Discussion
Janet Jakobsen, director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, opened the event by welcoming the panelists and the audience and then turned the discussion over to Siegel:
Deborah Siegel: . . . Feminists have a saying, “the personal is political.” And so, in good feminist style, I’m going to give you a bunch of both as I introduce the topic of tonight’s conversation. My brief . . . introduction has four parts: The personal, politics, culture, and young feminists’ responses.
So let’s start by getting personal. As I’ve been talking with friends and colleagues over the past couple of months in preparation for this panel, the three main emotions that arise the minute you say “work/family conflict” are really the same three as those expressed by women of previous generations.
The first is exhaustion. This one is big among younger women with kids, but also among women who have lived through these very same debates long before some of us in this room were even born.
The second is panic. Or, as one of our panelists put it in a recent e-mail exchange, paralyzing anxiety. This one is hot among women who are thinking about having kids just at the moment that our careers are kicking into high gear. Panic.
The third, as Cathi Hanauer has written about so eloquently in The Bitch in the House—and this one I hear from women across the age spectrum, and from those who have had kids, those who haven’t, those who don’t plan to—and that is anger.
So there you have it: exhaustion, panic, and rage.
There’s also a fourth going around, I have to add, and that’s humor. In the August issue of Real Simple magazine, editor Carrie Tuhy wrote that she would like to see a t-shirt printed with the following expression: “The balanced life is not worth living.” (laughter)
Balance. Juggling. Having it all. These are the catch phrases so often associated with women’s struggles to lead multidimensional lives in what Peggy Orenstein has called “a half-changed world.” But how do these concepts jive with members of the current generation of working women? Hopefully, we will find out tonight.
Moving then, from the personal to the political, I would like to offer a little bit of context to set the scene for our discussion. Second-wave feminists in this country were far more successful in getting women into the workplace than in revolutionizing that world to be family-friendly.
It makes perfect sense, then, that feminism’s daughters would still be responding—with exhaustion, panic, and anger—when they realize that if they step off the career treadmill to have kids, it might be impossible to get back on. It’s equally frustrating that feminism’s sons experience social difficulty when taking paternity leave because so few men today are public fathers at work.
These issues are even more pronounced among the working poor. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, and recent census data, the number of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) cases . . . is declining, just as child poverty is on the rise. The current battle for increased child care funding taking place around the reauthorization of the TANF legislation right now is evidence of the current administration’s, shall we say, conflicted narrative when it comes to supporting working families and valuing their conflicts and their lives.
Moving now from political to cultural narratives, about a younger generation’s struggle to make it. Popular narratives about professional young women’s quest to have it all send equally confusing and conflicting messages. Here are just a few.
A number of recent books by boomer-aged women warn younger professional women to learn from their mistakes and get on track with our love lives as we have with our careers. If we don’t, these books warn, we risk ending up professionally successful but single, childless, and alone.
When conversations about professional women’s struggles to succeed at home and at work make it into the media, they often devolve into these narratives of narcissistic careerism, romantic impairment, biological determinism, and forced choices. Feminism is either irrelevant or it’s the problem itself. Effective political solutions such as, say, the expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act, get left out of the conversation altogether.
The political, it seems, has become personal once again. The conversation seems all about what we are doing wrong, rather than what our culture or our government is or is not doing. So how are young feminists responding? Younger feminists, in many ways, in step with their second-wave foremothers, are talking back.
Younger women, some who call themselves feminists and some who simply call themselves pissed off, are coming out with books that call attention to the impasses we are still experiencing. Their titles are telling: Young Wives’ Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership. How to Avoid the Mommy Trap: A Roadmap for Sharing Parenting and Making It Work. Having It All?: Black Women and Success. Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families.
These voices from the front remind us that issues of work/family conflict are very much on young feminists’ minds and that, in many cases, the revolution may in fact be taking place in the context of our private lives.
Turning now, to our panel. Our panel tonight is an attempt to infuse the current debate with a dose of young feminist reality. I’d like to throw out three sets of questions to set the mood for the coming conversation. . . . These questions oscillate, as you will see, between the personal and the political, and back again.
1. What kinds of life lessons have we internalized from watching mothers, sisters, aunts, and mentors juggle work, family, love, friendship, and career?
