Women Who Had It All But Children
Helen Gurley Brown was the only person I ever knew who batted her eyes at me over the phone.
For the first meal we ever shared, Julia Child burned my breakfast toast.
The only time I was ever threatened with rejection for laughing out loud during a serious movie was while watching Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”
A confluence of events—-the death of the 90-year-old Cosmo girl, a hundredth anniversary celebration of the French Chef’s birth and the VP nomination of a Rand devotee—-conspires to recall those iconic women of the past century who made their mark in the world without leaving behind children of their own despite contentions at the time that they “could have it all.”
Add to the list the most famous feminist of all, Gloria Steinem, unless you count getting Christian Bale as a stepson late in life as motherhood.
Even now, in an era of pregnant CEOs, I am still haunted by such unfairness, which began to trouble me half a century ago when I was editing magazines for women and that, late in life, strikes home even more forcibly as I am literally sustained by children and grandchildren.
Life may be unfair, as JFK contended, but this kind of choice for an entire gender of human beings still seems unspeakable.
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Thank you for another excellent, thoughtful article. You have had an interesting life intertwined with other interesting people. Where can we go to get a copy of your biography?
A lovely and interesting article, Robert.
I do feel the need to point out that it’s highly likely that these women, or at least one of them, didn’t think that having it all needed to include children. It’s possible they didn’t want to have children, or couldn’t have children for physiological reasons. For many of us, yes, children are part of our “having it all” ideal, and the pressures of success or life or career make that difficult, but for many, it’s just not. And that’s ok, too.
Whether or not these women wanted to have children, the fact is that our culture then — and now — is not supportive of a work-family life that frees women to make a mark with their career and make a mark for generations to come via children.
And it’s not just women who might want to be “an executive” who have to make a trade-off. It’s just about anyone.
I hope my comment will be taken in the spirit of honest seeking of truth. I’m not trying to offend. I imagine some will see what I write here as ignorance of the plight of working moms. I invite thoughtful criticism of my view I’m expressing here, and I ask for the benefit of the doubt that what you take offense to might just be me not expressing my complex feelings on the subject clearly enough, or maybe my experiences have been sheltered and I could use some patient educating.
I’m taken by your expression that this unfairness is “unspeakable”. While I won’t disagree that it is unfair, you seem to suggest that this unfairness is caused by some social injustice.
I assume the unfairness we are talking about here is that men are more easily able to have a career and have children. I’ll ignore, for now, that this premise is somewhat dependent on how involved a man wants to be in the upbringing of his children. Certainly a man without children in the workplace has some advantages over a man who is highly involved in the lives of his children. But, that distinction is more subtle than the one that usually applies to women, to be sure.
To the extent that there are policies that make it more difficult for women who have children to work and get ahead than it is for men who have children to work and get ahead, certainly they are discriminatory and should be overturned. But, what are those policies? I can think of one: lax child support laws, which I’m fully in favor of reinforcing.
To the extent that workplaces have policies that discriminate against women and mothers, in favor of men and fathers, of course that shouldn’t be permissible either, but I don’t think it is.
It seems to me that the things that make it more difficult for women are primarily two things:
1) Culture. Although it’s changing, it’s still generally expected that women take the primary role of caring for children. But, all a woman needs to do to overcome this difficulty is to find a mate who supports her goals and is willing to take on the primary role of nurturing children or at least share the role equally or through some alternate child care arrangement. It may be more difficult for a woman to find such a mate in a man than vice versa, but if women seek men who are willing to agree to these arrangements, and few men are, then men are losing out too because they won’t be able to find mates either. A compromise would have to be reached which both partners could regard as fair.
