I remember agonising, the day before I had lunch with Tony Blair for the first time, over what my opening question to him should be. Something about Iraq? Or something more lateral and icebreaking—about his kids, maybe, or his taste in pop music? In the event I staggered into No 10 just in time to ask his aides where the toilet was before disaster struck.
Norovirus was sweeping through our house. I’d spent most of the previous night comforting my daughter while feeding bedclothes into the washing machine, my husband having announced that he was too ill to do anything except lie curled up on the floor. I felt tired but nausea-free as I set off for Downing Street; rather peakier once I got there. I should probably have called in sick. But this was a key assignment for me and I wasn’t about to pass it down the line. Such are the tribulations of working parenthood.
This episode and others like it flashed through my mind as I read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s flawed but valuable polemic on the subject, Unfinished Business. Back in 2012, Slaughter wrote a piece for the Atlantic which became one of the most widely read articles in the magazine’s 150-year history with an estimated 2.7m views. (You can see why a publisher thought padding it out to book length would be a good idea).
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” addressed the difficulties encountered by professional women with children. A controlled blast of righteous rage, it found the law professor and former Princeton University dean—now President and CEO of the thinktank New America—explaining why, after spending two years as the first female Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, she was quitting Washington DC and returning to full-time teaching at Princeton. She had felt obliged to make this choice because “juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”
The reaction from friends and colleagues to what they regarded as her “dropping out” was disappointment, disapproval and—worse still—pity: “I was, in effect, painted as someone who just couldn’t cut it or couldn’t manage the juggle of work and family,” she writes, “when in fact I was still teaching a full load, writing regular columns on foreign policy, giving 30 or 40 speeches a year, and working on a new book.”
The predicament Slaughter found herself in triggered an existential crisis. For years she had believed she could “have it all” and had duly done the rounds of universities selling this possibility to eager grad students. Suddenly she realised that both the gender pay gap and the lack of women in senior positions were partly attributable to an ingrained sexism that saw caregiving, whether to children or ageing parents, as (a) a job for women and (b) a fluffy, low-value job undeserving of respect or decent remuneration.
When women went off on maternity leave, their stock plummeted in anticipation of the missed meetings and loss of focus that surely lay ahead. She quotes the hedge fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, who voiced the unspoken prejudices of many male bosses when he remarked of a former associate: “As soon as that baby’s lips touched that girl’s bosom, forget it.” In the most rousing, radical sections of the book, Slaughter calls for nothing less than a workplace revolution and the building of a whole new “infrastructure of care.” We should think about paid caregiving “the same way we think about any other profession, including money management.”
"Though her Atlantic article was mostly well received, Slaughter was criticised in some quarters for promoting a “plutocrat feminism” concerned only with the plight of powerful women"Gender roles must be recalibrated so that domestic responsibilities are no longer a female preserve. Flexible working practices should benefit employees rather than employers: she cites the case of Starbucks barista and single mother Jannette Navarro whose maddening schedule, dictated by whimsical data analysis of customer flow, sometimes required her to shut up a store at 11pm and open it the following morning at 4am. “Leaning in” is all very well, but women “still run up against insuperable obstacles created by the combination of unpredictable life circumstances and the rigid inflexibilities of our workplaces,” not to mention cultural attitudes that “devalue them the minute they step out, or even just lean back, from the work force.”
Though her Atlantic article was mostly well received, Slaughter was criticised in some quarters for promoting a “plutocrat feminism” concerned only with the plight of powerful women. Unfinished Business finds Slaughter trying harder on that score, to the point where some of the privilege-checking feels rather masochistic. It is nevertheless the case that the rarefied realm she inhabits sets limits on how relevant the book could possibly be to the lives of ordinary working women, particularly in the UK. For the US can be a tricky place to work and have children (unless you’re in the military or employed at places like Google or the Mayo Clinic which boast state-of-the-art childcare facilities). And Washington DC in particular has its own professional microclimate. Where work and parenthood are concerned, it incubates some distinctive pathologies.