2. Does balance mean the same thing for us as it did for our mothers? Is balance possible? Is balance beside the point? What kind of public policy would young feminists like to see in place so that both women and men can be, not necessarily balanced, but effective in both public and private spheres?
3. What is success, for that matter? Are there vocabularies, [other] than the rather material emphasis on “having it all,” in which younger women and younger men are framing success today? What are the markers by which we measure and define a successful life in a half-changed world? And how do these definitions vary for women of different cultural backgrounds? And what about these definitions of success might be generationally specific?
And now, the panelists. Our panelists range between the ages of 28 and 40. One has kids. The others don’t. All are passionate and fiercely opinionated and committed when it comes to talking about work, family, and the meaning of success. I think you will be both moved and motivated by what they have to say, and I’d like to thank them in advance . . . .
Cathi Hanauer: Hello. . . . I was going to first read from my introduction, which I think will give you a good sense of why and how I put together this very personal glimpse into the lives of 26 contemporary women, who talk about their choices, their hurdles, their anger, their expectations, and their realities. . . . I think . . . you will get a sense of what I see as some of the conflicts for many, many women today. Women with choices, passions, ambitions, active imaginations. Successful women, living in a postfeminist, supposedly egalitarian society. Women probably like most of you in this room.
Though ultimately this is not an angry book, this book was born out of anger, specifically my own domestic anger, which stemmed from a combination of guilt, resentment, exhaustion, naïveté, and the chaos of my life at the time.
This was four years ago, now, after my family—my husband Dan, and my two children, then aged four and one—had just left New York City to move to a small town in Massachusetts where the kids could each have a room and Dan could work part-time from home, instead of full-time from an office. Enabling him to write a second novel and do his part of the co-parenting arrangement we both always, if vaguely, envisioned.
The move came for me, after an autonomous decade in my 20s, indulging in all of the things I had come to value. A rewarding, lucrative career combined with romance, solitude, exercise, good friends. Followed by six whirlwind years that included marrying, moving three times and birthing and nursing two children—all while contributing my necessary share of the family income by writing a monthly magazine column, publishing a novel, and completing a second novel under contract.
By the end, I had worked my way up to roughly two-thirds time hired child care, much of it taking place in our apartment in which I also worked. Our final year in New York had been a veritable marathon. Nursing a baby at the computer while typing to make a deadline. Sprinting home from my daughter’s nursery school, both kids in tow, to return phone calls. Handing the children off to Dan the instant he walked in at night, so I could rush off to a coffee shop and get my work done. When we moved, I expected things to finally be different. I’d be able to work purely and efficiently, to focus as I had years ago, knowing Dan was on during those times.
We’d be calm. We’d take family bike rides. Our new lives would begin. Instead, my life, my marriage, my schedule felt more overwhelming than ever. The phones rang nonstop. We had three distinctive rings. Dan’s work line. My work line. And the family line. A total nightmare.
FedEx packages and cartons of books I was supposed to be reading—I was writing Mademoiselle‘s monthly books page at the time—arrived by the week, to be added to the still-unpacked boxes that rimmed every room, dust bunnies breeding around them. I rarely managed to cook a good dinner as my own mother had virtually every night. And my husband’s idea of a good dinner was frozen waffles at 10 PM, which didn’t quite cut it for me. So I rushed my children through the hours so I could get to all the things I had to do—furious when they wouldn’t go to bed. Exhausted when they were up calling me in the night.
Dan was doing more parenting than he ever had and feeling, I imagined, like a better father than those of previous generations, simply by virtue of being around. Yet I still felt I was the one who managed and was responsible for the kids. From their meals to their clothing, activities, school work, babysitters, birthday parties. As well as handling all of the domestic things I’d always done—grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, school and social responsibilities, and so on.
I held the puzzle of family life in my head and it was my job to see that it was put together smoothly, which often meant doing it myself. And yet, I still had the same work. My income, now, even more important. My days were nonstop at high speed, my brain flooded with lists and obligations . . . which goes to your first point—exhaustion.
