Exploding the Myth of Balance, or Superwoman Bites the Dust

Young women are encouraged to feel that they effortlessly can combine marriage and career. . . . The myth of superwoman places total responsibility for change on the individual woman. . . . It also diverts attention from the political policies that would truly change our lives.
— Jean Kilbourne, Can't Buy My Love [1]

We all need both power and love in our lives. We need a way to find power that comes not at the expense of love, because love is our ability to be open to, and vulnerable with, and needful of, another. And we need a way to find love that leaves room for power, because power is our ability to confirm and to recognize the dignity of another person.
—Kathleen Jones, Living between Danger and Love [2]

Rory and Alison

We find it difficult to dream big dreams. When someone asks us where we see ourselves in 10 years, we feel strangely paralyzed. As young feminists, we feel that we should have ambitious goals for ourselves, and yet we're not even able to imaginatively project ourselves into a compelling future of our own design. One reason for this imaginative paralysis is that we find ourselves split between identities rooted in idealism and pragmatism. Because of the successes of second-wave feminism, we've grown up with the privilege of idealism: We have many more options available to us than were available even to our mothers, and we have built lives around these opportunities. Indeed, at some level we feel that it's our responsibility to be idealistic and ambitious, to forward the political, social, and economic ideals of the second wave. And yet, as a result of living with economic downturns and an uncertain political landscape on a large scale and witnessing the struggles of our feminist mentors on a more personal scale, our idealism has become hampered, replaced by a learned pragmatism. Although we have big dreams about where women can go in a broad sense, on our own individual level, these dreams have become scaled back, more realistic, more manageable. In the face of much uncertainty, it has seemed safer—less naïve, maybe—to limit our dreams to what can be realized in the foreseeable future. We know that the superwoman is a myth, so we are not even striving to have it all. We know we can't do it, so why pretend we can? Or that we would want to?

Our scaled-back dreaming has been shaped by our particular career paths. As feminists in the academy, we've experienced an intense pressure to achieve, combined with limited job mobility. However, this essay is not about the vagaries of the academic job market. Instead, we see our struggles as similar to the challenges that many couples face in trying to balance career and family, even before children enter the picture. Much recent feminist writing, from Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions to the collection Young Wives' Tales, has grappled with this issue, suggesting that our own experiences aren't unique but are, in fact, part of a particular cultural and historical moment. Indeed, this moment is distinctly third wave: Even as we've benefited from the second wave's insistence that women be allowed educational and professional opportunities, we have also been taken by surprise by the fact that society is still asking us to choose between private and public roles, between marriage and career, between love and power.

Rory

According to many academics—and especially the statisticians in my graduate program—I was a success story: After finishing my doctorate, I managed to secure a tenure-track position in my field and was proceeding happily along the route toward tenure. Indeed, once I had made the transition from the bustling activity of a large university to the sleepier life of a small liberal arts college, I grew to love my job and became convinced that I had found where I belonged. Working with undergraduates in an intimate setting, having supportive relationships with colleagues, and participating in (and feeling like I had a stake in) the life of the institution were all extremely satisfying to me.

Yet, in spite of all that, I have just committed academic suicide. What I mean is that I have just given up my (relatively secure) job as an assistant professor in favor of a life of uncertain employment prospects and virtually certain low self-esteem. Why have I made a choice like this? Love. It's corny, but true. I fell in love with another professor, a man whose academic institution was 450 miles away from mine. Although we spent nearly two years commuting to see each other, we realized that something would finally have to give, since the glamour of the long-distance relationship had worn off. And, since he was closer to a tenure decision than I was and his institution is more prestigious than mine, what gave was my academic career. I decided to take an adjunct position at his university so that we would be able to be together. We are getting married in less than three weeks' time.