2) Biology. Obviously, the act of bearing a child is more taxing on a woman, taking more of her physical, mental, and emotional energy for at least 9 months and beyond. Yes, that’s unfair, but it’s an unfairness instituted by nature, not a social injustice. If it were possible to sue mother nature for discrimination, I’d advise her to settle quickly. We can try to implement policies to mitigate that unfairness, but I don’t think you can ever completely counteract it. Furthermore, I don’t think it’s reasonable to suppose that the natural differences between men and women are limited to reproductive organs. It’s not hard to see that the same mechanism, whether you believe it was God or evolution or some combination of the two, that determined that women should deliver children also determined that women, in general, should have more of an inclination to nurture children. Therefore, women who want to have children and pursue a high-demand career feel more natural, internal tension. Clearly that tension, along with the obvious stress of child bearing itself, leads some women to sacrifice their career, all or in part. On the other hand, I suppose it could lead some women to forgo children, knowing that they could not provide the kind of nurture that they feel would be necessary of them to give, with or without a willing mate.
And it’s not hard to see how biology and culture work together to reinforce one another, meaning that since we’ll never overcome biology, the cultural aspect will probably never completely go away either. The end result is that, while we can and should implement policies to ensure that any woman that wants to pursue a high-demand career can do so as easily as men, I don’t think we ever will or should see an equal number of women in such positions. And the women we do see in those positions are more likely to be the outliers who did not desire to have children, or ones that did desire it but chose, in light of biological and cultural tension, to go without, or ones who chose mates who were willing to take on the nurturing role.
This may be unfair, but is it an unspeakable social injustice? I don’t think so.
My wife is of the opinion that both success and children cannot be done unless one parent steps aside. I have to agree with her. We have made the decision that I will be the one to ratchet down my career once we have a child. Right now we are both working 50-60 hour weeks and have been for years. You cannot raise a child and work those kids of hours…well, you can have someone else raise your child for you, but then… what is the point of having children?
actually AD, there are many things society can do for both men and women that want to raise children… for one, make company give pregnant women a much longer period of time for birth and then support whichever parent want to stay home with the baby.
In Germany, companies must allow one parent to take off one paid year after birth(70% of salary) to raise their baby. I believe the mother must leave work at 3 months before the predicted birth date.
Another example… when applying for an EU grant for research funding, mothers are allowed to take out a specific amount of time from the “research years” when grouping them into competitive experience levels.
I could go on with other small examples. In Europe, they are making a conscious effort to help women have children and also stay career competitive.
Now! this is not completely only just for the moral good of society. With European birth rates crashing, the EU really has no choice but to give women everything they need to have children…and no reason not to.
Robert… this is one of those post can only shake the head and say; Many men do not understand women. And to compound the problem, these same men have absolutely no idea why they can’t understand them.
Surely that goes both ways, but in this post can only say as a woman that chose not to have children, you are not even close.
I will offer a clue….There are millions of ways for a woman or a man to give birth in this world besides the biological and would say that each of the women that you wrote about did birth very significant children so to speak….that likely sustained them through the life stages.
Hi ad — Shannon mentioned a couple of things that would make it easier for women to have children while being successful. Here are a couple of others:
-Many countries in Europe have an hour limit on the work week. If you have to drop your kids off at school/daycare, then pick them up again afterwards, make their dinner, and put them to bed, it’s tough to put in much more than 40 or 50 hours at the office. Competing with a man who can put in 60-70 hour weeks because his wife does all that for his family is pretty tough.
-Companies that really value the contribution of their women employees and care about the continuity of that contribution do a number of things to ensure it. Things like private dedicated pumping rooms, or better yet, onsite day care, help a lot.
-Of course, one policy that would be arguably the most helpful, in addition to mandated available maternity leave per Shannon’s suggestion, would be a solid, comprehensive national health plan that treats women’s health as a priority. Pregnancy is scary and medically deliterious for millions of women, and having the assurance of quality, timely treatment for mother and child (pre and post natal) could be a game-changer as far as both allowing successful women to have kids and, conversely, allowing women with children to work toward professional success.
