Anne-Marie Slaughter, who gave up her job as a high level State Department official to better care for her kids, has created enormous buzz with her Atlantic cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Duh: It’s not like men ever could, either.
I know, lots of women juggling work and family are still angry — feminism promised us we could do both. “Have it all”: Be the main caretaker of your healthy, happy, smart children and still have a great career.
Slaughter goes on at length to conclude that women like her can’t indeed have their professional achievement and their family time, too. But what’s weird about the whole debate about women’s struggle to balance their lives is that men have absolutely no hope of achieving this kind of equilibrium.
It’s almost unheard of for a man to take a prolonged paternity leave, for example. And most who do take a week or three are helping the wife, not because anyone believes he can handle his child full-time.
My own wonderful husband took some time after our girl was born — but basically worked from home, doing conference calls all week. I couldn’t wait for him to go back to the office, so we could have some quiet. (Sorry, honey.)
If an older child is struggling, the possibility of a man downgrading his career to step in (as Anne-Marie Slaughter did) would never even be considered.
That’s not because men don’t want to be there for their families. It’s just that, for all that women struggle with the choices they have, men rarely have such choices at all.
A woman may look for fulfillment in a career, but the man has to focus on taking financial care of his family — whether or not the work is fulfilling. (And, for the record, for most people work is work.)
Of course, the media still go nuts about every hint that the feminist promise might somehow be true. They played up the study last week that informed us that the number of stay-at-home dads doubled in the past decade.
Ha! That was only from 1.6 percent of all stay-at-home parents to 3.4 percent — a miniscule number.
Even then, while some very few men might get a true choice to stay home, I wonder how many of these new Mr. Moms just couldn’t find a job. In the Obama Economy, their choice to stay home is still no choice at all. (And even in this “man-cession,” 65 percent of men are still the main breadwinners in their families.)
Then, too, most of the women even bothering to debate this question lead privileged lives already. When Slaughter stepped off her career ladder, she downgraded to merely being a tenured professor at Princeton. Would that we all had that “choice.”
The whole phenomenon of women as “equals in the workplace” is still fairly new, so perhaps it’s no wonder that so many of us are setting ourselves up for failure by chasing an impossible “all.” For men, though, the “all” is so unlikely and out of reach that they settle for success, professional and personal, where they find it.
If feminism is still about equality between the sexes, women should look to men to see what successful, guilt-free “balance” looks like. Hint: The formulais a lot less “have it all” and a lot more “suck it up.”
Karol Markowicz blogs at alarmingnews.com.
Twitter: @KarolNYC