All or Nothing?
How modern working mothers balance babies and rewarding careers
by Caitlin Leffel
About a year ago, I was walking around Brooklyn with my friend Alison and her little girl. I got to know Alison when I was the editor of her first book, City Baby Brooklyn, a guidebook for Brooklyn parents, of which there were, apparently, an influx. Not having had much to do with the NYC pre-school set since my babysitting career ended a few years ago, I was fascinated with her life bopping around between teaching college English, writing, and playing with her particularly charming toddler, Lucy, at the playgrounds and kid-friendly locales of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill. As we walked the streets, crowded with strollers and family units of all shapes and sizes, one after another we bumped into mothers she knew—one from her writer's group, one the owner of a local toy store, another writer—all similarly pert, and all of them employed—literally—by their children.
Amongst women of a certain demographic—well-educated, raised to succeed, above average in means but not so far above it that gainful employment is abstract—there comes a time when she looks forward and behind her to see what's going on. The time I'm talking about comes a bit after college, when the romance of collegiate life has faded, right around when she and her peers are putting the finishing touches on their selves personally and professionally—grad school, co-habitation, marriage—and getting settled in one industry and milieu. What did my mother do? What are my friends doing? What am I doing? That time has come for me, and what I see when I look around is women with children. There is a statistic that I've read several times recently that in New York City, where I grew up and where I live now, there has been a more than 25% increase in the number of children under five since 2001. So I'm not imagining them. I don't know if there are statistics kept on what these mothers are doing with themselves, but when I looked closer in my research for this article—ostensibly about women and work—I saw something else: the struggle to make work and motherhood compatible.
I figure by being one of the many women in the workforce I'm contributing to the force that is changing the world. Because of the women who are working (including myself), my daughters will have more of a chance to be what they want then ever before. If they choose a career, it will be thanks to the many women who chose before them.
— Cindy, London, Ontario, from UrbanBaby Message Board
I believe raising my own children is the best job I've ever had and no matter what, I will not quit my current career.
-Victoria, Colorado from UrbanBaby Message Board
When I was growing up, your mother either worked or she didn't. Today, the mommy track is much broader, and the picture looks blurrier. There is freelance, flex-time, stay-at-home moms who work, stay-at-home moms who don't, and stay-at-home moms who want to but don't make enough to afford childcare. There are small business owners, health and parenting educators, and a World Wide Web of muralists, onesie designers, and toy companies. There are doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers that went back to work full-time, and there are ones that didn't. When it comes to work, these days, mothers don't want for choice. But choice is a word that has an ambivalent relationship when it comes to women and their personal lives, and in the realm of motherhood today, it is deceptively elusive.
These choices, as we all know, are the spoils of a hard-won battle fought a generation ago by women who as a group transformed the workplace so that they and their daughters would be able to have the same jobs as men. Yet their legacy didn't end with the changing face of the boardroom. When women started walking through the doors this previous generation held open for them, some of them didn't like what they saw inside: inflexible rules, strict hierarchies, and careers that didn't match their interests and personal goals. And what about motherhood? Now that society and chauvinism weren't stopping the women from making partner, did that mean that they were supposed to do that and raise the children? Or if they couldn't or didn't want to sacrifice being the primary caregiver to their children, they couldn't work at all? Motherhood is a part of our biology, but work, as it never has been before, is part of our identity.
"Women broke the glass ceiling and then asked themselves whether they actually wanted to be up there with the men," said Jeannie, a mother of two in her thirties who freelances for magazines. "Many returned to more traditional roles and now, women of my generation are trying to figure out ways to embrace both the working woman and mother that are essential parts of their identities." Other women I spoke with mentioned the "pendulum," how women have gone from being housewives with no options to working to make things equal and now are back in the middle somewhere, torn between—or stretched across—the two extremes. "I wouldn't call it 'having it all'" says Jeannie when I ask her about her version of being a working mom. "It's a constant struggle, being the primary caregiver while also trying to carve out a meaningful career. You're constantly switching back and forth between your roles and never quite getting either just right." Yes, thanks to the women of the 60s, as well as the internet and her choice of profession ("It's the lawyers and bankers who have it the hardest," my friend Alison said), Jeannie can be both mother and professional, but something's got to give. It's physics: energy can be changed or transformed, but it can not be created or destroyed. The dirty secret behind all this progress is that women can't have it all, or as Robyn, a clinical psychologist and mother of two put it "your kids are going to slow you down no matter what."