All day long, I stomped around, barking orders—irritable and stressed out. I was angry at the cat for waking me, at the car for having no gas when I got in it—late for something, always late. At the toy I just tripped on. And at Dan, because he used up the coffee filters or Cascade, without putting them on the list. Because he had finished his work and had time to check out the New York Times and Salon, while I struggled to find time for mine. Because I was always more anxious and frantic than he was. Of course, I had fallen in love with him partly because of this very calm. But now his ability to relax when I never seemed to felt unfair, oblivious, even rude. I resented him in this cast I found myself in, even when I never stopped being grateful for the elements that created it.
Two healthy children, a nice home, an interesting job. What could I possibly be mad about? And yet, mad I was. So night after night, once the kids were asleep—sort of—I left laundry unfolded, phone calls unreturned, school forms unfilled-out, and my own work undone to go online and fire [off] furious e-mails to my friends, to try to figure it out.
And I began to realize something. A lot of these women, particularly those who, like me, were ambitious women, often writers, juggling jobs and marriages and sometimes small children—also were resentful, guilty, stressed out. “I want a partner in my husband, not another child,” one fired back at me.
“I told him if something doesn’t change, I’m leaving, even though we just got married,” said another, adding, “yesterday I actually had a fantasy that we got a divorce, moved back into our separate apartments and just dated each other again.”
“I’m fine all day at work, but as soon as I get home, I’m a horror,” said a third. “I’m the bitch in the house.”
The bitch in the house. That’s exactly how I felt. The opposite of what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house,” but with anger to boot. Sometimes my friends and I would get on the topic of our sex lives or, in the case of the married ones, it seemed, [the] lack thereof.
“Put me anywhere near a bed and I just want to sleep,” said one mother. A recently wed woman mourned the loss of the hot sex she had had with her husband before they tied the proverbial knot. One young single friend who had just moved in with her boyfriend already felt the waning of her desire.
In the same breath, she spoke of how it scared and amazed her how angry she got at him sometimes. How she would walk in from work and see a sink full of dishes and explode with rage, while her poor boyfriend watched, baffled, from the couch—beer in hand, newspaper spread before him, stereo blaring the Dave Matthews Band.
. . . Naturally, this outpouring of anger interested me. I began to ask these women about their thoughts and experiences, to dig deeper and to consider and compare potential reasons for this seeming epidemic of female rage.
At the same time, I started reading a new book, Flux, in which journalist Peggy Orenstein, after interviewing 200 women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, concluded that “women’s lives have become a complex web of economic, psychological, and social contradictions, with opportunities so intimately linked to constraints, that a choice in one realm can have unexpected consequences or benefits 10 years later, in another.”
Orenstein calls the modern world a half-changed one in which old patterns and expectations have broken down, but new ideas seem fragmentary, unrealistic and, often, contradictory. And I began to wonder if, far from being irrational or me just being a spoiled brat, my anger and that of my friends had clear-cut wellsprings. Sources that didn’t go away because we had more choices than other generations of women. Or because we had loving, sensitive partners or even because we led full, privileged lives.
So, I began to ask women if they would be interested or willing to explore some aspect of contemporary womanhood, a choice they had made, or anger, if they had anger And I ended up with 26 women—ages 24 to 67, single, married, with children and without—who together don’t so much offer answers as they do debunk the myths. The myth that women or mothers should not get angry. The myth that . . . marriage will always be sexually passionate. The myth that having it all is perfection. The myth that choice does not involve compromise.
Seventy-two percent of mothers today work. Thirty percent of working women out-earn their husbands. Feminism has opened the door to the world for us as we have arrived. We have walked through it and arrived, and this is a good thing. We’ve become our fathers but . . . and here’s the rub . . . we’ve not let go of being our mothers, and we have no wives. Women are still responsible for the bulk of running the households, for buying the gifts for both families, for caring for the elderly relatives, for calling the plumber when the toilet overflows. We carry, birth, and nurse our kids, which is a biological given. But also later, we are mostly the ones responsible for the feeding and clothing of them. Supervising their home lives. Education. Social lives. And birthday parties.
I’m not saying that all women do this or that men don’t help. And in fact, there are plenty of men who are doing it, as evidenced by the Fortune magazine cover about trophy husbands that ran a few months ago.
But as the essayist Daphne Merkin, who is in this book, put it once: “Feminism can come and go and egalitarian fashions can prevail or not prevail. But still today, it is the rare household where the bulk of the solicitude and concern for the children” —and I would add, for the community—”falls on the husband or father.”
