On discovering that WWPD the novel has already been written

The feminist dilemma of our age - at least according to certain articles I came across through my work over the past month or so - is that high-achieving women marry even-higher-achieving men. Something about a study, Harvard Business School... It's not quite the Second After Sartre problem (that is, being a female genius overshadowed, for gender reasons, by a lesser-but-male genius), but it can be. Why, one might wonder, don't elite women pair off with less-accomplished men?

The articles about Harvard Business School graduates (and now, Stanford graduates) do somewhat make my eyes glaze over. But this question is more entertainingly addressed in The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein's 1983 novel, which I just read, maybe reread, although I could be conflating it with Fear of Flying. Both involve questions of female identity as relational, and discuss Jewish female beauty as resulting from racial intermixing via pogroms. Both also have a few more oddly specific overlaps with my life (general biographical details, not from the racy bits!) than I'd have thought possible in fiction. Except for the bit about looking somewhat Slavic - these blondness-providing pogroms evidently spared my ancestors, unless that's where the pallor comes from.

Spoilers below; click on the post title for the rest...

Susan Sontag's "Top Shelf"

Sometimes a preexisting tag demands a blog post. Sometimes that's hardly the half of it.

Susan Sontag shopped at Sephora. She was on their mailing list.

The verdict in at least two articles noting this fact is that Sontag was "just like us." As a haver-of-loyalty-points myself, I can't disagree.

I suppose one way to look at this is that it's a let-down, that the Beauty Myth impacts even lady-geniuses, holding them back from the great heights only available to too-brilliant-to-bathe men (via). (Now adding the other necessary tags for this post). That's not how I look at it. I see it as definitive confirmation that conventional femininity in no way precludes being an intellectual heavyweight.

And yes, as it happens, the holographic nail polish I ordered just arrived, and looks excellent.

"Lean into an unpaid internship"

Fiction is better, the article. By yours truly. I need to be better about the whole social-media self-promotion thing, i.e. it's not enough to just link to the article without making it clear that I, you know, wrote it. I need to... "lean in." I mean, I'm getting there. I have the beginnings of a functional website.

OK, so I've finished Lean In, and will provide my much-anticipated verdict. (I must phrase it like this, despite not actually thinking my verdict is especially anticipated, because Sandberg promotes faking it until you make it.) Which is not entirely unenthusiastic, if somewhat less positive than Flavia's.

As a reader, I'm not the biggest fan of books that are collaborative efforts between famous people and people actually capable of writing. It's not the principle of the thing - as long as the "with" is acknowledged, it's fine - but the writing style that ensues. There are these little quasi-humorous asides, where you may find yourself wondering, is this Sandberg? Her "with"? The moments that are meant to feel natural just don't. I found the style incredibly distracting, even though I could tell it was designed for easy reading.

Style aside, it's a mix of sensible advice applicable to all women; sensible advice applicable to the three or four women in Sandberg's boat (the second-after-Sartre problem); artificial-feeling nods in the direction of stay-at-home moms doing really important work, too (although I might file that, too, under "style" - it feels very much included to preempt that accusation, but cuts against the book's main message); and painful attempts to make Sandberg's career trajectory relatable. There are also platitudes - be confident, but not obnoxious. Fair enough, but how? Isn't the problem there that the line is only ever visible to others?

First, the sensible-and-applicable. The bit about how you should do what you would do if you weren't afraid, it's self-help-ish, but not wrong. And the advice about the long haul - that just because your work hardly/doesn't pay for childcare doesn't mean you should quit - seems right. There's value in staying in the workforce in some capacity. And the big-picture argument - that there ought to be more women at the top of every field - was true when Anne-Marie Slaughter said it and remains true. Fewer women opting out means a broader pool from which Slaughters and Sandbergs might emerge, and means a lot of good-but-not-spectacular careers for women who don't quite reach the top. (Most men won't, either.) And the biggest, overarching point - that the person who steps back in a straight couple shouldn't by-default be the woman - is entirely true and important. And relevant to everyone, not just executives.