The miserable dearth of men truly willing to do so in the numbers that women do for their men is not something that arose in a vacuum of course. Surveys show clearly that even in homes where the male partner is out of work or explicitly staying at home with the kids while the female partner is working, women still put in more hours per week caregiving and doing housework. In homes where both parents work, this is of course even more stark. We must teach our boys that contributing to a household in ways not purely about bringing home the bacon is not only desirable, but is mandatory. Boys that are taught this not only grow up to have more egalitarian relationships, but also value the contributions of their female coworkers more. Conversely, recent studies show that men with stay-at-home wives are actually demonstrably more likely to exhibit sexist behavior at work. The fight for equality at home and equality at work are pretty inextricably entwined.
Oh! And of course, allowing women to fully control their own fertility by making contraception and abortion available to all women who want them would be excellent for encouraging success in women. Most women who have children before they’re ready to do so don’t end up achieving the professional/financial success of which they would be otherwise capable. Such events greatly reduce the chances that women will stay out of poverty, go get an education, or establish a career before having children.
@roro80
You go girl, I can’t even begin to understand how some of the males of ‘the’ species (almost wrote ‘our’ species but changed my mind) think they know whats best for you ‘women folk’.
Guess they don’t know ‘women folk’ like they think they do. (i.e. Paul Ryan’s wife)
ShannonLeee and roro,
I’m happy to talk about policies that would improve people’s (men and women’s) ability to nurture their children while providing financial well being. It’s a topic I’m very interested in. But, before I do I should point out that I consider this to be tangential to the point.
My counter-point to the OP is that I don’t see this as a social justice issue. The unfairness exists primarily because of biology, by which I mean more than just the mechanism of reproduction, and secondarily because of culture, which is at least partially inevitable and perhaps even justified given the biology aspect.
Most of the policies we can talk about (with the exception of those that directly relate to biology such as nursing rooms) can and should apply to fathers as well as mothers. The lack of policies supporting working parents hurts a father who is the primary caregiver as much as it hurts a mother. So, while it may be a question of good policy, it’s not a question of justice. To the extent that these policies often do effect women more than men, it’s because women tend to make different choices primarily as a result of biology and culture, not injustice, in my view.
One more thing before we talk about policy: while I can’t speak for the women Robert mentions in his article, I’m skeptical that the reason they didn’t have children was because of the lack of policies that support working mothers. From the little I know about them, they were all pretty passionate about their work. I can’t imagine they said to themselves, “If only I could take a break from doing cooking shows and writing books, maybe I could have children.” So, I’m happy to expand the discussion to include ordinary working women also, as long as we point out that the examples we started with were anything but.
(At this point I feel I should apologize for the length of my comments. I’m usually verbose despite my best efforts, but in this case I can’t even pretend to try to address a topic so sensitive, complex, and important in a few paragraphs.)
Regarding policy, I should state up-front that my goal may be different than yours. While I believe in equal opportunity, I don’t think we can or should strive for an equal level of professional accomplishment over-all. I think studies the argument that that women make ~80% of what men do, and that this is an injustice, imply that the standard should be 100%, which I don’t think it necessarily should be given the argument I’ve been making above.
Are women given a fair shot in terms of career opportunities? Probably not as fair as it should be. But my focus is different: I want to see stable families raising their kids well with the financial means to provide for themselves and provide a good future for their kids. Policies that help working parents are a big part of that.
I’m in favor of extending FMLA to allow new moms and dads to stay home longer without fear of losing their jobs. But I would not be in favor of mandatory *paid* leave. The responsibility of a business is the responsibility of its owner(s) (yes, corporations are people in that sense), and I don’t see how you can mandate that any particular person should pay for someone else to raise a child.
Instead I’d prefer to see an increase in the child tax credit (so we’re all paying for it, rather than a particular person or group of people). This could also replace subsidies for child care. If a parent wants or needs to work, the tax credit ought to be enough to cover the child care. If one parent wants or needs to stay (and often it is a need, not a luxury), they can consider the tax credit to be their paycheck of sorts. This way, we aren’t subsidizing parents who work as opposed to those who stay home. Either way, the family is in a better financial situation and is free to make the choice that makes sense for their family. I’d also be open to the idea of phasing out the tax credit at higher incomes.
I’ll leave it at that because it’s getting late and I want to respond to one more thing roro said…
roro, with regards to the difficulty women face finding men who will agree to an untraditional or egalitarian relationship.