This discussion for me is not only about what men do or don’t do, and I can’t resist the chance . . . to tell you that if you want to hear the men’s side of this, my husband—even as we speak—is finishing up the companion volume to The Bitch in the House. It’s true. It’s coming out in the spring and it’s called . . . The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Thoughts about Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom.
Anyway, as I was saying, this discussion for me is not only about what men do and don’t do or about what society asks, expects, and demands of men versus women today. Also—and this is nothing new—I think that the discussion is also about the internal conflict for any ambitious, worldly woman who also wants children: The contrast and conflict between the biological or material instinct and the intellectual one. Being a good mother is antithetical to being a powerful career woman, in many ways, I think. One is about patience, routine, calm, self-sacrifice, domesticity, and unconditional love. The other is about drive, power, brains, ego, getting out in the world, or deep into the self and breaking new ground. I think the switching back and forth is often what drives the highest-powered working mothers to the edge.
. . . I think our goal is to talk about this openly and honestly, until we figure out some answers. Because most of us don’t want to be angry. We want to be able to look into the mirror at the end of the day and like what we see. We want to give our families what they need without sacrificing ourselves. [But] neither do we want to be depressed or unchallenged like so many of our fore bearers. . . .
Thank you. (applause)
Lynette Clemetson: When I was asked to participate in this panel. . . I guess it was probably two months ago now?—I was sitting at my desk in the Washington bureau. . . . And my response to the invitation was swift and unequivocal. I laughed out loud, at my desk. I don’t remember what the particular angst I was struggling with at that moment was, but I do know that on that day . . . , I was trying to map out some sort of game plan for myself, for what I was going to do, not just professionally but personally, in my life over the coming months, because we are going into a presidential campaign year . . . . And I was struggling. . . .
So when I saw this e-mail, it struck me as just plain hilarious that anyone, let alone the folks here, would want to hear my take on work, family, and the meaning of success. . . . Because at 35, which I am now, I [feel] far less sense of clarity about the meaning of success in my life than I did at 25. And just to step back and give you some context for that, I will say that in my adult life I have always been a person with a game plan.
I, like probably many of you, was the person in college who had the job, who had the internships, who was active in student government and many different student organizations. I knew what I wanted to do fairly early on in college, with my career, and had plotted out a way to get there, or at least a general way to get there. I even had—though not ever written down—sort of five-year plans for myself. What things did I need to accomplish by the time I was 25? What would I accomplish by the time I was 30?
I [worked] for Newsweek for six years . . . And when I was in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, working in Newsweek‘s Hong Kong bureau, in the run up to the then-British colony’s handover to Chinese rule in 1997, I received a letter from my graduate school advisor.
It was a congratulations letter on my job at Newsweek and . . . the application that I wrote to get into my interdisciplinary master’s program in East Asian studies at the University of Pittsburgh. And in this letter I [had] spelled out very clearly that I wanted to enter this master’s program not to go on to the Ph.D. program, but because I wanted to become a foreign correspondent in Asia. I [had] then crafted a Pacific Century essay [on] all the important things I saw happening in Asia in the last decade of the twentieth century, and one of these things was Hong Kong’s handover in 1997. And [I wrote that], if I then, in 1990, started this master’s program and started studying Chinese, . . . my goal was to work for a major news organization covering the handover in 1997.
So that shows you what kind of type-A freak I was. (laughter) I did always have a game plan. So, to be sitting there at my desk that day and, [in] recent years, not able to do another five-year plan so easily. Not able to come up with a game plan has been the source of . . . frustration. . . . And then I started thinking about it and realized that saying yes to coming here, to participate in this, was not just good for me because I would get to listen to Cathi and Carrie and Deborah and you, but because it would give me permission to take time in my life to think about what these things meant to me.
. . . And I did, for months. It was what I was going to talk about and the subjects that we were going to tackle were on my mind throughout interviews, as I was putting story lists together over the past couple of months.
I’ll give you one example of how it came up. I was recently covering the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington. And one of the many things I did . . . for the anniversary was, for the Week in Review section of the New York Times, I did vignettes with people who had been at the original march.
So I talked to Dorothy Height, who is president emeritus of the National Council on Negro Women. Some people I interviewed over the phone, but Dr. Height I wanted to go see in person. And the office of the National Council of Negro Women is in Washington.