Next, the not-as-applicable. The stuff about the two-body problem was... not so helpful. First, a 27-year-old woman is faulted for not wanting to move abroad for a year for some very important job because she has a boyfriend. Fair enough - if you're not going to go abroad for your work then, when? (I did, and have the grungy Paris-dorm flip-flops to tell about it.) Then Sandberg insists that women should be open about their personal lives as this relates to geography, and proudly recalls telling her mentor, Larry Summers, that she'd rather not move abroad because she wants to meet a man (they're only found domestically?), and also would rather not live in D.C. because it's where her ex-husband lives. What normal person could do this, given that there are enough problems for many people trying to tell higher-ups that they want to live near the person they're actually involved with? What message does this convey, other than that it's good to be at a place in life where Larry Summers has your back? (As someone I discussed this with said, this sounds more like leaning out.)

We then reach the point where Sandberg is happily married to her second husband, but they live in different cities. The cost (or, one suspects, comfort) of travel isn't an issue, but they have a kid now, which complicates matters. Her husband - 50-50 partner that he is - graciously decides to move to her city. Has he opted out? Not exactly - he's become CEO of another company and moved that company to her city. And how delightful that must have been for all the employees of said company, who must now move away from their families. This isn't how it goes for white women, or for white women with college degrees. This is how it goes for like three people in the world, and she and her husband are among them. Between this and the enthusiasm for "Porn For Women," that book about how, ha ha, women's biggest 'turn-on' is for their husbands to clean the house, Sandberg would lose me from time to time.

The main problem with the book is that it's trying to be two things - a guide for all the women, and one for the second-after-Sartres of the world. It's not exactly that it's offensive to women who are less ambitious. It's very every-box-checked, with privilege acknowledged, the full deal. It's just... maybe not so useful if you're never orchestrating the merger of two companies or some such. If your goal is ruling the world, then yes, it's incredibly important to pick a spouse who'll embrace this. Yet few men - and, drumroll please, few women - are interested in signing up for that life, and if you want a happy relationship, and don't want to be CEO of an especially large corporation, this may not be a wise strategy. This one woman is discussed and praised for having played mind games with boyfriends, canceling on them for fake work events, to see how they'd react, and asking them to travel with her (was she paying?) at a moment's notice. It's not worse for a woman to do this, but it's kind of weak behavior on anyone's part.

And then there's the Lean In empire, which is its own thing, and which just feels like internet-age positivity without much direction. A 20-something unpaid intern tells her Lean In story (dream the big dreams!), as do Sarah Ferguson (!) and Tyra Banks (!!!), who evidently leaned into her position as a supermodel. You can also intern for zilch at the Lean In organization. For all that Lean In has to say about the need, as a woman, to deftly negotiate, there sure is a lot of space left open for celebrating women who work-for-no-pay outside the home.

"That was way harsh, Tai": a response to a no-holds-barred manifesto I somewhat agree with

Flavia has a guest post from one of her readers, a claim that there is indeed an "opt-out revolution," as it's been put elsewhere. The guest-post is, in "Clueless" parlance, "way harsh, Tai," towards women with Ivy League degrees of not-such-distant vintage (spotted at the writer's husband's 25th reunion) who do not work for pay. It's also super compelling and getting a great discussion going. The letter-writer, who implicitly acknowledges the anecdotal nature of her evidence, finds that women with fancy degrees (Ivy college, graduate degrees) are staying home to raise large families. If it's their 25th college reunion, that makes them 47, give or take. So it's unlikely, though not impossible in that milieu, that they're staying home with very young children, let alone physically recovering from pregnancy. They're staying home with older children, it seems.

Which is interesting, sure. Do their husbands encourage this (as Flavia says in the comments, the status-symbol phenomenon, or for less sinister if still upsetting from a feminist perspective reasons) or merely tolerate it? How much of this is choice and how much is, as the author hints at one point, something more bleak - a kind of internalized misogyny holding back women with great potential? The danger of choice feminism is that we risk not considering that very real phenomenon as a possibility. Is there any positive to an arrangement where one parent stays home, if we make it more of a gender-neutral option? Could be, but as long as it's not gender-neutral, we must go on having this conversation.

And a useful conversation it is. But it's a message that would have come across more strongly had the author not held herself up as a shining example of adherence to feminist ideals, of general together-ness. She writes, as an example of why two-working-parent families are better, "When our child was small, we could afford excellent in-home care and also save for hir education. We don't have to debate whether or not we can afford camp, music lessons, or orthodontia. We can!"

