Home—Blog—Time for middle class women to drop the bourgeois fantasies about having it all
Jul 02, 2012, 04:46
Posted byMerryn Somerset Webb
Comments (15)
Can women have it all – ie the same choices as men - when it comes to having good work and a family too? According to a much-discussed article by Anne-Marie Slaughter in The Atlantic last week, the answer is no.
In the (long) piece, Slaughter talks about how, as the first woman director of policy planning at the US State Department (a job she had on leave from Princeton), she suddenly found the “feminist beliefs” on which she had built her entire career “shifting” under her feet.
As soon as her two-year term was up, instead of looking for more government work as she appears to have expected that she would, she “hurried home” to Princeton. Why? Partly because she didn’t want to lose her tenure but, she says, mostly because her conclusion that “juggling high level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”
The fact is, she says, that women don’t make it to the top in today’s world because extreme working conditions (in government she worked long, long days and got one day a month off) make it impossible for them to do so and to do anything else as well.
Evidence? “Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a family.”
Some, such as Facebook’s Sandberg, think this is about an “ambition gap – that women do not dream big enough”.
But isn’t that. It is that “travel sucks” when you have young children; that school schedules never match work schedules; that in the early years of a career, childcare takes up more than a post-tax salary; and that in too many jobs timetabling is inflexible and too much work has to be done in rather than out of the office.”
To solve all this – and to keep clever women properly in the workforce - Slaughter wants to see less obsession with face time and less “time macho” behaviour; she wants employers to find a way of valuing family; she wants people to be able to think of their climb to leadership “not in terms of a straight upward slope but as irregular stair steps with periodic plateaus” when time is taken out for family; and she wants us to pursue happiness rather than just career success.
That might all sound a little airy fairy but it's certainly got people talking: the online version of the piece has had over 2,000 comments so far.
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However, not everyone is much impressed. The problem with all this, says Naomi Wolf on www.project-syndicate.org, is that this really isn’t a woman’s issue any more. “All over the developed world millions of working men with small children also regret the hours that they spend away from them and go home to bear the brunt of domestic tasks.”
It also isn’t quite the issue that Slaughter’s generation think it is. It is recognised by both sexes making it more of an “ambient tension of modern life for a generation of women and men who are committed to gender inequality.”
That’s probably beginning to be true and it is also part of a better response from New York University's Professor Katie Roiphe in the weekend FT. She simply takes issue with the “inane language” of work life balance.
Isn’t “part of the skill or joy of life in the imbalance, in the craziness, in the bizarre or implausible intensity” of juggling all sorts of things? Go for the perfect balance of helicopter parenting and “organic chicken grilled outside with heirloom tomatoes” and you could easily miss out on the “bursts and flashes of greatness in the midst of what Winifred Holtby, a journalist in the 1920s, called the ‘rich unrest of family life.’”
Working life is gradually becoming more flexible, more family friendly, more shared out inside families (witness the rise of the women who out-earn their husbands) and less face-time orientated (in the UK and Europe at least).
The things that Slaughter so wants will happen in the next 20 years or so – pushed along by both sexes. In the meantime, we might all spend more time “embracing the implausible, the complicated, the imperfect, the imbalanced and the here and now” rather than wallowing in bourgeois fantasies about having it all.
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(02 July 2012, 05:20PM) Complain about this comment
"mostly because her conclusion that “juggling high level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”""“organic chicken grilled outside with heirloom tomatoes”"Unless teenage boys have changed dramatically from my day I can assure the good lady that her teenage sons have very, very little interest in heirloom tomatoes.I hope her policy planning for the US government is somewhat more realistic than her views on parenting.
(02 July 2012, 06:36PM) Complain about this comment
Women will always bear the biggest caring burden for their young children - a function of anatomy and physiology. However the outrageous cost/lack of childcare in the UK is the biggest impediment. The problem is over-regulation and nanny state red tape that makes it impossible for nurseries to provide childcare at reasonable cost. Most of these nurseries barely make a profit despite charging eyewatering sums, largely due to the state regulated numbers of registered CRB'd course trained and certificated carers they have to employ. Childcare vouchers only cover a fraction of the cost. Childminders have also been pushed out by over-regulation. If you want to employ a nanny you now have to set up a pension scheme as well as paying all the national insurance double tax. The demanding jobs are not the problem and many companies offer flexible and home working, it's the nanny state that financially disincentivises mothers to work.
(02 July 2012, 08:57PM) Complain about this comment
As you seem to stoically refuse to read the work of Danny Dorling ,I will offer a quote from him." If the middle classes could do a decent or simply good job,rather than endlessly being told they must be excellent at work,we could be far more honest with each other". Every parent who goes to work and dumps their child at nursery creates four car journeys.Their own two and the creche worker's two. Too many of the needy well off suffer from severe optimism bias regarding their own abilities. A good dose of reality is what most of them require not a cheap nanny.
(02 July 2012, 09:50PM) Complain about this comment
The state specifies ratios of children to childminders Boris and it's not 1:1 making the number of car journeys incorrect even if we ignored those parents who walk to the crèche then continue their onward journey on foot or by public transport. There's also those parents who drive to their place of work where the employer provides a crèche within the grounds to consider.I'm surprised nay shocked that you've knowingly used such an obviously incorrect figure given your widely acknowledged and stoic pursuit of correcting incorrectness where and whenever it raises its ugly head.Highly emotive use of dump too, shame really as the sentiments of Danny Dorling's quotation had merit regardless of the saving to the exchequer a reduction in tax payer funded child care offers.