She had just done a book called Open Wide the Freedom Gates, and so, she was in town and I was able to go see her. She is 91 now, and amazingly lucid, and we were talking about the march. And the reason I wanted to see her was that she was one of the few women sitting on the platform that day, of the March on Washington.
I started asking her about her memories. She immediately starting talking about the politics that were going on in the organizing of the march that day. And how, of the many speakers there, there were a group of women who thought that there should be at least one woman speaker.
The men organizing the march gave a very sort of crafty, diplomatic response that they were well aware that there were women in the synagogues, churches, and community organizations there that day, and [aware of] the great role that women had played. And [that] by having the leaders of those organizations speak, those women would be represented.
Dr. Height was telling me this story and she stops and she says, “Of course, all of the leaders were men.” And she left it at that. She then said, after pausing, “But we felt that the goals that day, the overarching goals that we were trying to achieve were important enough that we didn’t want to get into a squabble. And so, we accepted a place on the stage.”
The next day after the march, the National Council for Negro Women held a meeting and at the meeting they discussed, Why was this the tactic that we chose and what do we now do about it? And the March on Washington had this second meeting for them. She said it gave them a new impetus for their role as women, and the work that they would do in the women’s movement. And so, it was a fabulous vignette for the newspaper, but it also informed the way that I was thinking about this too.
Because, though Dorothy Height never used the word feminist to describe herself, of course she was a feminist. And of course, she is a woman who has had an extraordinary life and balanced a lot of things in [her] life. And so, interviews like that, I would come away with my work and immediately personalize it for myself, and use it to try to help myself think about the things we were assigned to think about for today.
Getting back to the notion of success for me, the notion of success for me in my 20s was always very clear-cut. Women in my family had worked, but the way I saw it, they had jobs. I wanted a career. My family had always struggled economically, and so what I wanted was economic success. . . . [S]uccess for me was linked to certain jobs, certain companies, a certain salary. These were benchmarks that I could set out for myself, a certain salary range I guess. . . . .
In fact, as I progressed, the very linear, clearly defined notions that I had about work and success have become more amorphous, harder to contain or trace. If I were to try to draw . . . on paper my notions of success and how they have changed over the years, the progressive images might resemble what we have been seeing over the past few days of Hurricane Isabel.
In the early stages, my views of success, my view of myself would be strong and contained and formidable, with a perfectly formed eye, a clearly advancing path. In the later stages, though, when it’s time to really get down to business, actually the image is a little ragged around the edges. Still formidable on the whole, and something to be taken seriously, but more patchy and unpredictable in terms of direction and in strength at any given moment.
So having described myself as a weakening hurricane, I think you can see why I thought it would be a really good idea for me to come here. I thought, with any luck, that listening to people here I might pick up some game. That I might reconstitute and I might strengthen. . . .
I have achieved some things over the past years that were not explicitly part of any of my five-year plans. When I was in Asia, I fell in love and got married. . . . I met my husband in a student lounge at a Chinese school in Taiwan and we got married in Hong Kong . . . He is from England. I’m from Ohio. We have family spread all over the place, and we bought a house two years ago, partly because we realized then that in the seven years that we had been married . . . we had lived in 12 different apartments in three different countries.
Buying a house took on all kinds of psychological meanings. It was setting down roots, after a life where we had sort of decidedly not set down roots. And so, marrying, buying a house—any of you who are married, with a family or a mortgage or even a dog, you understand that any of these kinds of developments are enough to fuzz up the edges of any independently strong, advancing hurricane.
Success for me now is less about any one goal . . . that I need to check off on a to-do list, and more about carving out a life that feels fulfilling on a number of different levels. And so, I think less about success and I think more now about fulfillment and happiness. And as much as I might want to, I see no finish lines in sight.
As I close, I also wanted to add another note of context. When I looked at the title of the series, I realized that I actually don’t ever describe myself as a feminist. . . . It’s not that I reject the label. In fact, I think I embrace it. But I also think that, perhaps, like many people my age, I think less about labels for myself generally. And I feel less a need to label myself with words because many of the ideas and ideals of any number of labels that I might use to describe myself . . . are simply implicit in who I am and what I do, and the way I choose to live my life.
