The current issue of The Atlantic has an interesting article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and most recently director of policy planning at the State Department.
Her title, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” pretty much says it all. Slaughter recently left the State Department to return to Princeton. The University has rules about giving up tenure if away for more than two years, but as Slaughter admits, that wasn’t her main concern. She wanted to get back home, because she felt that she was short-changing her twelve and fourteen-year-old sons.
Her honesty about her motives has sparked a great deal of appreciation from younger women she has talked to. They don’t believe the “women can have it all” line that they have been fed by feminists of an older generation. Climbing the greasy pole to the top of competitive professions conflicts with having a family and being a mother. Slaughter’s article itemizes the many dimensions of this conflict, even to the point of allowing women have a stronger desire to be present for their children than men.
The article is important, because it reflects a moment of sober reassessment widely shared among the elite women Slaughter talks to and represents. The Atlantic and other magazines have recently published articles about the unhappiness of elite women, and we seem to be in the midst of a modest degree of soul-searching. Has the sexual revolution really been an unmitigated good for women? Has adopting the career goals and work life of men been for the best? Are children really choices for most women, or are they closer to deep psychological necessities?
Important questions. But, unfortunately, Slaughter isn’t really up to answering them. At the end of the day she is a modern liberal, which means believing in an unlimited future. As she says, “I still believe that women can ‘have it all’ (and men can too).”
Her naive faith is characteristic of liberal elites who really believe that they can throw themselves into the hyper-competitive meritocratic system that rewards them so richly without risking profound personal losses. With continued re-socialization and changes in work environments—all of which will require more women in power to change things—the painful conflict between our self-regarding desires (“I want to rise to the very, very top!) and our responsibilities to others (it could be our parents or friends just as easily as our children) will melt away.
But it’s silly to imagine that flexible work schedules will make much of a difference. You can be a workaholic in your home office, and in fact without the ritual of leaving the workplace it can be an even greater danger. We need an interior discipline to negotiate the kinds of dilemmas that women like Slaughter have faced and will continue to face, not social reform.
And this discipline only makes sense in light of a substantive view of what makes for a good life, which of course liberals like Slaughter don’t want to “impose” on anyone and won’t even formulate for themselves. They’re all about honoring “choices.” Yet it’s telling that the one person in her story who does have the discipline to put limits on the demands that a career places on life is an Orthodox Jew. No lack of a substantive view there.
June 22nd, 2012 | 10:51 am
Reading the original article, I couldn’t help but think of the sort of hyper-conformist overachievers that many of us may remember from high school. I wonder whether many of the women who want (or expect) it all are merely the grown up versions of such individuals.
In the penultimate paragraph of the article, Slaughter describes her efforts to get her female students to speak up more, and her husband’s efforts to get his male students to speak less and listen more. This resonated with my own experience of disparity between the general behaviour of the sexes in various contexts, and made me wonder whether there isn’t a particular underlying problem here that hasn’t properly been identified.
I suggest that this problem is that our education system and forms of socialization have privileged, inculcated, protected, and rewarded quiet conformity, especially in females. The quiet conformist is motivated by external approval and operates according to external direction and expectations. This privileging of quiet conformity creates a sense of entitlement relative to the system, and can produce extreme and angry resentment in situations where the hyper-conformist does not feel sufficiently rewarded or socially validated.
The hyper-conformist understands fairness as depending upon one’s quiet conformity and living up to social expectations, and believes that the top positions should operate like the gold stars that one gained for test results and attendance in school, representing an identity-grounding personal validation by the system, a reward for playing really well by the rules.
These hyper-conformists are the overachievers in school, but suddenly find a problem when they hit the real world. In the real world the top jobs don’t go to the quiet hyper-conformists, but the hyper-conformists find themselves leapfrogged by unreasonable and risk-taking non-conformists. The overachievers in the real world are people who confound rather than live up to expectations. They are the people who are self-driven and motivated, rather than driven by social approval and validation. They are the people who struggle to bend the world to their way of thinking, rather than conforming.
