decorating or homemaking generally is the right way, is the oft-cited mantra that women are better than men at multitasking.

  In her controversial article “The Retro Wife,” journalist Lisa Miller writes, “Among my friends, many women behave as though the evolutionary imperative extends not just to birthing and breast-feeding but to administrative household tasks as well, as if only they can properly plan birthday parties, make doctors’ appointments, wrap presents, communicate with the teacher, buy the new school shoes.” She goes on to cite a 2010 British study showing that “men lack the same mental bandwidth for multitasking as women. Male and female subjects were asked how they’d find a lost key, while also being given a number of unrelated chores to do—talk on the phone, read a map, complete a math problem. The women universally approached the hunt more efficiently.”

  Okay. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that women are better at doing multiple things at once. So what? It was not so long ago that we looked at people (women) who did multiple things at once as “scattered” or “jack of all trades, master of none.” Since when did being able to do multiple things at once become the one and only measure of success and ability?

  Andy and I agree that I am certainly better at multitasking than he is. I can remember various appointments while making a list for dinner while emailing the kids’ teachers. But just as he can put a tastier dinner on the table faster than I can, so can he also sit next to our younger son for hours on end working through the nuances and mistakes of his piano practice. He is also a much better disciplinarian. Many of these attributes come precisely from his ability to tune out competing priorities and put in sustained effort over a long period of time.

  No matter which partner is better at focusing or multitasking, homework monitoring or organizing playdates, if we women truly want equal partners in the home, then we can’t ask our husbands to be “equal” on our terms. Andy’s view of how to run a household definitely differs from mine, just as his taste in everything from furniture to how to organize a kitchen differs. But why is my way the right way?

  It’s true that some homes run by some dads might look more like sports camps than the photo spreads in Good Housekeeping. I might even go out on a limb and say that on average homes run by dads will be more cluttered than homes run by moms. The dishes and the laundry may take second place to a game of catch after dinner or, as in my household when I was away in D.C., a game of poker during dinner. Your spouse might also be, as Jennifer Senior argues in All Joy and No Fun, less emotionally attuned to how your children are feeling at any given moment and more practically attuned to meeting their physical and intellectual needs. That may be just fine: an immediate emotional response may be exactly what is needed for soothing a skinned knee but less useful for sleep training a baby. We may find that more typical “dad” ways of parenting are no better or worse than typical “mom” ways.

  Even if every stereotype holds, however, and our worst female fears of living rooms turning into man caves are realized, are we really so sure that our kids will come out worse? While single fathers may not be nearly as plentiful as single mothers, they have managed to raise plenty of successful kids. So have families with two dads or two moms. Alternatively, if women let go and let the men in our lives be genuinely equal or primary caregivers, we may just find that all these stereotypes of male/female parenting differences are socialized as well.

  There is only one way to find out.

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  EVERY GENERATION ASSUMES THAT THE way it does things is the way things are. Notions of who should be caregiving and who should be working, for instance, are as historically contingent as notions of who should be allowed to marry each other. Interracial marriage was illegal in many states until 1967; modern British royalty were not allowed to marry commoners until Prince Charles married Diana, or previously divorced spouses until he married Camilla; and the struggle for same-sex marriage in the United States is still in full swing. What was once unthinkable in one age becomes normal in another.

  With regard to caregiving, historian Mary Frances Berry pointed out in a New York Times op-ed back in 1993 that the “traditional idealized family” of a mother caregiver and a father working outside the home is a modern invention. (Berry’s op-ed was in response to Kimba Woods and Zoë Baird both withdrawing from consideration for attorney general over childcare issues, but sadly, it feels as fresh today as it did twenty years ago.) Before the 1950s, Berry points out, white families relied on African Americans to take care of their children. Even working-class fa
milies had black maids. If we go back further, to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the United States, many fathers actually were primary caretakers after the children were done nursing:

  [Fathers] not only directed their children’s education and religious worship but often played with them, decided what they would eat and hushed them to sleep when they awakened in the night. Today’s trend toward increased parenting by the father to relieve mothers from the stress of balancing jobs and child rearing may be seen as a return to the patterns of old.

  In the days when childhood was short to nonexistent, children essentially “apprenticed” with the parent of the same sex, boys going to work with their fathers and girls with their mothers as soon as they were old enough to learn and help. Infant and toddler care was women’s work, or, in richer establishments, the work of nurses, but nurture was certainly as much a father’s job as a mother’s.

  Home economics has long dictated the changing roles of different family members; in the agrarian era families all worked together on the farm, while in the early industrial age children from poor families worked in the factories to free up their parents to work the fields. Children were only pushed out of the Western labor market in the first half of the twentieth century because of declining demand for unskilled labor; more families could also afford to keep them in school. As sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes it, “The useful labor of the nineteenth-century child was replaced by educational work for the useless child.”

  In her book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi makes the valuable point that a sense of “manhood flowed out of [men’s] utility in a society, not the other way around.” Masculinity is not a detachable thing that you can take off like sunglasses or armor. “The men who worked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard didn’t come there and learn their crafts as riggers, welders, and boilermakers to be masculine; they were seeking something worthwhile to do,” Faludi explains. In other words, if male caregiving becomes valuable economically and emotionally, we will redefine our concept of masculinity to include caregiving attributes. As the nature and place of paid work change, which is happening rapidly, we will change our values. If history is any guide, men should be able to take on a full range of caring and nurturing roles, from teacher to entrepreneur. But they will redefine all those functions their way. It’s up to women to let them.