Fifteen years ago, before I had children, I spent six months working at the Washington Post. Although I’d joined Fleet Street years after the liquid lunch fell out of favour, I was immediately struck by how damn hard journalists in DC worked—both men and women. There was an admirable dedication to the story, a slavish devotion to fact-checking and an almost complete absence of holidays. Unfettered by family myself, I found it exhilarating, and I lived and worked the dream. But had I had children then either my personal or professional life might well have turned rapidly sour.
Life on Capitol Hill is hard and demanding. It is normal to work from 8am to 8pm and in fact most key decisions are taken outside “normal” business hours. The problem with this is that, as one former Capitol Hill staffer recently explained to me, “if you’re not physically present for these key conversations, you render yourself moot or somehow less essential.” There is nominal observation of big holidays like Christmas and Easter, but no family occasion is sacrosanct. My source continued: “I remember in 2008, President [George W] Bush pocket vetoed the National Defence Authorisation Act on Christmas Day and we had to work to deal with that on Christmas itself. I have plenty of friends who have missed friends’ weddings and cancelled expensive vacations because legislation was coming to the floors of Congress that they had to be present for.
“The unique dynamic in DC is you can have moms in very high profile political jobs that are incredibly time-consuming and then dads in non-political/corporate/legal jobs which require less time at the office but are also more highly compensated. So you have this ironic dynamic where the public sector parent is working more and making less and the dads are working less, making more and having to pick up the slack with the family. It can create tension in marriages.”
So what of Slaughter’s own marriage? Certainly, she seems unwilling or unable to take her own home-front advice. At the start of the book she links her decision to return to Princeton to problems within her family. For two years she commuted between Washington and the family home. She would spend all week in DC, return to Princeton late on Fridays in time for the weekend, then leave again at 5am on Monday. In poignant detail she describes the upset this regime caused. Her youngest son, 10 when she started her State Department job in 2009, would cry on Sunday nights when he knew she had to leave the next day. Her eldest son seemed at first to understand the pressure his mother was under but went off the rails the second puberty hit: “His friends changed, and over the next 18 months he started skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. He fought with his father and did his best to ignore me completely.”
In eighth grade (aged 13 or 14) his behaviour worsened and Slaughter cites an incident—we never find out exactly what it was—that led to his suspension from school and questioning by the local police. And this is where Slaughter undermines her own argument. Even though “Andy [her husband] was there... doing his level best as the home parent... my son was constantly on my mind. As much as I loved the work I was doing, I would get a call or a text with the latest upset and wonder why on earth I was sitting in DC when my son needed me in Princeton.”
I don’t mean for a second to suggest that Slaughter shouldn’t have felt upset and conflicted here. The pull of home and family has a tidal strength and for such a hyper-competent woman the compulsion to intervene must have been almost impossible to suppress. But to answer Slaughter’s own question: you are sitting in DC because your hugely important job, which you do brilliantly, is contributing to the safety of the free world and anyway your husband is at home looking after the kids! This puts you in a lucky minority. But his contribution counts for nothing if you don’t have the confidence to let him make it.
“The supposed contradiction between work and motherhood is a mirage, a modern cultural construct”Slaughter says that the crisis with her son “forced me to confront what was important to me, rather than what I was conditioned to want.” It encouraged her to question the “feminist narrative” she had grown up believing. Reading Unfinished Business, though, it isn’t the feminist narrative that’s the problem —it’s Slaughter’s desire to be at home cooking her boys hearty home-made breakfasts. She calls this a “deep evolutionary urge.” But that’s like my husband saying he has a deep evolutionary urge to go to the pub when the kids’ bedtime gets a bit shouty. The spurious link Slaughter posits between her absence and her son’s bad behaviour goes to the heart of what it means to be a “good mother.”