Alison

My husband and I have been together for 11 years, married for four. We lived together for the seven years preceding our marriage; since we got married, though, we've lived in the same zip code only sporadically. We joke that the marriage finally split us up, but the fact is that our careers are to blame. When we met, he was a musician, working a variety of temporary jobs to make ends meet. I was the driven one, the achiever, excelling in school and with a great future ahead of me. We thought we had it all figured out: My career would be the one that mattered; I would be the breadwinner; he could go anywhere I wanted to go. So he followed me to grad school. I was so grateful that we were not going to be one of those couples with two high-powered careers—in fact, we would scoff at the academics we knew (many of them) who lived apart for years at a time. "How can they do that?" we would ask. "How is that a marriage?"

Then slowly, over the course of several years, Walter developed academic goals, goals that took him away for classes for months at a time, to the point that now he's getting ready to move across the country to start grad school. And I'm staying here. When it was my turn, he followed me, but I am not doing the same. I did look for positions near where he will be, but I was only able to round up a few adjunct courses at a variety of universities. No benefits, no stability, and more important, no chance to advance my career. I couldn't do it. I love my husband, but I also love my job—and I love the accomplishments I've made at it: one book published, another under contract. Since my career is no longer the only one that matters, we are embarking on a commuter marriage.

Rory and Alison

At first glance, our situations seem to be polar opposites, but ultimately we are grappling with the same issues. We are both trying, as best we can, to construct lives that include intimate relationships and fulfilling professional work. Yet, even though we are striving for a balance of personal and professional commitments in our lives, we're finding that we can't help but sacrifice one side of the equation to the other. We've had to make what feminist scholar Kathleen Jones calls "unreasonable choices" between power and love.[3] That is, we are faced with the choice between power—the ability to act autonomously and independently, to have personal ambition and work that matters—and love, the experience of connected and compassionate relationships with others. And, of course, we need both—everyone does. So how can we choose? How can we find anything approximating balance? Rory seems to have privileged love over power at this point in her life by choosing to leave the tenure track and get married, whereas Alison has chosen power by pursuing her career instead of joining her husband as he goes to graduate school.

These have been agonizing choices because we have had to prioritize and sacrifice things that are central to our identities and are crucial to our sense of wholeness as people. It's easy for outsiders to scrutinize our situations and pronounce judgment; we often hear, "Why should you have to leave your career?" or "Why aren't you going with your husband?"—as if there were a clear-cut way of solving this dilemma. But the fact is, there is no easy solution. Every choice we can imagine involves loss.

At some level, this dilemma is a legacy of feminism. Second-wave feminism has provided us—straight, white, middle-class women—with a wealth of options, but the larger community has not risen to the challenge of making these options feasible. A lack of institutional change has meant that women like us have had to develop a sense of pragmatism to fill the void. Our stories may be heightened versions of this phenomenon, but we see them as emblematic of a particularly third-wave moment. In a sense, we have had some progress because of feminism, but not enough: Our expectations have been raised by the promise of the second wave, but have been let down by inadequate political change. We should clarify that we don't blame feminism for these unreasonable choices; instead, we feel that feminism provides us with tools we can use to, if not resolve this dilemma, at least confront it, understand its difficulties, and recognize our problems as political, rather than as personal failings.

Rory

Even though in this essay Alison and I may seem to have assumed a rather grim tone about our pragmatism and our difficulties in dreaming, when I think about the ways that my feminism might help me to improve my situation, I feel anything but glum. Don't get me wrong—I am not turning gleeful cartwheels, either. Instead, I have a kind of cautious optimism about my future. I think this is because I see feminism as a transformational political perspective. For me, feminism is predicated on a belief in the ability to transform; according to this view, everything can be altered and improved—and this means everything from global politics to personal human relationships. My confidence in feminism's ability to remake the world has logical implications for my own life: If I am committed to the possibility of change in the world, then I should also be committed to the possibility of change in myself.