. . . I looked up on the Internet and asked Deborah, before this started—let’s make sure we all understand, can you tell me what the definition is of a third-wave feminist? I wanted to make sure that I knew what we were talking about before I came into the room. And I expect that we will talk tonight some about generational differences between older feminists and what, for the sake of this conversation, . . . we are going to be calling third-wave feminists.
. . . I see my own identity as part of a heritage, as a descendant of two pivotal social and political movements: the feminist movement and the civil rights movement. The very fact that I have the luxury not to think too much about labels and to form an ever-changing, ever-expansive view of what success means to me, speaks volumes to the successes of each of those movements.
And I expect that my responses tonight on any number of questions will be informed as much by my views on race as by my views on gender. And on that note, I would like to close by reading from a book written by a former colleague and close friend of mine . . . Veronica Chambers. . . . her book is called Having It All?: Black Women and Success. . . . And there was another book, actually . . . by a professor at the University of Maryland called Bart Landry, and it’s called Black Working Wives. And it really talks about the fact that some of the issues that we tend to talk about in balancing work and family don’t easily apply to the black experience.
Because black women have always worked. And one of the things that he points out that’s very interesting . . . is, he talks about the notion of the traditional family where the wife stayed home. And he challenges that, saying that the traditional family, if we define it now, was really a growth of the industrial revolution. That, when families were farm-bound or trade-bound, the whole family worked, and women worked. When we became a more industrialized economy, the notion changed about the wife staying at home. And there was a period when black families wanted to do that as well, but you have to remember that for black women to stay home, that wasn’t accepted because after the end of slavery, when people were sharecropping, having black women stay home meant a real loss of low-wage labor.
And so, he lays out some of those things. Veronica picks up those ideas in her book, and the notion of the black career woman.
“Thank God for Clare Huxtable,” she says in her introduction. “If it wasn’t for her character on The Cosby Show, I might never have had a glimpse of what it was like to be a smart, beautiful black woman, who made her own money, lived in a gorgeous house, and who was adored by a handsome, charming man. Not to mention, Clare Huxtable could be fabulous without ever being trifling.
“When I ask professional black women to talk about a character from television or film that reflects their lives most accurately, they inevitably mention Clare Huxtable, even though she hasn’t been on TV in years, though she can be seen on Nick at Night.
“The Cosby Show had a ‘let’s be real’ quality to it. Their house was obscenely big, as improbable in the 1980s New York real estate market as the gargantuan apartments occupied by America’s favorite slackers on Friends. As a lawyer, married to a successful doctor who managed to raise five kids without so much as a nanny, Clare Huxtable gave Wonderwoman a bad name.
“Yet, she wasn’t a mythic character. The number of black women entering law school and graduate school has increased more than 120 percent in the past 20 years. Clare Huxtable was a character, both inspirational and aspirational.” And I think that’s a great introduction because I certainly was part of the . . . post–Clare [Huxtable] generation in terms of how I saw a career for myself. . . .
Veronica [also] has a chapter where she talks about black stay-at-home moms. In it, she . . . talks about this phenomenon as . . . sort of a new luxury for black professional women. . . . if you think about it, black women have been stay-at-home moms for hundreds of years. They’ve just been staying at home with other people’s children, typically.
. . . So, I think as we frame the discussion here, I also would like to inject a certain point that most of us here who are engaged in this discussion and how hard it will be for us to juggle our lives, will be talking from a position of relatively luxury. . . . we do have choices, and . . . even though it’s stressful, I’m really thankful to have the choice to be under so much stress. (applause)
Carrie Fernandez: I’m speaking tonight from both a professional and personal level. . . . I’m a 28-year-old woman pursuing a career in nonprofit communications management, who grew up assuming I would work and support myself. What’s more, I was raised by two sets of parents, all four of which worked.
And I grew up in a household where my brothers did the equal share of cleaning up and doing the dishes, and so forth, as I did. What’s more is that from a very young age I dreamed of a future in which I would be wearing a suit and being an important business executive.
And the image of myself walking down the aisle in some sort of gown is a very recent development. It’s also important to note that I grew up telling myself and telling everyone around me that I would never have children—this wasn’t for me.
So, knowing all that, it’s probably not too difficult . . . to imagine me working as the publicist for the 10th anniversary of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, [of] the Ms. Foundation for Women. I spent two years there, and then, after that year, managed the somewhat controversial transition to Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.