Modern society can feel particularly unfair to the modern quiet conformist woman, for whom social validation seems to depend upon fulfilling both the traditional roles of wife and mother, alongside the role of the driven career woman. Such an individual will feel the need to ‘be it all’ in order to have it all, or even to have it at all. Such a conformist, hooked on the drug of social validation, finds herself in a world where true social validation is only achievable by the superwoman. The ‘having it all’ is less about the rewarding character of the work itself than it is about the need for validation and the reward of recognition and approval.
The inability to put limits on the demands of one’s career, slavery to social expectations, an unwillingness to accept opportunity costs, and the resentment towards any who achieve more in an area of life on account of their preparedness or ability to make costly sacrifices, strikes me as classic quiet conformist thinking. Such conformists often develop a sense of entitlement to recognition and status as a matter of course, and believe that society should operate like a gold star system does in schools. When it doesn’t they assume that it must be purely on account of injustice and unfairness, failing to appreciate that being truly exceptional involves strongly agentic self-directed non-conformity.
I think that a crucial part of changing this situation must involve a movement away from a form of education geared towards creating and privileging quiet conformists, an education that is egalitarian, conformist, test and grade-oriented, inclusive, highly sensitive, communal, affirming, non-physical, quiet and sedentary, and non-confrontational. An education that genuinely trained people for the real world, for determined and self-driven action, to be people of personal conviction and direction, rather than merely prisoners of social expectation and demand, would do women a far greater service than one which will lead them to feel entitled, cheated, and resentful conformists, imprisoned by the impossible expectations of the real world and struggling to establish limits and self-direction in their lives.
June 22nd, 2012 | 4:01 pm
It isn’t so much that women have a “stronger” desire to be present than men.
It is the recognition that someone has to be present for these kids. It’s not only best for the child but for the entire family if the “one” who is present for these kids is a family member, rather than a string of hired strangers (yes, it is possible to find nannies that are loyal. But then a different problem arises, because the economics of the situation make it impossible for such loyalty to be reciprocal, and the unreciprocated loyalty destroys the bonds between people – it is impossible to ever fully trust someone after you’ve watched them casually use up, then discard, another person. Especially a person you were fond of.)
The problem with feminism is that they don’t have a place in their worldview for the raising of children as an inherently valuable activity. They think they are “too valuable” for what they view as menial and trivial work.
June 22nd, 2012 | 11:39 pm
Blake,
“It is the recognition that someone has to be present for these kids. It’s not only best for the child but for the entire family if the “one” who is present for these kids is a family member, rather than a string of hired strangers”
You’ve identified only one third of the problem. Fathers need to be present, too. How can a boy learn to be a man from someone he only sees on nights and weekends? Fathers were forced to be separated from their children by so-called enlightened child labor laws (which were really just a naked power grab by members of the humanist religion or Unitarian Universalists). Moreover, children were forced to be separated from their grandparents by other liberal programs that forced home ownership, the formation of nuclear rather than extended families, and the interstate highway system.
The problem with men is that they don’t have a place in their worldview for the raising of children as an inherently valuable activity. They think they are “too valuable” for what they view as menial and trivial work, and so if they can’t get as wife to do that work, they hire a string of strangers who see their children more than they do.
June 23rd, 2012 | 7:59 am
As usual, “elite” women are just catching up to the suffering and sacrifice of their sisters. As early as the 1990′s, women who hd been raised to venerate the workplace and their own, unlimited, potential in it, began to ache for the children they had borne and arranged day care for. They have been fighting to get back to them ever since, with varying success. Thus vindicating the disdained perspective that women are made for more than money.
June 23rd, 2012 | 11:21 am
I have a serious problem with the notion of “having it all” from the get go. It seems to me that this premise, or dubious goal is so completely wrong headed. It is not encouraging that our culture encourages such rabid self-absorption. And this is not even a discussion that just pertains to women,men cannot “have it all” either.
