Women — Can They Have It All?

Women — Can They Have it All?

It was a gently sunny afternoon in a grassy backyard in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Local artist Jaspar Lepak was serenading her Mother’s Day audience with songs of motherhood, womanhood and the challenge of taking herself seriously as a folk singer-song writer while tending to her role as a mother.

Like a fish afraid of water
Like a bird with heavy wings
I am a woman torn by longing
For a child and for my dreams

— Floating

Women — can they have it all? Jaspar’s lyrics ask. Can women have the child and the dreams?

I say, yes. They can. And, in our post-pandemic world, it might be easier than ever for women with career aspirations to have it all.

But not all at once. And not full-blast, full-steam ahead year in and year out.

You Can’t Have It All — Choose Two of the Three

When I was young (okay, middle-aged), a highly successful writer I admired told an interviewer that a woman has to choose. She can have a career and a couple of kids. She can have a couple of kids and a husband. Or she can have a husband and a career. But not all three.

There just is not enough time in a day or in a life to give each occupation its full due, she said. Something has to give. The husband. The kids. Or the career.

(It’s true, of course, that having a husband who participates around the house and brings home an income makes combining career and motherhood a whole lot easier. What this writer wanted to say was that when a woman devotes herself fully to her career and her children, her marriage, her husband, gets neglected.)

This worried me, because like most of the professional women I know, I wanted all of the above.

The Three Biggies — Career, Children, Husband

(In my case, I also wanted a house and a smattering of dear friends. And a nice little garden. But mostly I wanted the three biggies: career, children, husband. Not in any particular order. All three items ranked No. 1 on my list. Nothing was expendable.)

My problem was — I see this now — I thought I had to have all three gotta-haves right then, right there, full-time, and full-blast.

That’s because I pictured life with husband and children as something that went on and on indefinitely. I didn’t give much thought to how the future would look, post-kids. I didn’t do the math.

Doing the Math

Let’s do the math. If you have two children two years apart and the youngest goes off to kindergarten at age 5 and then to college or an apartment of their own at age 18, that comes to seven years of exhausting preschool parenting followed by 13 years of attentive, but less exhausting, school-age parenting — for a total of 20 years.

And so, if a person’s work life extends from age 20 to age 65 and their parenting life lasts just two decades, that leaves twenty-five years for  a fulfilling, full-time, full-blast career. Some of those twenty-five years might be at the outset of a career. The rest might come after twenty years of balancing parental and work responsibilities.

Feminist Anne-Marie Slaughter Says the Quiet Part

And there’s the rub, of course. Balancing work and family — it’s a tough issue, one that Anne-Marie Slaughter famously addressed back in 2012 in her Atlantic magazine article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”

Slaughter had been the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department but decided to give up her high-powered government job for work that was closer to home and closer to her teenaged sons.

Slaughter had become “increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet.” She was doing work that she loved, but one of her sons had quit doing his homework and was refusing to talk to the adults who were reaching out to him. So she left her fast-paced foreign-policy job and “hurried home as fast as I could.”

Slaughter embraced her need and desire to mother her children. She accepted the cost that motherhood was imposing — temporarily — on her career.

Step Into the Slow Lane?

But how is a professional woman to succeed if, from time to time, she must step into the slow lane to care for family? The American workplace needs to do a lot more to accommodate workers with children, Slaughter argued. And it’s up to women (and men) to make those changes happen.

“We have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal,” Slaughter wrote. “We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too.”

Thank You, Covid

The work-life balance, I suspect, has gotten a big boost since Slaughter wrote those words — thanks to the coronavirus and the pandemic shut-down. Working remotely, obviously, has  given mothers and fathers some much-needed flexibility.

But the shut-down has also wrought a significant cultural change over the past three years: All those video chats. All those laptop cameras. All those coworkers and bosses ogling each other’s homes and work spaces — homes inhabited unpredictably by toddlers, spouses, cats, buzzing kitchen timers, and flushing toilets.

Since 2020, it’s been there for all to see: coworkers have lives, important clients have lives, bosses and CEOs have lives.

It used to be, back in the before times, that we would show up for work, dressed for success and ready to focus exclusively on our jobs, no excuses. We left our needy children at home, our overworked spouses, our aging parents, and colicky dogs. Out of sight, out of mind.

But now with so many of us working remotely, the jig is up. There’s no denying that there is life outside of work. There are kids with homework. There are flooded basements. There are psychotherapists to visit and spouses who need rides to colonoscopies.

We’ve always known that we had a life. And now our bosses know it. And they know that we know that they know it. Which gives women who want to have children an edge that we didn’t used to have.

Pretending I Didn’t Want Babies

When I was first married I was working full-time on the copy desk of a local newspaper. I wanted to write more and edit less. So I felt I had to act as though having babies was the last thing in the world I wanted. I felt sure I’d be overlooked for a writing slot if management suspected I’d be getting pregnant. They would take motherhood to mean that I was an empl0yee not worth investing in. I’d be dismissed as not an important asset to the paper.

But now the cat is out of the bag. Women, many of them, want to have children. And, like Jaspar, they want their dreams as well. And now — thanks to Slaughter and the army of second-wave feminists she represents, and thanks to the norm-breaking culture of the pandemic shut-down — women feel freer than I ever did to announce their desires to the world.

Having It All

Today’s young women will work hard to have it all, and I think they will get it all. They will have careers, children and life partners if they want them. And, with a bit of luck, they will also have dear friends and a nice little garden.

More about children and careers — daughters in this case — at “Scrubbing the Floor With My Daughter Cinderella.”  And spouses at “The Politics of Housework Revisited.”