To Have or Not to Have It All: The Dilemma of American Women

It’s one of those never-ending and never-settled public debates that only Americans know how to orchestrate: the type to be revived by an unexpected incident, the sudden appearance of a paradoxical statistic or a passionate declaration. The last to date deals with an issue that they (Americans) have faced for several decades with a certain amount of courage, ups and downs, and consistency: Can women manage both professional and family success?

This time the detonator was a long article published on June 20 by the Atlantic, under the title “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Be careful, the crucial word here is “still.” The second important element is the author, Anne Marie Slaughter. She is not a star of feminism but an important figure in the American foreign policy elite and professor at Princeton who has also taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago. A regular at international conferences, she is an intrepid speaker with a strong personality, and her academic reputation exceeds American borders.

Anne Marie Slaughter has a husband, a brilliant academic himself, and two teenage sons. Everything was going well for her until Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State under President Obama, offered her a job as the Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. This is a prestigious and important position that one simply does not refuse, especially when you’re the first woman to be offered it. Her husband encouraged her. While he would take care of the children, she would take the three-hour train ride from Washington to Princeton every weekend.

18 months later, Anne Marie Slaughter realized that she “couldn’t manage.” Despite a father’s good will, a mother’s absence is not without consequences, or at least that’s what she convinced herself concerning her oldest son, who was 14 and in the middle of his adolescent crisis. The weekends boiled down to a race between remote working, homework and chores. Cunningly, the feeling of guilt began to sink in. She opened up to a friend about the matter and was scolded, “Come on, you, the woman with everything, how can you ‘not manage’?” After two years, Anne Marie Slaughter returned to Princeton and a schedule that was more compatible with her family life.

She is not the first or the last to throw in the towel. Michèle Flournoy resigned from her post as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy after three years in the job to spend more time with her children. Like others before her, she was replaced by a man.

This is exactly what grieves Anne Marie Slaughter. Where are all the women who, like her in 1985, graduated from the best universities with the most prestigious degrees? Weren’t they just as many as men? “We were sure then that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream.”

She esteems that it’s perhaps the time to tell the truth to young women graduating today in even greater numbers than men: No, you can’t have everything — power, love, motherhood and a good conscience. We were lied to. You should be able to have it all. But as long as society is organized that way it is economically and socially — that is to say, by men — that will be very difficult. In the Atlantic, she suggests a few paths to take to break away from this mirage.

Her message differs from that of Sheryl Sandberg, the very charismatic General Director of Facebook and the mother of two small children. “We have to admit something that’s sad but true: Men run the world,” she stated in a very noteworthy speech in May 2011 in front of Barnard College students. But Sheryl Sandberg refuses to see it as an insurmountable obstacle. For her, women should fight “to have it all,” with a weapon they don’t use often enough, ambition. She herself maintains that she leaves the office every day at 5:30 to make dinner for her children and gets back to working afterwards. As proof that she hasn’t been penalized for this, she just joined the Facebook board of directors, which has been exclusively masculine up until now.

The widespread reaction to Anne Marie Slaughter’s article surprised everyone. There were nearly a million clicks on the magazine’s website, 1,500 comments and more than 125,000 “likes” on Facebook, a heated debate about the “havingitall” hashtag on Twitter, a New York Time’s headline, television mentions and so on. Foreign policy purists, who aren’t all friends of Slaughter’s, held their noses and accused her of “needing to exist.”

Others made ironic comments about the lament of the affluent, but women from all backgrounds jumped with both feet into this national “conversation.” Because if even the privileged with degrees, husbands and cleaning ladies “can’t manage,” then what hope is there for a cashier at Wal-Mart?

The conversation is also intergenerational. It is between the idealists of the 1970s and the strategists of the 2000s. It’s between those who believed that they could break the glass ceiling and postponed motherhood, often to realize that it was too late, and those who today chose to begin by having children at the risk of falling behind in their career plans.

Quite naturally, this debate has joined the ranks of the parenting dispute that never really disappeared from the radar screen in the United States. After the success of Amy Chua’s book on the merits of ultra-demanding mothers in 2011, the time has come to criticize “over-parenting” and “helicopter parents,” who never stop whirling over the heads of their children. In the Financial Times, writer Katie Roiphe denounces “tawdry, consumerist, boring, bourgeois fantasy of ‘having it all.’” According to her, it’s better to embrace “the implausible, the complicated, the hectic, the imperfect, the unbalanced and the here and now.” As a result, Anne Marie Slaughter suggested another title for her article: Why working mothers need better choices to be able to make it to the top. The debate continues.