In the bulk of her fourteen-page article, Slaughter debunks (or at least tweaks) several of what she calls “the half-truths that we hold dear.” She addresses three feminist mantras: “It’s possible if you are just committed enough,” “It’s possible if you marry the right person,” and “It’s possible if you sequence it right.” Then, Slaughter proposes several solutions.

I opened to Ann-Marie Slaughter’s article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” prepared to be annoyed. The cover of this month’s The Atlantic features a photo of a business-suited woman carrying a baby in a briefcase, and I expected the accompanying article to offend most of what I believe about the nature of work, complementarianism, and motherhood.

I was surprised.

Instead of being an angry rant, Slaughter’s article reads as a genuine attempt to wrestle with issues of the intersection of work and life, particularly for working mothers. As testimony to its resonating quality, the article set an all-time record for number of pageviews on The Atlantic’s website this weekend. Mom to mom, Slaughter tells a compelling story.

Beginning with her personal testimony of pursuing a high-level State Department career, only to be overwhelmed by the needs of her teenaged sons, she then details her exit from Washington, D.C. to spend more time with her family.

The subsequent negative reactions of her feminist colleagues, and the experiences of younger women who came to her for advice, led Slaughter to believe “that glibly repeating ‘you can have it all’ is simply airbrushing reality.”

As a mother, I appreciate her obvious concern for the well-being of her children and her desire that the tasks of motherhood be recognized for the accomplishments that they are. I can also imagine that she will receive criticism from her peers for her honest deconstruction of the failings of feminism, and I applaud her for being willing to take those risks—even venturing so far in her article as to commend Sabbath-keeping, and to admit that (gasp!) men and women approach parenting differently.

In the bulk of her fourteen-page article, Slaughter debunks (or at least tweaks) several of what she calls “the half-truths that we hold dear.” She addresses three feminist mantras: “It’s possible if you are just committed enough,” “It’s possible if you marry the right person,” and “It’s possible if you sequence it right.” Then, Slaughter proposes several solutions.

Slaughter summarizes her position this way, “I still strongly believe that women can ‘have it all’ (and that men can too). I believe that we can ‘have it all at the same time.’ But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are structured.”

In response, I’d like to confront a presupposition she glaringly neglects to address.

For all her lamenting about the difficulties of “combin[ing] professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family,” Slaughter fails to acknowledge that being a working mother is itself a choice—a choice with far-ranging implications.

By framing work as either necessity or basic human right, she erroneously absolves women from responsibility for the difficulties they encounter.

Initially, Slaughter does make some noises about choice, and she frankly states that she is not talking to everywoman. According to one source, two-thirds of American women with young children work outside the home, but Slaughter says she is addressing “my demographic—highly educated, well-off women.” She goes on to say that “we may not have choices about whether to do paid work” (which seems insincere, given her prior admission of wealth) “but we have choices about the type and tempo of work we do.”

There, her admission of choice ends. In the next sentence, she says: “We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.” To Slaughter, smart and savvy women must work, must lead.

She says: “You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions.”

To read her article, one might begin to see working moms as those who have been imposed upon by an unforgiving business model. The women she writes to and about have their backs against the wall—just trying to make it as leaders in a world hostile to mothers.

This is a glaring bias, which skews the rest of her arguments.

In reality, the issue of work-life balance for women is a question of personal responsibility for personal choices. The women of Slaughter’s demographic are those who are ambitious. They are women who have decided to pursue highly demanding careers in competitive fields. They are women who made a choice.

(The same could also be said about the decision to have children, which Slaughter only mentions as a “choice” in mocking italics.)

Absent entirely from her article is any admission of responsibility. Instead, the paragraphs are distractingly filled with concerns about “los[ing] the competitive edge” and “coming back on line for the most demanding jobs.” She is remarkably transparent about her struggles, but never once suggests that they are her own doing.

Reading her article, I would have liked to hear: “I want to be a leader. I want to be a mom. And I can admit that I’m not excelling at either one partly because I have chosen to do them both.”

But, instead, it’s “America’s social and business policies” that attract her pointing finger.

Focused as she is on shifting the blame for a difficult situation—and on making working motherhood work—her proposed solutions often seem either superficial or unrealistic.

Take, for example, her suggestion in an Associated Press interview that Americans should champion “schools that end the same time work ends.” (Which, for Slaughter’s State Department job, was 7PM plus a commute.) I understand how this would make a working mother’s life easier to schedule. I’m not sure how it would help her to be a better mother.

Or, her suggestion that employers establish a policy that they will “schedule in-person meetings. . .during the hours of the school day” allowing more working moms to work from home, utilizing technology for video-conferencing, during the late afternoon. This idea would be an excellent one for companies who hope to attract and retain working moms to their staff. But is it really the responsibility of all employers to accommodate their employees’ outside commitments?

That cover photo on The Atlantic is a perceptive visual gag: a briefcase makes an awkward baby carrier. Being a working mother is difficult, but Slaughter’s suggestions for a fix would be more authentic if she’d begin by admitting she put the baby there in the first place.

@Copyright 2011 Megan Evans Hill – used with permission

Megan is a PCA ‘Preacher’s Kid’ married to Rob Hill who is pastor of St. Paul Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Jackson, MS   She and her mom, Patsy Evans, blog at Sunday Women.

Sources:

Associated Press. “Record Hits on Mag’s ‘Can’t Have It All’ Story.” 22 June 2012.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=155603833 [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

Ludden, Jennifer. “Working Moms’ Challenges: Paid Leave, Child Care.” National Public Radio. 20 April 2012. http://www.npr.org/2012/04/20/150967376/working-moms-challenges-paid-leave-child-care

Slaughter, Ann-Marie. “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The Atlantic. July/August 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-can-t-have-it-all/9020/