So, many of you are probably familiar with the Ms. Foundation’s Take Our Daughters program. It started in 1993 with the goal of making girls more visible, valued, and heard throughout the world, and in this country, specifically. At the time there was research and concern around girls losing their self-esteem in adolescence.
And this program was designed to address that. Over a 10-year period, about 71 million adults, which is a third of the adults in this country, participated in the program; and on average, took 11 million girls to work each year.
But what I think is even the larger testament to the program’ success is that we now live in a world where girl power and the power of girls are not only cool, but they are pop culture icons. And beyond [the] impact [that] the program had on the popular culture, it also allowed girls to infiltrate the corridors of corporate America, television stations, factories, fire houses, and universities. And that ultimately changed these institutions.
Girls’ observations and questions when they went to work raised important issues of equality for women in the workplace, and concerns around work and family in very blunt ways. For examples, girls asked everything when they went to the workplace. Why do men have all the large offices? Why are all the pictures on the wall of white men? Can you have a family and work here too? How much money do you make?
. . . These girls were living with adults when they asked these questions, who were struggling to manage work and family. Some were rushing home from their offices to make dinner, and sneaking out for a school play or a soccer game. And many of the children or girls lived in households in which moms and dads worked multiple jobs, just to make ends meet, and weren’t home all night because they were working the night shift and the kids were long asleep by the time they got home.
But children observe all of this and they take it in. Children knew their parents were having a hard time; they saw them stressed out, tired, distracted. They wanted their lives to be different. This question, Can I have a family and work here too? was the direct reaction to what they saw, and they asked it in a way that only children can, basically, with no filter.
So over time, girls’ questions prompted workplaces to ask themselves many of the same things. Companies in a study that we did at the 10th anniversary said that the program actually encouraged them to create more opportunities for their women employees.
But at the same time, another interesting development emerged. The media often portrayed this program as a mother/daughter bonding activity, when the reality was that 40 percent of the adults that took girls to work were men.
Fathers wanted their daughters to have the same opportunities that their mothers wanted them to. And at the same time, they wrote letters to us and commented [that] this was really one of the first times where they could be public fathers in the workplace.
For years, men have watched their female counterparts lose opportunities for advancement, for being seen as the primary caregiver at home. And they were afraid of the same thing of being put on the daddy track. And it was these two developments that really got the foundation thinking about, how could the program move forward? How could it do more for girls and for boys? They started discussions about how we could really tackle these issues. So after 10 years, Take Our Daughters turned into Take Our Daughters and Sons with the goal of not only showing girls they could have it all, but making these opportunities real for them.
After a decade the foundation changed the program, but I do want to point out that it was a contentious point, and I think to some extent, still is—that it was more than adding boys to a girls-only program. It was a conscious move to broaden the national discussion around work and family.
One of the first things we did in creating this program was partner with the Families and Work Institute, which is a very well-known nonprofit here in New York that works with corporations and does a lot of research and advocacy work around work and family. And they created workplace activities for us with the intention of getting girls and boys to ask questions about work and family, in the presence of employees and decisionmakers that day in the workplace. And the intention was really to get girls and boys to share their vision of the future with the workplaces that would someday employ them.
For example, activities of real experiences like, If you have a big presentation and you’re about to walk in to do it, and the school calls and says your kid is sick, what do you do? And it was up to kids to tell the parents how they would solve that problem.
So at the same time the Families and Work Institute had conducted research called “Ask the Children,” and we used this in producing and really putting together the Take Our Daughters and Sons program. But one of the statistics said that 80 percent of girls and almost 60 percent of boys—which is a huge number—expected to reduce their work hours when they had children.
It’s an amazing stat that we know is not a reality today and Take Our Daughters and Sons was designed to try to help make that a reality. So, in April of 2003, four in 10 U.S. companies participated in this new program and started these conversations. The first occurrence was a tremendous success in workplaces and in the media, but did not go without critics and controversy.
When the change in the program was first announced, there was a significant outcry from the feminist community, who saw the change as the Ms. Foundation finally giving in to the critics who, over the years, have asked, What about the boys?
We spent a lot of time and effort explaining why we had made this change and what we had hoped to accomplish. And most people, after hearing it, were supportive, although many were still saddened to lose the girls-only program.