There has never been, and I daresay never will be a human being on this earth that “has it all, or has had it all! Since the beginning of time the lucky few with choices, have given up some things in order to pursue others. The simple act of making a choice automatically forecloses the possibility of other paths.
The majority of us, without choices, have simply done what is expected. or what we know, or what our ancestors have done through the generations.
The smallest minority of folks our society holds up as beacons to the “having it all” mindset, are actually carrying burdens deep in their souls and have no authentic joy. I do not care what the glossy magazines say, most of them have lives resembling train wrecks!
My point is that having it all is not a part of the human condition, nor should it be. The question needs to be, what promotes authentic happiness and true human flourishing? Worshiping the false god of self absorption-or truly giving of oneself as we form connections with other human beings-whatever our calling turns out to be.
Let’s have a real conversation about what a good life is all about-and stop encouraging the younger generation to even think they should want to have it all. Unless we stop promoting this way of thinking we will continue to set our children up for a lifetime of depression, loneliness and alienation.The unobtainable goal of “having it all” leads to a dead end of bitterness and despair. What kind of legacy is that? We must do better for our kids-all of them-male and female.
June 23rd, 2012 | 4:23 pm
The problem with men is that they don’t have a place in their worldview for the raising of children as an inherently valuable activity. They think they are “too valuable” for what they view as menial and trivial work, and so if they can’t get as wife to do that work, they hire a string of strangers who see their children more than they do.
Only a liberal could honestly argue that being a wife is degrading compared to being a hired stranger.
You should go see the film “The Help” and see a celebration of how working women enjoy much much better lives, higher status, and more fulfilling sense of “purpose” than poor, oppressed wives.
June 23rd, 2012 | 7:02 pm
The article discusses the fact that most elite jobs eat the lives of those who hold them, and that society does not benefit from a world where the important decisions are all made by people who gave up their private lives. She states that there are a number of easy ways for employers to allow more actual life balance so that no one has to chose between a family and a paycheck. Why does anyone object to this?
June 23rd, 2012 | 7:09 pm
If you have more options, choice and compromise are necessary. What price then will the rest of us pay so that women who want to “have it all” can “have it all”? The rest of us is children, old people, men, and women who have chosen and compromised and are content with their choices.
June 24th, 2012 | 10:49 am
Blake,
So you think it’s right that fathers spend so little time with their kids? You seem to watch a lot of movies. Have you noticed how many complain about absent fathers?
June 24th, 2012 | 11:43 am
And please notice that I didn’t say that wives are degraded. I’m saying that men should spend more time with their children. I don’t know where you got the degrading idea.
June 24th, 2012 | 11:00 pm
“Fathers were forced to be separated from their children by so-called enlightened child labor laws (which were really just a naked power grab by members of the humanist religion or Unitarian Universalists). Moreover, children were forced to be separated from their grandparents by other liberal programs that forced home ownership, the formation of nuclear rather than extended families, and the interstate highway system.”
Huh? Men in the military or who spent their lives at sea were separated from their children for years. A man with an 8-5 job has it easy compared to men who were historically in these essential professions.
Living with the extended family has been less common in Western Europe than in Asia for hundreds of years and this cultural difference was carried across the Atlantic and reinforced by individualism and cheap land. “Liberal programs” had nothing to do with it. Nobody is forced to move out of their parents’ house — it just so happens that most Americans do not want to live with their parents when they become adults.
June 25th, 2012 | 11:53 pm
Mark,
I was just spoofing Blake’s customary exaggerations. The examples of sailors and soldiers are good, though. They fly in the face of his usual argument about two parents and the liberal destruction of all good things.
June 26th, 2012 | 10:41 am
After reading this, I will just ask one question to anti feminists: Why is that raising kids is a problem only for women “to have it all” but not for men?
June 29th, 2012 | 9:48 am
[...] piece for The Atlantic regarding the myth that women can have it all, which has in turn created heady debate. The debate about what feminism is is certainly warring on – is it choice, equality, WHAT [...]
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