Eh, not everybody can. Another family - even Ivy-educated - may have calculated that if the lower-paid partner (often the woman) worked outside the home, this wouldn't pay for childcare for multiple children. Now, maybe that's short-sighted - maybe the woman should keep working as an investment in her future career-and-salary - but it's still a different situation.

Also this: "Maybe it's my background as a scholarship kid who always assumed she'd work her whole life, but I've never seen the world of work as a faceless enemy," and "[...] I've managed to work my way into a decent position, and I have hopes that new opportunities might open up for me in the future."

Is that a frank assessment of good life choices, good character, or a kind of boasting that fails to take into account the role that luck plays in all of our lives? Maybe a bit of both, and I say this as someone who's probably also done my share of good-life-choices humblebrag without intending to. I mean, it's good to think your own choices are consistent with your own values. And there's also some genuine humility in there, so perhaps I'm being unfair. But it just seems like, if you're talking individual cases, maybe there were not-so-cheery reasons these women stopped working, and it wasn't all about being bad feminists. Like the anonymous commenter at Flavia's says, certain things can go wrong in the reproductive process that disproportionately impact the one with the uterus.

Anyway, it seems clear enough that children of the middle-class-broadly-defined who weren't Chua-parented aren't done any favors if told that they won't always have to work no matter what. Because they will. Children of the super-ridiculously-rich, no, and by all means let them pursue careers as unpaid fashion assistants. But if you're of the set risking impoverishment if a husband leaves, someone's done a number on you if they gave you the impression you don't really need to work.

-Like Withywindle, who linked to some data about this there, I do think a j'accuse on the topic of elite women opting out kind of does call for numbers, if it's making sweeping claims, and not just questioning the choice on an individual level. Unless the reunion published a book with what everyone's up to (which can happen) and is basing this on something larger, it could be that the author simply ran into an unrepresentative group. I wonder if the women the author met really don't work for pay at all, or if the author's rounding down their less-ambitious or from-home jobs to 'housewife'. Or even if - if these were just women met briefly at a social function - some of these women do have powerful careers, but in a social/reunion setting for whatever reason choose to identify first and foremost as "moms." Which would also be interesting, but which would be quite different.

-We really do need to be sure these are women who might have had illustrious careers, but then decided against. "Elite" isn't a monolith. Nor does 'graduate-educated' mean 'employable in the professions.' See Emily Matchar. See my Second-After-Sartre theory. While women who become high-powered executives tend to come from a certain part of society, it's not accurate to look at everyone with an MA in Medieval Tapestry as a potential Sandberg or Slaughter who opted out. This doesn't mean women don't self-sabotage along the way, closing off various opportunities open to those at their universities, of their social class. It only means that said self-sabotage has often happened long before any husband-and-babies entered the picture.

-In response to: "Is it just me, or is the unemployed spouse and large (3-5 children) family back with a vengeance among the economic elite?": These women are/were home with a million kids, presumably over the span of many years, unless quadruplets. They weren't idle. They weren't "unemployed" really. They didn't opt out of doing things with the day.

-Re: "Why aren't women who drop out of the paid workforce being treated for depression, or at least urged to get counseling before they go?": Unemployment has been known to relate to depression, as, they say, has stay-at-home parenting. I suppose I don't love the way "depression" here is used almost interchangeably with making the wrong life choices. (OK, so there's this: "If you are educated for and capable of a decent job, the disinclination to work should be seen as a symptom of an underlying problem, not a lifestyle 'choice.'" But in context, it reads as if the letter-writer doesn't think these women are depressed, just foolish.) If these women really are depressed - and perhaps so - then this is upsetting, not a reason to chastise them for their failure to adhere to feminist principles. We may then want to look at what it is in the culture - the "beauty myth"? something in the water? - that's led them to that state. We'd want to investigate correlation and causation. We'd sooner view these women as victims of social norms than as bad feminists or spoiled housewives.

-If you're going to have a post that asks what message it sends to daughters if mom doesn't work, you also need to address the argument that kids are better off if one parent stays home. Once the think-of-the-children angle enters into it, once you're arguing that other people are bad parents, you do open yourself up to the same accusation. And as much as I personally think working-for-pay is important, I'd have to say, there are far worse things a parent can do to a kid than stay home and look after him/her.