The amazing thing, from my perspective, as the lead person trying to explain it to the media . . . many of whom were these smart, successful, talented women of major magazines, [was that] they had never started to consider men’s role in the conversation around work and family.
And one of the goals of the new program was to reframe the debate around work and family, from not just being a woman’s issue, but to be[ing] a mainstream issue. Men and women, as we’ve heard here tonight, are working parents and caregivers and the world no longer looks the way it did 50 years ago.
Yet, we still live in a world confined by the traditional breadwinner/caretaker dynamic. Women are still struggling to be good mothers, whether they work outside the home or whether they work inside the home. And men, increasingly, are looking for ways to be the breadwinner, without being the absent father.
Women can pursue almost any job or career they want, but they also remain to be seen . . . as the primary caregiver at home. And even with increasingly stay-at-home fathers and the stories around that in the media, men still feel the loss of career advancement and opportunity if they take too much advantage of the work/family policies on the books.
Increasingly, I do think there is a recent trend and wave of media coverage picking up on this. How men in the world have chosen to stay home. Some, because of layoffs. There were some interesting articles around that. But at the same time, we’re hearing about how these men are being ostracized at the playground by the moms there, and some men are being ostracized by fathers and other men at cocktail parties because they now have nothing interesting to say.
So, what’s also interesting to me is there are plenty of families and couples out there that almost never see each other. Especially in the low- or middle-income brackets. They are working opposite schedules so someone can be home with the kids. Or, increasingly, [at home with] an elderly parent . . . .
So now, it’s not to say there aren’t stellar companies out there leading the way, because there are, and acting as models and to how to successfully institute work and family programs. But it’s difficult because the most progressive policies for your average salaried worker, do not always translate—rarely, I think—into success for hourly and low-wage workers.
What’s more, is that none of these policies mean anything in the long run until we change the culture and gender stereotypes ingrained in our culture to make those policies really mean something for most families.
As many of you probably do, I deal with these issues every day. I consider myself to be an independent, self-supporting woman with a good job and ambitious career goals. I work probably, lucky for me, an average of 50 hours a week and try to go to the gym once in a while.
And my biggest responsibility beyond that is taking care of the kids at home, which really are cats. I live with my boyfriend of four years . . . and lucky for me, his schedule allows him to do a lot of the housework. I haven’t done laundry in probably about a year. . . .
However, despite the burdens he relieves for me at home and all the times he spends listening to me talk about my work and family issues . . . , he still worries that he’s not taking care of me enough, sometimes. And part of that is because his career is not as lucrative as he would like it to be right now. Although he knows that I don’t expect him or want him to support me financially, he still wants to be able to do that and sees not being able to do that, as somewhat of a failure.
At the same time, what makes it even more complicated and interesting is that if we decide to have children—something that he currently wants more than I—we both at this point anticipate that he would probably be the primary caregiver.
So, this brings me to my conclusion and why we are here tonight. How do third-wave feminists define success? My answer: for themselves.
True success, for me, is being able to make your own decisions about what’s right for you and your family, without having to weigh those decisions against the cultural norm. Success, to me, is being conscious of the stereotypes that we are tempted to buy into, and continuing to find what works for us as individuals.
It’s about having choices to work or not to work—although the reality for most of us is that we have to, financially. And it’s about not judging ourselves or others for the choices they make. I also feel lucky I don’t have the same voices in my head that my mother did.
By the time she was my age, she had two kids, was divorced, remarried, and working as a reporter at a major TV network. While I was growing up, she was on call all the time. Often traveling and sometimes even working on Christmas Day. At the same time, she believed that this was success.
Women of her generation, or her specifically, were supposed to have it all and pull it off with no problems. But she eventually ended up leaving that job to be at home more. And while there is a part of me who wished I wasn’t a latchkey kid, at the time I recall being very proud of that title. I liked being trusted and independent and continue to thrive on those characteristics today.
I’m glad I’ve had the luxury of taking my 20s to figure out what I want out of life and who I am. My mother is in her late 50s now, and I think, still working on that. And I hope that if and when I decide to have children, I will feel less conflicted about work and family than she did. Although, I suspect, I would face my own set of challenges, conflicts and voices.
