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Authors: Anne-Marie Slaughter
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mean that women really aim higher than men? Are they strivers rather than settlers? In the end, Andy Cohen is arguing just that. He is saying that women of my generation, at least, are simply asking for too much out of life, whereas men have learned to lower their expectations. Millennials too, in Cohen’s view, possess a wisdom about their own limits and the limits of life and luck that their elders—meaning my generation—lack.
But hang on. Isn’t reaching for the seemingly impossible an all-American tradition? The boys I grew up with were pushed to aim as high as possible. Now that women are striving for what many men had and still have—a high-powered career and a family too—it seems disingenuous to say that they simply want too much.
True and Not True
T HE CLAIM THAT “ MEN CAN ’ T have it all either” is complicated. On the one hand, it is important for women to see that many men, today and for decades past, have accepted what they understand to be a role requiring them to trade time at work for time with loved ones. A man may have a family and a high-powered career, but many men wish they were able to spend much more time with that family.
It is also true, of course, that individual men have made trade-offs at the expense of their careers.Perusing a biography of Colgate Darden, a former governor of Virginia and the namesake of the University of Virginia’s business school, I was struck by Darden’s explanation of his refusal to run for the Senate in 1946,notwithstanding strong public support for his candidacy, on the grounds that he would never see his family. Jim Steinberg, a deputy secretary of state, and Bill Lynn, a deputy secretary of defense, both stepped down from their jobs after two years in order to be available for their children too.
Still, let’s not indulge in revisionist history, where we pretend that the trade-off between being a full-time caregiver and a full-time breadwinner was traditionally equal and both sexes would have been happy with more of what the other had. After all, Carl Friedan, Betty’s husband, didn’t write a book called
The Masculine Mystique
describing a “problem with no name” afflicting men. Men have not complained about being financially dependent, left in poverty when their wives ran off with younger male secretaries. Men have never been regarded as the weaker sex, less capable of reason or brilliance. Men have not had to fight for equal pay for equal work. And men still have far more control over the levers of power and influence in American society than women.
HALF-TRUTH: “CHILDREN NEED THEIR MOTHERS”
I SPEND A LOT OF time being driven back and forth to the train station to catch Amtrak to Washington or New Jersey Transit to New York. One of my favorite local taxi drivers, whom I’ll call Steve, is a fount of stories and folk wisdom. He is a little older than I am, with three grown kids and a couple of grandkids. He’s devoted both to his wife and to the memory of his own mother. He has very fixed ideas on what men and women are good at, and not so good at. And he tells me regularly, with the confidence born both of conviction and life experience, “Children need their mothers.”
What he means is that mothers give children something special, something children cannot live without, something that fatherscannot supply. He means that mothering is distinct and different from fathering, that children cannot fully thrive without their mother’s care. He means it as a compliment to mothers—that they provide a special and irreplaceable mother love. But I hear it as a statement of the natural order of things, a mantra that ends any discussion of genuinely equal parenting.
Of course children do need their mothers. And their fathers. And their grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and close family friends who will follow them on Facebook and look out for them during the years when parental advice, or even conversation, suddenly becomes
But hang on. Isn’t reaching for the seemingly impossible an all-American tradition? The boys I grew up with were pushed to aim as high as possible. Now that women are striving for what many men had and still have—a high-powered career and a family too—it seems disingenuous to say that they simply want too much.
True and Not True
T HE CLAIM THAT “ MEN CAN ’ T have it all either” is complicated. On the one hand, it is important for women to see that many men, today and for decades past, have accepted what they understand to be a role requiring them to trade time at work for time with loved ones. A man may have a family and a high-powered career, but many men wish they were able to spend much more time with that family.
It is also true, of course, that individual men have made trade-offs at the expense of their careers.Perusing a biography of Colgate Darden, a former governor of Virginia and the namesake of the University of Virginia’s business school, I was struck by Darden’s explanation of his refusal to run for the Senate in 1946,notwithstanding strong public support for his candidacy, on the grounds that he would never see his family. Jim Steinberg, a deputy secretary of state, and Bill Lynn, a deputy secretary of defense, both stepped down from their jobs after two years in order to be available for their children too.
Still, let’s not indulge in revisionist history, where we pretend that the trade-off between being a full-time caregiver and a full-time breadwinner was traditionally equal and both sexes would have been happy with more of what the other had. After all, Carl Friedan, Betty’s husband, didn’t write a book called
The Masculine Mystique
describing a “problem with no name” afflicting men. Men have not complained about being financially dependent, left in poverty when their wives ran off with younger male secretaries. Men have never been regarded as the weaker sex, less capable of reason or brilliance. Men have not had to fight for equal pay for equal work. And men still have far more control over the levers of power and influence in American society than women.
HALF-TRUTH: “CHILDREN NEED THEIR MOTHERS”
I SPEND A LOT OF time being driven back and forth to the train station to catch Amtrak to Washington or New Jersey Transit to New York. One of my favorite local taxi drivers, whom I’ll call Steve, is a fount of stories and folk wisdom. He is a little older than I am, with three grown kids and a couple of grandkids. He’s devoted both to his wife and to the memory of his own mother. He has very fixed ideas on what men and women are good at, and not so good at. And he tells me regularly, with the confidence born both of conviction and life experience, “Children need their mothers.”
What he means is that mothers give children something special, something children cannot live without, something that fatherscannot supply. He means that mothering is distinct and different from fathering, that children cannot fully thrive without their mother’s care. He means it as a compliment to mothers—that they provide a special and irreplaceable mother love. But I hear it as a statement of the natural order of things, a mantra that ends any discussion of genuinely equal parenting.
Of course children do need their mothers. And their fathers. And their grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and close family friends who will follow them on Facebook and look out for them during the years when parental advice, or even conversation, suddenly becomes
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