Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  More recent feminist writers, however, have begun to say not that women should forget about being wives and mothers and start to act more like men, but that they should somehow play both roles at once. They should strive for success in the same way as men, but also be wives and mothers.

  The most famous example of this genre is Anne-Marie Slaughter’s autobiographical essay in the Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which made the rounds several years ago, and since then, Slaughter has followed up with a book. After giving up a promising career at the State Department because she felt a duty to spend more time caring for her teenage son, Slaughter returned from Washington (with some regret) to resume her position as a tenured professor at Princeton. But she sees this as something of a failure, or at least an unsatisfying compromise. She hopes that others will not have to make such choices in the future. If only there were as many women as men on corporate boards and in the Senate and the courts, and perhaps even a woman president. This is her solution.

  Debora Spar, president of Barnard College, has suggested a more “feminine” vision of reform. This includes sharing childcare among neighborhood women and generally seeking solidarity with others in similar situations, as women in other countries have (supposedly) always done—not competing but cooperating. She diagnoses the problem as excessive individualism and competitiveness; we should foster communitarian arrangements for working women—if only women were nicer to one another and more supportive!

  Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook, sees the answer in empowering women. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small,” Sandberg writes in Lean In, “by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.” But men must do their part as well. “A truly equal world,” she writes, “would be one where women ran half our countries and men ran half our homes. I believe that this would be a better world.”

  Of course these approaches have received criticism from those who say the writers don’t get the difficulties of working-class women, and that these are the problems of “the one percent.” These authors have also been criticized for neglecting the fact that men, too, feel deep conflicts between work and family. But many readers are grateful for a genre that seeks to confront the difficulties of having children and careers without simply saying: “work harder” or “stop working.”

  Yet, this is precisely where such literature fails. It presents the problem as one that admits of solution primarily through political or social reform. But the problem Slaughter, Spar, and Sandberg describe is not at root sociopolitical. It is rather that the personal qualities required by professional work are directly opposed to the qualities that child-rearing demands. They are fundamentally different existential orientations, and the conflict between them is permanent.

  Flexible hours, parental leave, working from home, and other policy changes are necessary for women to flourish as professionals and mothers. But the core of the problem is more spiritual and psychological than political or social. A failure to recognize this is frankly to succumb to ideological blindness. To quote Spar again: “Feminism wasn’t supposed to make us miserable. It was supposed to make us free.” But “feminism” is not a lived life; it is a political movement, a set of ideas abstracted from experience and propounded as ethical imperatives. It should not surprise any thoughtful person when reality does not conform to the dreams of ambitious elites with bright ideas.

  Taylor, my biblically articulate student, sees that she has a talent, and she feels called to develop it, which means giving herself to the hard work of pursuing excellence. To do so she must focus on herself, for the sake of the gifts she has been given. The problem is not that this work is time-consuming or that it reduces or eliminates a woman’s ability to do other things. The problem is that the serious pursuit of excellence requires a self-culture. The excellence is within us and must be developed: my musical potential brought to fulfillment, my academic aptitude developed and realized through education.

  Many of the women in my classes are particularly captivated by the idea that a major component of human happiness is the pursuit (if not the achievement) of moral and intellectual perfection. In working through Aristotle’s Ethics, for instance, they find a compelling way of understanding what they do every day in their classwork. Like Aristotle, they are pursuing moral and intellectual virtues. And of course they are pushing themselves to reach concrete, worldly goals: to ace the MCATs, to write a really fine short story, to master ancient Greek, to play a Bach fugue with confidence and proficiency.

  Yet in the midst of all this work, these young women are aware of the ever-present danger of pride (as are my male students, though perhaps less often). They have felt the futility of what Hobbes described so vividly as “the perpetual and restless desire of power after power.” They sense that other activities and other modes of life offer a very different kind of good: Worship, poetic contemplation, and love are quintessential examples.

  My students know that motherhood is more like these activities than it is like the pursuit of excellence. They sense that caring for others requires us to put aside (at least temporarily) the quest for achievement, not just to make time but also to create space for a different mode of being. Worship and love: These require no particular talent or cultivation of the sort I have been describing. They are gifts of the self, not achievements of the self.

  The contrast between excellences we achieve and love we give appears in the distinction between ratio and intellectus, as Josef Pieper highlights in Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Pieper wanted to recover an authentic notion of leisure in a contemporary world that seems to value only work, achievement, and endless practical activity. In ratio, reason serves extrinsic ends and the achievement of particular goals. Intellectus is receptive, and even passive in the sense of “suffering” itself, to experiences that cannot be controlled. We pause from our striving toward goals to pay attention, to observe, and ultimately to love.

