Perhaps you've read or heard about this Atlantic piece, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All". It's the cover story of the most recent issue of the magazine, which arrived at our house a couple of weeks ago. I haven't read it yet, but apparently it's aroused quite a controversy, as this topic usually does–"this topic" being the difficulty women have in balancing family and job. Or, as it is generally framed by the journalists and academics who talk about it most (or most conspicuously anyway), family and career.
There is a whole lot to be said about this, and everybody on all sides has said it, from the traditionalists who believe it's best for mothers to focus on raising their children, even if it means less money and prestige!!, a troublesome idea in some quarters, to the feminists who argue that is actually wrong for women not to have jobs outside the home. I'm not making that last one up; that also was an Atlantic piece, I think, sometime within the last ten years, but I've forgotten the woman's name now.
A whole lot to be said, but I just want to register one complaint from the male point of view: there's an implication in this complaint that men do "have it all." Anybody who thinks that we do, in general, is an idiot. Most men don't go off every morning to a career they love. They go to work, at a job which they don't especially like, or maybe even hate, and they do it because they have to, and/or because it's their duty.
For most of us life after adolescence involves a great many compromises between what we would really like to do and what we have to do to earn a living. Adults accept this.
There's an interesting exchange about the Atlantic piece at PBS. I like this, from one of the participants, Naomi Decter:
Of course we can't have it all. No one can have it all. Men can't have it all either. …this is a problem and always has been a problem of highly privileged, highly educated women. And I think the fact is, we're extremely lucky and we may not have it all, but we have much, much more than most of the women and men in this country or certainly in the world.
Observation tells me that a great many mothers, possibly a majority, possibly a large majority, who hold down jobs would really rather be at home with their children, at least while the children are young, but must work to make ends meet. Feminists have never had much interest in them. In fact, to the extent that improving that situation would require paying better wages to the husbands of those women, they're hostile to that concern.
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