But women still don't like being told what to do. In 1998, Joyce Purnick, a columnist who joined the New York Times in 1979 and has no children of her own, outraged graduates and alumnae at her alma mater, Barnard College, by giving a commencement speech in which she told the women that they shouldn't have children if they want to advance to the highest levels professionally. "There is no way in an all-consuming profession like journalism that a woman with children can devote as much time and energy as a man can." This may be true—particularly within certain professions—but it's also impractical. After all, working full-time while you're a mother may set a positive example for future generations, but if every woman prioritized her career over having children, there wouldn't be any future generations to set that example for. So now what?
"I believe one of the pernicious lies that has been told to your generation is that one can have it all." —Judy Chicago, Smith College Commencement Address, May 2000
This brings me back to the women I saw that day in Brooklyn. These women may not be helping the numbers of female executives in Fortune 500 companies by their choices, but by rejecting the status quo in favor of creating and managing individual work-life balances, they are actually making a much more empowering (and, I would argue, no less challenging) move. When I asked Alison (who formerly worked full-time at a publishing house) about herself and her friends, she said she knew she wanted to do something professionally that was compatible with motherhood, and many of the women she knew adapted what they were doing before (architecture, graphic design, nursing) to accommodate child-rearing (freelancing, telecommuting, becoming a health educator). This foresight is something that Robyn echoes: "Today the question for mothers isn't always 'am I going to work or not?', it's 'can I pick a profession that will be compatible with motherhood?'"
More and more, women are rejecting the rigid terms at which working motherhood has been issued to them and making work work for them. And the renegotiating doesn't end with flexible, child-friendly schedules. All of the mothers I spoke with also mentioned the potential for professional reinvention that comes with the personal reinvention of motherhood. I heard about a woman with a law degree and a medical degree who started a scrapbooking business; a former fashion executive who opened a hair salon for kids; and the "Alpha Mom," a former Smith Barney SVP who started a 24/7 on-demand parenting channel of the same name. It seems that for some of the women who worked their way into the highest halls of professional achievement—corporate law firms, investment banks, and medical practices—kids can provide a legitimate excuse to get out of a career that's not (or is no longer for) them. And making a job out of motherhood is not a defeat. These mothers are entrepreneurs, business owners, and their own bosses; they have taken women's lib to the next level by fighting the institutionalized power and financial centers that their mothers worked to get them into, and forging individual paths to success.
And there's the rub. This trailblazing—commendable as it is—has broken up this formerly unified group of women, and left each one out to fend for herself against the lagging social conditions and judgments of others. Now there is choice, but there is no institutionalized standard to measure oneself against. Today's working mothers may be empowering themselves by rejecting the unappealing situations offered to them and going out on their own, but even though they are doing it in increasing numbers, without the framework of a women's movement or a social precedence, they are doing it alone, under fire. Whether they work full-time, part-time, or not at all, in the home or out, out of financial necessity or preference, every mother is held accountable for what is seen as her choice (when in reality, it usually isn't based entirely on their preference). As a consequence, the housewife and the working woman have turned into enemies, and no woman wants to be one or the other. They want to have it all—they need to have it all—but they have no guides—and no allies.
This is not to say that things can't change. The working women of the 60s couldn't have imagined the way that the internet, for example, would transform the workplace for everyone. But it does draw attention to the unresolved role of women in the world today. During the course of writing this article, I realized that this wasn't really about kids or motherhood at all. It was about the identity of the modern woman, and it exposed to me a pervasive ambiguity about women and work. Forty years ago, there was a charge for women to storm the boardroom. As a group, they succeeded. But individually, they were burdened by the ideals of the group, and today, they are still in a subordinate position. All of this talk about choice, options—good as they are for the individual—exposes how a woman's profession is still often seen as fluid, secondary —in other words, it is largely treated as frivolous. As bold as it is for a woman to leave the corporate world when it can not give her what she needs and start her own business—and I truly believe that it is—I can't help but thinking of how much her sex had something to do with it. How often can the father afford to leave the salary, the health insurance, the future at the company to find something more compatible with raising his children? Paradoxically, the more empowered that professional women become individually—choosing careers they love and can work around raising children rather than what is the most secure bet for prosperity—the less the group as a whole advances. That is, at least until we all change the way we think about work, for everyone.
The personal is political, but it is also personal. The desire to open doors and offer good role models to future generations of women and men is felt as palpably in today's stay-at-home mom as it is in the working one. But at the same time, arranging the best situation for one's family—based on income, profession, and personal preferences—is necessarily the choice that matters more to the individual. For some that means working at the same rate they did before they had kids, for some that means devoting themselves full-time to motherhood, and for increasing numbers, it means coming up with a particular arrangement that is somewhere in between. To keep up with this, the change that's needed most isn't a more lenient Family Medical Leave Act, state-sponsored child care, and more paternity leave; it's the willingness of society to let the family act in its own best interest, and let them decide what that is for them.
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