(02 July 2012, 10:45PM) Complain about this comment
#5 An Admirer. The point is moving childcare out of the family to private institutions has a massive cost to society, socially, emotionally , economically and environmentally. Fair enough not every kiddie goes by car,but you must get the point. It is ineficient and I thought all the free market types loved efficiency nearly as much as they love a profit.However, thank you for correcting my (rare) incorrectness.
(02 July 2012, 11:43PM) Complain about this comment
The merit in returning to the nuclear family of the 50's might not go down too well with xx chromosome part of the population Boris, even if a raft of the xy crowd pines for the Stepford model.The good old days only existed in the world of Leonard Sachs.
(03 July 2012, 06:54AM) Complain about this comment
Those darned offspring; they really get in the way of feminist ideals don’t they? From experience I can say the nuclear family of the 50’s and the 70’s worked well and believe ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. Now before I get the calls to castrate me, let me say I’m totally in favour of women as equal partners in the workplace, but alongside the same opportunities and same pay goes the same responsibilities, same hours of work etc. Although the State is attempting to re-programme millions of years of evolution with childcare vouchers and legislation if you were one of the small businesses that provide most of the employment in this country, would you hire a woman of child bearing age in the knowledge you might be funding several years of maternity leave, or would you quietly (as the discrimination is illegal but usually unenforceable) hire a man or older woman, all other things being equal? Bottom line -the basic decision for most women is the same – career or children.
(03 July 2012, 08:21AM) Complain about this comment
#7 Admirer. Which is why ,as a part time working father, I referred to parent and not mother.
(03 July 2012, 08:52AM) Complain about this comment
If only they could all be like Dambisa Moyo, instantly rendering two forms of discrimatory regulation redundant and the understandable if unacceptable furrowed brow on the face of a small businessmen a distant memory.The gene pool would suffer with the absence of such talented output, maybe even disappear altogether as the burger muching baby makers proliferated unabated!Perhaps there's something in this state nose poking thing afterall. maybe a career and children should be made compulsory or is that just an impossible dream?
(03 July 2012, 08:55AM) Complain about this comment
You did indeed Boris, I was forgetting about the xyy man.
(03 July 2012, 11:35AM) Complain about this comment
Unfortunately, the cost of enlightenment is a loss of innocence and the nuclear family of the 50's cannot be returned to even if desired. As I'm too young to remember these times I can only say my grandparents seemed very happy and owned their own home on my Grandpa's salary alone. Now the 'forbidden fruit' or 'red pill' has been eaten we need two salaries to survive (and we still can't own our own home!) and we have a record number of people on anti-depressants; so you decide. I for one would like a simpler life....what life seemed to be in the good old days. What we consider progress like inflation, may not be necessary at all...just a man made thing to make other men rich. Is capitalism really improving the lot of mankind or just temporarily lining the pockets of a privileged few, generation after generation...just maybe we have got it all wrong here in the West after all!!!
(03 July 2012, 06:46PM) Complain about this comment
#11 Nick Fury. You are spot on. If you haven't done so already you would greatly benefit from reading Enough by John Naish and How to be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. Our grandparents generation were happy for many reasons, not least just surviving the two wars but being the first generation to get decent pensions, inside toilets, electric lighting, healthcare and a fighting chance to live to be old. Shame so many now seem to want to punish the elderly simply for having lived so long.
(05 July 2012, 06:24PM) Complain about this comment
@ 12.Boris. My grandmother had a business, a shop, and needed to borrow from the banks to move it to a bigger premises and expand it. Before the bank would lend her any money, her husband had to sign the documents for her, as being a woman, she was regarded as too irresponsible. My grandfather had no role in her business. These humiliations, big and small, women faced on a daily basis must have had an effect on the balance of power inside marriages and their marriage was certainly a difficult one. This was a long time ago but it did happen. It is a mistake to look back and assume everything was wonderful and everyone was happy in the past.
(05 July 2012, 08:17PM) Complain about this comment
#13 Ellen. My own grandparents had a shop and bakery business. The whole lot was bought ,for my grandmother, by her parents, in 1937. She ran the business,owned the business, did all the paperwork. My grandfather made and delivered bread. He was illiterate and relied entirely on my grandmother. She had been a teacher and was also one of the first women in Devon to ride a motorbike. I think it depended on the feistiness and determination of the woman in question. I am a long way from thinking everything was wonderful in the past. I am simply stating that generation had many reasons to be happy. Liberation form old prejudices being one and for women the reducing the fear of death in childbirth must count highly too.
(05 July 2012, 10:26PM) Complain about this comment
@ Merryn. Where do you consider yourself in this? You are clearly very successful in your chosen field and appear to have struck enough balance to know the day to day stuff the children are doing. Is it a question of choosing a family friendly career?I read a good article in the Guardian where the journalist pointed out that if we talk about feminism in terms of the face we see in the mirror, it becomes narcissism. Certainly something I have been guilty of.Some men also get embroiled in the idea that the advance of the working woman has a personal cost to them.
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