I woke up yesterday morning to a message from a former student who'd sent me a link to Anne-Marie Slaughter's cover story in the new Atlantic. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a brilliant piece that lays out the reasons why women still can't have it all -- and what we as a society ought to do about it. Within a few hours, links to the story were bouncing around the Internet (not to mention my Facebook page), including an excellent recap by HuffPost columnist Lisa Belkin.
Slaughter, who gave up a prestigious State Department post in D.C. -- her dream job, in fact -- when she realized her family needed her more, starts the piece by recalling a conversation with a friend where she confessed that, when her time in Washington was up, she was going to "write an op-ed titled 'Women Can't Have It All.'" Her friend was horrified:
"You can't write that," she said. "You, of all people." What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman -- a role model -- would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.
Something struck me when I read the piece and started parsing it out for myself. And that's whether there's another question we ought to be asking here. It's not simply whether we can have it all (like Slaughter, I agree: we can't, at least given current workplace inequities and societal structures) -- but what the pervasiveness of that myth has done to a whole generation of women whose expectations are out of sync with what awaits them out there in the real world.
Back when Undecided was just a twinkle in our eye (fueled, no doubt, by a frosty beer or two after a grueling hike on a hot summer day), the question that kept coming up in that initial bout of brainstorming was whether we, as women, had been sold a bill of goods. And what we found in the two years of research and interviews that followed was that this idea of having it all, the mantra so many of us assumed was our birthright, had led to a world of grief. Because when you're led to believe that you can have it all -- or worse, that you should have it all -- you feel like you've done it wrong when things don't measure up. You are to blame. Somehow, you've failed. When the truth is that reality -- workplace structures, public policy, the culture itself -- has not kept pace with our own expectations.
One of the things that gets lost in the "you go, girl" rhetoric is what economists call opportunity cost. As Stanford economist Myra Strober, who founded Stanford's Center for Research on Women back in 1972, told us, "If you're doing A, you can't be doing B. If you're playing basketball, you can't be reading Jane Austen." In other words, unless and until we can clone ourselves, we're stuck trying to balance a bunch of trade-offs. Don't get me wrong: This is not another salvo in the Mommy Wars or a knock on feminism. Or even a suggestion that life choices are an either/or proposition. The point is not that we have to choose between family or career -- but that we're going to have to make peace with the fact that if we want to both raise a kid and run a company, it's not only going to be hard but there are going to be challenges that are greater than we have been led to believe.
Despite our best intentions, very little in either realm is going to be perfect. We may have to compromise. And when we're raised to be empowered, to believe that we can have it all, that's one tough pill to swallow.
It's a hard lesson, made harder by the fact that there aren't a lot of role models out there who can show us how to navigate the trade-offs. We were discussing this issue last year on a talk show, in fact, when the host brought up Michelle Obama and Oprah as powerful women who seemed to have it all. And what we said was that in the traditional definition of having it all -- fabulous career, fabulous marriage, parenthood -- neither qualified: Oprah has no family and Michelle, for obvious reasons, has given up her career. Likewise Hillary Clinton or, for that matter, Sheryl Sandberg. Incredible role models, to be sure. But, in a way, scary ones, too. Because for the for the vast majority of us, despite our own aspirations, if they are held up as the ideal, we are bound to feel that we have fallen short.
One of my senior journalism students this year wrote her capstone on the lack of women atop the corporate ladder and what younger women should do to get there. In reporting the story, she interviewed women in leadership positions across the country, essentially digging for tips that would help her generation make it to the C-suite. What she found, good and bad, was a lot of the stuff we write about here. But the thing that struck me was her solid conviction that, when all was said and done, having it all was indeed a possibility.
Which is, I guess, is the right way to think from inside a college classroom: More power to her for her optimism -- and her sincere conviction that her generation will be the one to make things work. But still, the question nags. It's not whether or not we can have it all -- but why we saddle ourselves with the expectation that we should.