-Having an egalitarian, 50-50 marriage, but basing this entirely on work-for-pay, seems like a dangerous road to go down, even if both partners work. Two spouses rarely have the exact same salary or work-hours at all times. It matters, in terms of power balance, if one spouse isn't and could virtually never be economically self-sufficient, i.e. if that person could never, if need be, leave. But do we really think the hedge-fund-manager plus nursery-school-teacher marriages a) are typically 50-50 household-chore-wise, or b) need to be in order to be egalitarian in the internal-power-balance sense? 

-Refreshing anecdotal evidence time! I know of quite a few women who divorced at a certain age and promptly went back to (a more practical version of) school and, in at least one case, went on to out-earn the ex-husband. This is going to be easier for women who already have a college degree, and who are relatively young (40-ish, say) when all this happens, but it's been done. I mean, there's always air-conditioner-repair school, even for the happily-married. It never hurts.

Brevity

To the critics of Anne-Marie Slaughter's very-long-but-who-am-I-to-talk* manifesto: she's not claiming to tell the story of struggling or ordinary women. You can't criticize her for neglecting to address the well-being of poor/middle-class women, because she did address it, with her claim that if life is made easier for the Anne-Marie Slaughter's of the nation, the benefits would trickle down to all women. What you can do is question that hypothesis. You can - I shall - speculate that Slaughter wanted to tell the story of her situation and others like it, but felt that it would be irresponsible/in bad taste not to connect this to a broader, social-justice one. Critics I've read seem to kind of get this, kind of not.

*I listened to some of the WBUR interview with Slaughter, and a common theme with the callers was that they were busy working moms who had not, alas, had time to read the article. Normally in such cases, one wonders why the person's calling in, but here, given the subject at hand, it did seem unfortunate that to read about the impossibility of having it all, and respond in a timely fashion, in a way that shows you caught every nuance of Slaughter's multifaceted point, you'd need more leisure time than the target audience might have.

Second After Sartre

The WWPD take on Anne-Marie Slaughter's already-picked-apart Atlantic cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." In three parts. Scroll to the third if digression's not your thing.

1) Second-after-Sartre

If your complaint is that you had to curtail your ambitions, and what this leaves you with is, "I teach a full course load [at Princeton]; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book," and if your decision just happens to allow you to hold onto tenure, then what you've got is a Second-to-Sartre problem, as when Simone de Beauvoir based a feminist theory around her experiences as (poorly-treated lover of and, more to the point) second fiddle to the better-known Existentialist, and more specifically, in reference to some philosophy exam on which he placed first, she second, but it was unfair for sexism reasons the details of which I've since forgotten. A SAS problem is not a first-world problem, an UMC-white-person problem, a college-educated-woman problem. It's the incredibly narrow subset of feminist concerns specific to female geniuses and hyper-achievers.


If we fault feminism for conflating the concerns of relatively wealthy, often white women with those of all womankind, we must also question attempts to project Second After Sartre onto women who are simply upper-middle-class. Even if limiting the discussion to straight, married women with advanced degrees and "choices," those for whom the fallback is anything approaching tenure at an Ivy and the life of a public intellectual are few and far between. Think glorified secretarial jobs in the town where the main bread-earner (husband) has a job. Think freelance-writing, or selling crafts on the Internet. Think 'more time for yoga and volunteering.' I say this not to disparage these pursuits, but rather to illustrate what the options are, realistically, for a woman who doesn't need to apply at Walmart, but whose husband's career comes first, and someone has to keep track of those kids.


I understand that there's less zing in pointing out that Slaughter's out-of-touch with an upper-middle-class demographic than in noting that she doesn't deal with the concerns of the mom who's a cashier at Walmart (which she admits!), but this does seem a key detail. And it's not a 'privilege' issue, because this isn't about unearned status, or haves vs. have-nots. Just that the difference between Slaughter's story and that of 'ordinary' female professionals couldn't be greater.


Slaughter explains that "genuine superwomen" "cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure." If that's the case, why is she pitching her altogether exceptional story at "highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place"? Why must the hook, the lede, be her life, if it doesn't illustrate the point she's trying to make, and if anything detracts from it? Is it because "Atlantic cover story about women" suggests a confessional approach?