  Parenting requires ignoring for a time the individual quest for self-perfection and excellence and focusing instead on the needs of another person. This can only be done in what Pieper calls leisure. He does not mean inactivity or the absence of responsibility, but the setting aside of goals, which is the condition of attention and activity that isn’t striving. In leisure we are available, disponible, which is why Pieper uses this term as a synonym for contemplation.

  Leisure in this fuller sense is not part of the lives of modern feminist writers. By their own admission, they are consumed with a quest for individual betterment, for greater efficiency, and for time-saving strategies in daily life, going so far as to recommend better techniques for punching the numbers on a microwave. They frankly confess that they wish to be consummate achievers in the workplace as well as in their personal lives, as they train for marathons and eat healthfully to avoid gaining weight in middle age. They reap the rewards of all this focused work: promotion, money, attractiveness, and most important of all, honor and recognition, much of it well deserved. They then expect to transfer this mentality and the same kind of pursuit of excellence directly into motherhood and child-rearing.

  But, if I am right, these two endeavors require different orientations of the self, and we simply cannot approach marriage and family in the spirit of achievement at all. If we try to do so, we will find ourselves frustrated and conflicted. For well-behaved or smart children are not markers of our success; children are ends in themselves, to be loved and cared for as individuals. They need from us something other than our talents; they need us, full stop.

  Most women see this difference, at least to some degree. Caring for children takes place for the most part in private. There is no payment. Most of the time there is no audience. There are no promotions and few thanks. We often talk of trying to be a good parent, and rightly so, but it’s not an achievement, at least not in the same way that being a good pianist is an achievement. It is a kind of self-giving that is different
from self-culture. The mode of being demanded by children isn’t of the sort that allows mothers (or fathers, for that matter) to engage in the self-culture that’s such an important part of any sustained pursuit of excellence.

  And what do the children themselves desire? They want patience, calm, and the full attention of their mothers, which are exact opposites of what the hectic pace of professional work often requires. Children do not want a parent who is physically present but multitasking; they want that parent to look at them and listen to what they have to say. They want attention as they swim, draw, or play the piano. This requires Pieper’s leisure, a categorically different kind of focused activity that is not in the service of achievement. The sorts of endeavors that allow us to use and develop our God-given talents are very different from caring for the children God has given us.

  It’s fashionable nowadays to call unpleasant situations “tensions” and to identify problems as “challenges,” as if by denying fundamental and sometimes tragic oppositions we might wish them away. Such words are used again and again in the contemporary essays I’ve been describing.

  The same essays imagine solutions that strike me as evasions. “The best hope for improving the lot of all women,” writes Slaughter, “is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.” This is just the kind of utopian political prescription that emerges throughout this literature. Everything is about power—gaining and keeping it. Women will remake the world!

  The assumption is, as I said, that motherhood and professional work are two of the same kinds of endeavor, activities on the same continuum of achievement. A feature in the Wall Street Journal has made such an argument more explicitly than I would have ever dreamed possible: A movement is now afoot to conduct family life on the model of a business. We should call “family business meetings” and compose a “family mission statement.” Children should be assigned tasks and receive “performance evaluations.” If we could just get the family to act more like our junior colleagues all would be well. The child qua employee would happily entertain himself, helping with the laundry, while we efficiently cross out items on our to-do lists. All of life would now be one long round of tasks—but at least we’d be “getting things done.”

  It is worth imagining a hypothetical perfect world where women are equally represented in all political institutions and cooperate with other neighborhood women in taking care of children (on the model of a business), and formerly recalcitrant husbands at last do their fair share around the house. Women are then freed from the “burdens” of taking care of children. But are they happy?

  I’m afraid the answer is still no, at least if we listen to Anne-Marie Slaughter. She confesses that even with a supportive husband who is willing to shoulder nearly all the childcare, she still does not feel comfortable being away from her son. There’s no rational explanation for this, according to the theory that we just need more help and that the roles of men and women are functionally interchangeable. But there seems to be something in the nature of most women that wants not only to be sure that children are cared for but also to do the caring themselves.

  If this is so, and I think it is, doesn’t the “stay-at-home” argument make the most sense? Shouldn’t women, and especially those who are financially stable enough to do so, focus predominantly on family and children? This idea is worth careful consideration, although the mainstream press often treats it as a strange or oppressive view.