  A NEW ERA

  ENGLISH PROFESSOR ABIGAIL RINE WROTE a wonderful post on her blog, Mama Unabridged, in which she described her bearded, tattooed husband as “a cloth-diapering wizard, an amazing cook, a master gardener” and explained that he has established a “seamless rhythm” with their son “that is simply beautiful to witness.” Rine realized that if her son wore mismatched socks or pajamas all day, that didn’t mean her husband wasn’t doing a bang-up job of childcare. She points out that the real revolution for this century “would be to stop seeing the home as a gendered space” but rather as both a male and female domain, just as we now see the workplace.

  Close your eyes and just imagine letting it all go—the expectations you imagine others have of you and that you have of yourself, your mate, and your house. Imagine that if your children call for your husband or partner or any other loving adult in their lives, then you have the security of knowing that many different people can be there for them. Imagine that your mate takes charge of an equal set of domestic responsibilities and tells you what to do to help out and fill in.

  If we can let go of the mountain of assumptions, biases, expectations, double standards, and doubts that so many of us carry around, then a new world of possibilities awaits. We may lose our status as superwomen, but we have everything to gain.

  Part III

  Getting to Equal

  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has fought the feminist fight for a very long time, winning seminal victories for women’s rights as a lawyer in the 1970s and continuing to speak up in both opinions and dissents after she was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton in 1993.

  Ginsburg once gave an interview to a newsletter for Supreme Court employees in which she explained that she had given one of her clerks, David Post, a flexible schedule to allow him to take care of his two young children during the days while his wife worked as an economist. Ginsburg noted, “This is my dream of the way the world should be. When fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children, that’s when women will truly be liberated.”

  Note that she did not say “when fathers pull their weight at home” or “when fathers do their share of household chores.” She said “when fathers take equal responsibility for the care of their children.” The difference between taking responsibility and “helping” is an ocean of logistics and worry, not to mention contingency planning. Women have to let it go; men have to take it up.

  But can we actually make change of that magnitude? In the summer of 2013 I gave a talk at TEDGlobal in which I exhorted the audience to think about the need to “resocialize men” in just the ways I have described here. I could feel the waves of skepticism rolling off the audience. “You may think it can’t happen,” I said. “But I grew up in a society where my mother set out little vases of cigarettes on the table at dinner parties, where blacks and whites had to use different bathrooms, and in which everyone claimed to be heterosexual. Today, not so much.”

  That got a rueful laugh. My point was to remind audience members just how much our world has changed over the past fifty years, vastly for the better from the point of view of African Americans, the LGBT community, and families who have lost loved ones to lung cancer. Given the magnitude of that change, think about how much change we can still make—in ways that might seem unimaginable today.

  These last four chapters are about the concrete steps we must take to get to equal between women and men, to finish the great business of the women’s movement. They include simple changes we can make in how we talk, changes in our career trajectories, changes in the workplace, and changes in our political system.

  In 2012 my younger son and I were watching the Democratic National Convention. Then-senator John Kerry was speaking, and my son asked who he was. I replied that he was a senator, he had run for president in 2004, and that if President Obama were re-elected he was quite likely to become secretary of state. My son looked surprised and said, without missing a beat, “You mean a man can be secretary of state?” Born in 1999, my son was only five when Secretary of State Colin Powell was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, who in turn handed over the keys of office to Secretary Clinton. Looking at him, I remembered how jubilant I felt the day the first woman secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, was sworn in in 1997, after more than two centuries of men.

  Change often takes a long time to build, but then can happen very fast, like a torrent of rushing water finally breaking through a dam. My lifetime has been a period of revolutionary change for women, but the pace of that change has slowed and stalled. It’s time for the next great wave, for women and for men.

  8

  CHANGE THE WAY YOU TALK

  Back in the early 1980s, as I began my first year of law school, I remember being startled by the way my professors talked. A handful of young male faculty members at Harvard (the roughly seventy-person department included only a few women at that point) were deliberately trying to change the gender messages they sent. So when, for example, my torts professor mentioned a judge, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or any other profession, he would deliberately use the pronoun “she.” I jumped every time he did it. It just sounded so strange. I didn’t know a single woman doctor, judge, or engineer. As I used to tell my students, I’m not that old, but as recently as the early 1980s a shift in pronoun opened up my world.

  A decade earlier, the honorific “Ms.” (pronounced “Miz”), as opposed to “Miss” or “Mrs.,” had come into use. It may be hard to believe now, but the introduction of “Ms.” into the lexicon was a huge rallying cry for early feminists, led by the iconoclastic (and now iconic) magazine of
the same name. “Miss” or “Mrs.” immediately identified a woman as married or unmarried, on the assumption that her status in that regard was the single most important piece of information anyone would want to know about her. “Ms.” gave women their own identities, regardless of marital status. A seemingly small change in language had enormous symbolic significance.

  I tell you these stories to show that how we talk matters. A lot. The words we choose reflect and reinforce deep assumptions about what is normal and what is not, what is approved and what is not, what is valued and what is not. While changing the way we speak may seem subtle, it can send a very powerful message of inclusion and alter the default assumptions of those we talk to. Back in law school, hearing the pronoun “she” applied to professions and positions that I had only seen men hold shifted my conceptions about what was possible.

  In the 1980s it was important to modify our language simply to include women—half the human race. Forty years later we are still expanding that linguistic circle. In 2014, Facebook changed its gender identity options. Before, you could only choose male or female when you built your profile. This made some gender nonconforming people feel as if their identities were being erased. Today on Facebook, you can choose from a long list of customized gender options, including transgender male, transsexual female, gender nonconforming, and androgynous. As GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis put it, “This new feature is a step forward in recognizing transgender people and allows them to tell their authentic story in their own words.” Language is one of the principal ways that we make the invisible visible and the silent heard.