I do not mean to suggest a broad-based self-help philosophy. What I mean is that I have chosen my life course and can continue to act to change it. Even as I embark on this new phase of my life—one that implies, as I said earlier, lowered self-esteem—I remind myself that I have chosen to remake my life, and this decision means that I still have agency. While I have made a choice that has emphasized love over power, I have not given up my professional aspirations; in fact, I still have a meaningful career, one that I want to explore and develop. I do not want to resign myself to a "this is as good as it gets" mentality, feeling that I should simply be satisfied with the work life I have managed to cobble together. While I cannot suddenly become an idealistic dreamer who imagines the impossible plum position at a high-powered institution, I can continue to work within the parameters of my new life to find ways for the "power" half of my ego to feel more fulfilled.

Alison

I have sometimes felt that feminism is more about power than love, that a feminist perspective would always argue in favor of the "power" side of the equation. When I consider my own marriage, though, I know that isn't true. Feminism is integral to this love relationship for several reasons. First of all, feminism creates an infrastructure that allows Walter and me to have a relationship in the first place. Feminism is a necessary prerequisite for our marriage because it is what allows us to come together as equals and attempt to work through the messy business of compromise, honesty, and power sharing. I am able to love Walter because I can come to him as a full partner—and it isn't one of those Southern Baptist partnerships where the woman gives her opinion but the man is the ultimate authority. Also not one of those partnerships—and here I'll offend some people—where I give up my last name, or even hyphenate, and he isn't expected to change at all. Or where sex is defined around his needs.

This partnership is, in a sense, based on our ability to make choices. At one level, it doesn't matter if we choose to follow a traditionally masculine/feminine pattern, with me as the trailing spouse, or Walter in charge of mowing the lawn. What matters is that, as much as possible, we make real choices. Jobs have to be done and decisions have to be made in a marriage, but, for us, none of those decisions are made because of prescribed roles. We take a feminist approach to almost every question that comes along, and we consider any assumption about masculinity or femininity suspect and up for grabs—so much so that Walter jokes that if we ever have kids, he'll start lactating to facilitate being a stay-at-home dad.

Prescribed roles—default states—are easier, of course. They simplify things considerably. But simplicity is not our ultimate goal in this marriage. It's more important to us that we work and negotiate and empathize and compromise so that, as much as possible, both of us have our personal and professional needs met. So that our whole is greater than the sum of our parts. We are working to have both power and love in our relationship.

Rory and Alison

In writing this essay, we have discovered that there's no easy way out of our dilemma. We will admit that we crave both love and power, and yet feminism can't provide us with a balance of these desires. What it can do is teach us how to be open to transforming ourselves so that the absence of one or the other half of the equation doesn't prove to be totally debilitating. Feminism can help us to create networks of support as we talk about these issues in our lives. We need to stop beating ourselves up for our failure to achieve the perfect balance between work and family. Balance is a myth, just like the superwoman. We are all doing the best we can, and instead of thinking about what we ourselves are doing wrong, we need to remember that institutional change—not personal adjustments—is what will help people live lives that are more fair and full.

While personal flexibility and even personal transformation are important, alone they are only a partial solution. The next step is that as a society we need to rethink our commitment to the possibility of having careers and families. Because the second wave made great strides in advocating for women's abilities to garner more power educationally, professionally, and economically, now young feminists can continue the discussion by articulating the need for structures of care that would permit women's private lives to be as full and as satisfying as our professional lives have the potential to become. Indeed, feminism—because of its ability to bridge the personal and the political—provides us with the best philosophical framework for public discourse about the kinds of changes that need to occur. While examining our personal relationships in order to improve them can be an exhausting endeavor, we can't stop there. Feminism asks us to connect the personal and the political in order to bring about social change. As young feminists we need to do more than reflect privately on the challenges of our own personal situations; we need to bring these stories into public discourse and demand that policymaking institutions recognize the human need for both power and love.

Endnotes

1. Jean Kilbourne, Can't Buy My Love (New York: Free Press, 2000). [Return to text]

2. Kathleen B. Jones, Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). [Return to text]

3. Jones, 2. [Return to text]