The difficulty goes both ways. How difficult would it be for a man who dreams of being a full-time caretaker for his future children (yes, they do exist) to find a wife willing to take full responsibility for the financial success of the family?
Any choice that is contrary to the prevailing culture will inevitably encounter difficulty because society is set up partly to be efficient, which often means catering to the most common. And, since as I mentioned the culture is at least partially, and I’d argue mostly, the product of biology, that culture is not likely to be changed and therefore these difficulties will continue to exist. This concept is broader that this topic: fairness and efficiency compete in many ways. Diverse diseases effect many children, yet research money is focused on the most common, even if they effect a minority of all kids who suffer. It’s quite a moral dilemma.
But I agree with you that we ought to teach our sons to share in the housework. My wife stays at home. It’s a choice she made long before we married or had kids, but it turns out it’s a good thing because we have a child with unique needs and honestly I don’t think we could have managed without a full-time parent at home. She has enough on her plate raising our kids so I take the primary role for some of the more mundane tasks: dishes, laundry, getting the kids baths and to bed, getting them ready for the day in the morning and off to school. This means I rarely work more than 40 hours a week, putting me at a disadvantage to my peers who can work more. But, it works for our family and I’m fortunate to have a job that can support us.
What I’ve learned is that there is not two categories of work in the family: bring home the bacon and raising the kids. There are really three: housework is distinct from raising kids. My job is to make money. My wife’s job is to raise kids. We support each other in those roles, of course, I don’t mean to say I don’t help raise my kids. My point is that housework is a separate job that we share. To combine “housework” and “raising kids”, as it often is, is to minimize the importance of the latter, in my view. I get angry when I hear of men who get upset when their wives don’t have the house clean when they get home. I’ll gladly take a messy house in exchange for well-raised kids.
Ad, biological differences between men and women are the same in the US as they are in places like the Congo or Japan. Biology might arguably be the initial source of the inability for women to participate in society in the same ways as men, and why it is fairly universal throughout the world, but it is not the driver of success today, any more than having poor vision is still a factor in success.
And you are speaking of culture and social justice as though they are separate, unrelated things that have no effect on each other. Social justice is all about changing the culture, so I really can’t emphasize strongly enough that social justice and culture are deeply and inextricably entwined. Whether in a household, in a company, in a community, or in society as a whole, if there is a culture of valuing and encouraging the contributions of all members, then you will have successful individuals of all types. If you don’t then you use the tools and methods of social justice work to change that culture. The way you do this in a family or company is of course different than the tools available in a community or a country, in which case we get to talk of policy. But these aspects feed off of each other.
I do not agree that technology has overcome the difficulties of pregnancy, child-birth, and most importantly child-rearing in the same way that it has overcome the difficulties of poor vision. The fact that many women want to have children, a biological process more taxing on the woman than on the man, and choose to be the primary caregiver for their children, which I think is a natural consequence of biology which is to some degree inevitably reinforced by culture, means that as a group they will not achieve the same level of professional accomplishment. There are only so many hours in the day, or, as I’ve learned is more important as I get a little older, only so much energy to go around.
(The only caveat is that the evidence I’ve seen suggests that there is a trend occurring where men are becoming less industrious, particularly in their 20′s which has an impact of the rest of their lives, which could result in professional parity, but only as a consequence of that social ill.)
“And you are speaking of culture and social justice as though they are separate, unrelated things that have no effect on each other.”
You are right that my lines are too starkly drawn. To the extent that our culture encourages, intentionally or as a result of historical understanding of biology, discrimination against women who want to reach high levels of professional success, I’m in favor of efforts to change that culture. But my point is that, to some degree, our culture reflects a biological reality. It naturally accommodates the fact that women are predisposed to be want to be the primary caregivers for their children. Therefore, efforts, whether cultural or political, to achieve a goal of general professional parity are misguided, in my opinion. The result of such overreach is women who feel torn by a culture that says they not only can but should reach for professional success regardless of whether they want to raise children.