We as a society should care if the absolute most brilliant and hard-working women are held back, even if that leaves them with fulfilling careers and, of course, material comforts. But should this be feminism's first priority? Slaughter appears to think so: "Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women." There are a few problems with this approach, most obviously that women publishing treatises about work-life balance in the Atlantic are biased in favor of a solution that begins at the top and trickles down.

2) Leave the kids alone!

After many of my female (and some male) Facebook friends had long since shared this, after I thought I knew what the gist might be, my mother asked me if I'd seen the thing, and noticed how the author talks about her son. I had to check it out, and, indeed:

But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. 

Parents! Do not do this! Not even if you're a woman who didn't take her husband's name, and thus your children are slightly less readily identifiable! (Of course, if you provide your husband's full name, as Slaughter does, there's not much mystery.) Your adolescent-and-younger children can't consent to this kind of thing (living under your roof and all that), even if you've asked, but almost definitely don't want their lowest points or mediocrity used as fodder for their parents' high-profile think pieces. (And yes, I have my mother's permission to credit her to pointing me to this. Also, she, unlike Slaughter's son, is not 14, nor am I embarrassing her.) Find some other way to illustrate your points.

3) The substance of the article

This is what I read: Women are held back not so much by discrimination against women as by discrimination against a more flexible, low-key, dare-I-say-Continental approach to work. Women, even hyper-achieving geniuses, feel primarily responsible for the children's well-being; men, even super-evolved, 50%-or-more-of-the-household-tasks ones, do not. Women feel selfish putting work first. "To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish." While this might give the impression (and does, to so many employers) that men/fathers make better employees than women/mothers, in fact we'd all be better-off with a gentler work environment. The 70-hour workweek to which the serious professional must aspire is, in practice, a whole lot of wasted time. All achievements great and small could, in principle, be compatible with going to your kids' recitals.

And I find some of it convincing, some not.


If we took as a given that women want different things than men, that women not merely give birth (and experience pregnancy as well as possible physical and psychological repercussions) but wish to spend more time with their kids, this quite simply would leave mothers, all things equal, with fewer hours in the week, and make mothers less appealing as employees in many fields than men, fathers or not, or women without children, and this would be totally fair. 


My own sense, however, is that of the parents with this desire, at least at this point in time, more are mothers than are fathers, but it's not absolute, not (necessarily) innate. A more just approach would be to say that parents who are the primary caregiver should expect less, career-wise, than their childless or not-primary-caregiver equivalents.


As much as it's appealing to think that the time a mother spends nurturing/bonding with her kids is time a male coworker of hers is off skiing, Facebooking, or observing obscure Jewish holidays, the perhaps disappointing fact is that there are some people who work constantly, efficiently and constantly, who effectively put their lives on hold either forever or until reaching a point in their career at which the future is more or less guaranteed. And that's who gets the most done. There are also some who aren't that talented, or are slow workers, and who end up at the same place as others who work better but less and do have lives outside the office. An employer might unfairly conflate having no life outside work with being incredibly productive, but even if that were addressed, this would still leave the reality of those few workers who accomplish the most precisely because the only balance in their lives is devotion to all the myriad responsibilities of their job.

Although 'no outside life' isn't entirely accurate. It's OK to have an outside life if it consists of a spouse whose entire job is to support you and your career. Something above and beyond 'being supportive.' If somewhere along the line, you landed someone who makes sure you never need to bother yourself with petty things like going to the supermarket, you're able to work as much as the non-partnered hyper-achiever who will at least need to pick up frozen pizzas every so often. While men and women alike can and do go the monastic frozen-pizza route, a man is far more likely than a woman to have that kind of spouse. 

But not all that likely, in this day and age. Women don't want to do that, and men, at the end of the day, don't want that done for them. More relevant is that assumptions persist even in the absence of that type of marriage. When a man mentions he has a wife, this makes him sound mature, responsible, able to commit. Few will think, 'uh oh, that means he has a life outside work.' Some will think, even if they won't articulate this, 'oh good, that means someone's picking up his dry-cleaning so he can stay past 7.' Meanwhile a woman who mentions a husband is implying, unless she specifies otherwise or her boss happens to be a really evolved, feminist sort, that hers is not the main career in her household, and that any minute now she might leave to have kids, never to return. 

The one bit of the piece I thought was relatable, and quite powerful, despite referring to the 0.001% in terms of achievement and ambition, was this: "Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children."