  Many women want to stay home, and even secular elites have begun to see it as a desirable option. Witness the significant number of affluent, well-educated women who have, if perhaps with a bit of shame, opted out of the workforce because they recognize the benefits to their children. They see that devoting themselves to home and family yields great goods, which include an authentic division of labor between husband and wife as well as a mother’s ability to give undivided attention to her children. It is obviously the model that feminism has often disparaged, but its appeal endures.

  Nevertheless, this option does not present an easy, one-size-fits-all solution to the conflict I have been describing. Sometimes staying at home is even promoted with an ideological fervor not unlike what is found in Slaughter, Spar, and Sandberg. And while I’ve sometimes felt the appeal of stay-at-home motherhood, it should not be idealized, as if it presented no difficulties.

  To wit: Although the rewards of caring for children are very great, motherhood can also be also tiring and frustrating, not to mention lonely. A woman must be extraordinarily self-assured to withstand the self-doubt that might cause her to wonder at times whether she has done the right thing.

  A stay-at-home mother may well be just as talented as her husband, but “the world” takes little notice of the work she does. Jessica, who was an honors student at a prestigious college before she gave birth to her seven children, typically rails against her husband’s colleagues after a dinner party for their obliviousness to her existence as a mind. When put in these terms, it is not altogether clear who faces the more difficult situation: the “working mother” or the “stay-at-home mom.”

  Moreover, the pitfalls of pride are not absent in this kind of life either. If the identities of working women tend to be bound up with achievement in their chosen fields, many stay-at-home mothers I know speak of the intense competitiveness, usually under the surface, that can spring up among women who do not work professionally outside the home. They quietly judge each other on the basis of their children’s discipline habits and academic achievement, or they gossip critically about the diets, appearances, marriages, and family lives of those they know.

  I’ve learned not to idealize the mother who stays at home as the natural and obvious corrective to the conflicted, busy, ambitious professional woman. In fact, these women sometimes pay a high price for suppressing parts of themselves that call out to be developed and rewarded.

  Mary, a young, devoutly Catholic woman, told me recently that over the past few years she has watched most of her college friends marry and start families. She, however, confessed a strong desire to pursue a scholarly life, not rejecting family and children, but recognizing other goods, too. Should we discourage her? Of course not. Every time we admit a young woman into college or graduate school, we are implicitly telling her that we value her intellect and wish for her success. But she’ll surely face just the kinds of difficulties I’ve been describing.

  I’ve assumed throughout that women possess a desire to care for children that they feel more strongly than men. Many may balk at this, although I’m often struck by how widespread my presumption is among conservatives and liberals alike. What else could give Slaughter, Spar, and Sandberg the confidence that increased political power for women will make for a more family-friendly economy?

  The observation that women, as a group, undoubtedly have more of the “nurturing” impulse than men does not yield the conclusion that sex alone should determine a woman’s course of life (what I call “gender determinism”). It does imply, however, that we cannot come to terms with the difficulties women face in the present day until we consider the way that we feel about the competing inclinations in our own souls.

  Modern women are right to think that both the pursuit of excellence and the desire to care for others are part of a fully flourishing life. One the one hand, excellence in a particular field requires persistence, self-confidence, drive, courage, and initiative. These are eminently admirable qualities. On the other hand, serving or loving another requires the even more admirable qualities of attention, focus, care, patience, and self-sacrifice. The accent we place on them, and the way we put them into practice, is a matter for all of us to figure out for ourselves.

  But we must not deceive ourselves. We cannot happily harmon
ize these two modes or pretend that they are somehow the same in kind. The disharmony is most apparent at the extremes, when we observe the two modes collapsed into one sphere of activity. We have all seen, for example, the driven mother who can talk of nothing but her own successes and those of her brilliant offspring, or the woman continually distracted by her iPhone, unable to focus on her children as she waits for the next important message to come in. Something is profoundly disordered.

  At the other extreme, we probably know many women who have chosen not to pursue their own excellence. Of course there are better and worse reasons for this decision, the most admirable of which is devotion to nurturing others. Yet this also comes with costs. I’ve never forgotten Jessica’s almost plaintive confession to me late one night, years ago, after too much wine. “My husband,” she said, “has done the things that I really wanted to do, and could have, but didn’t.” The optimist in me wanted to tell her it wasn’t too late, but it was, and we both knew it.

  Both the ethical imperatives I’ve described—“must work” and “must stay at home”—reflect noble desires, the one for talents fully used and the other for the vocation of motherhood. But I worry that both are too often promoted ideologically, prescribed as answers to the anxieties young women naturally feel about what they should do. This problem is especially pressing for those high-achieving college students I have been describing, who cannot imagine doing anything—be it career or motherhood—halfheartedly.