“The supposed contradiction between work and motherhood is a mirage, a modern cultural construct,” wrote Kate Figes in her 1998 book Life After Birth. That might seem a lofty generalisation from the vantage point of a 21st-century world where work follows you home in a way it never did in the last century. But what Figes means, she goes on to clarify, is that “mothers of the past had little choice but to see their roles of mother and worker as interdependent rather than mutually exclusive.” Upper-class women might not have worked, but lower down the social scale they did, on farms and in factories. These women didn’t beat themselves up about working. They just accepted that it had to be done, and their children worked too from a young age. (I am not advocating child labour, just reminding you that it was once unexceptional.)
The idealisation of maternal domesticity occurred in the late 18th century following the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel-cum-childcare manual Emile, or On Education in 1762. Emile introduced the idea that motherhood should be a source of pleasure and satisfaction; also that this should involve elements of guilt and self-sacrifice. No, women should not go out to work because, in Rousseau’s words, “the true mother, far from being a woman of the world, is as much a recluse in her home as the nun is in her cloister.” Just because women have a greater awareness of domestic duties—making packed lunches, keeping up with the washing—that doesn’t mean they should be the ones doing them.
Why does it fall to women to keep the show on the road? Why must women constantly keep in their heads a definition of “good motherhood” robust enough to blank out the static buzz of guilt and confusion, when for some men “good fatherhood” involves little more than the odd kickabout in the park? I say “some men”—obviously, many are excellent caregivers, including my husband, whose lucky ability to work from home and so do the bulk of the childcare enables me to do my better-remunerated job. (Slaughter is very funny about what she calls “halo dad syndrome” whereby “fathers do what is routinely expected of mothers and are treated as if they are extraordinary.”)
The elephant in the room—a big one, wearing a flashing tiara and doing back-flips—is money. An unintentionally hilarious article in Fortune earlier this year was entitled “Women with big jobs and big families: Balancing really isn’t that hard.” Among the women profiled was Jaime Teevan, a researcher with Microsoft Research and a professor at the University of Washington who has a six-year-old, an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old. Teevan explained that the family “[spent] money on things that make our lives easier.” This included employing a chef to cook vast batches of meals which could be frozen for use when necessary.
Slaughter admits that money gave her and her husband the ability to afford high-quality daycare when their children were small and, later, a full-time housekeeper. Aha, I thought. I had wondered how on earth a self-declared “sleep evangelist” was able to secure for herself the seven or eight hours sleep a night which enables her to be “happier, pleasanter, and unquestionably more productive”: pay someone else to do all the chores. Another problem—and I’m not criticising Slaughter here; she doesn’t have much to say on this subject—is the modern professional woman’s conception of a successful, happy childhood: children pinballing between violin lessons, football games and tutors, excelling in all areas because mere flourishing is no longer enough.
In my experience, and at the risk of reinforcing a cliché, successful women like Slaughter are often fiercely driven and perfectionist; struggle with delegating; and unlikely to settle for second best in any aspect of their (or their children’s) lives. I can imagine how unsettling it must be for someone like this to find, just when she thought she’d got her family on an even keel, that her children needed her as much at 13 or 16 or 19 as they did at three. Stepping back and allowing men to be involved—properly, independently involved—is crucial.
What we need now is more exemplars. I cheered this week when Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan declared that he would only agree to be Speaker of the House of Representatives, a job third in line to the presidency, if he was able to remain an involved father to his three children. Blair, by contrast, decided not to take paternity leave after his son Leo was born in 2000. Instead he went into what he called “holiday mode” where he did slightly less work. But then, statutory paternity leave wasn’t introduced until 2003 and it was David Cameron who in 2010 became the first British Prime Minister to take it. The senior male politician who always seemed the most involved in family life was Nick Clegg. Even when Deputy Prime Minister, he split the school run with his lawyer wife Miriam González Durántez and rushed home to help with bathtime.
This is to be applauded, but Durántez, equally busy and pressured at work, grew justifiably angry when a journalist asked her how the family coped with her husband’s job. “No one would ask him how he balances everything,” she pointed out. Until they do, “unfinished business” is about the size of it.
