Unfinished Business Read Free

schedule to accommodate my kids’ school events or parent-teacher conferences. In the same spirit, I would often respond to the question of why I had left the State Department by saying, “My husband and I have two teenage sons who definitely need hands-on parenting, and they will only be at home for a few more years.”
    Suddenly, the person I was talking to would have a very different perception of me. The reactions ran the gamut from “It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington” to “I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I never had to compromise and my kids turned out great” to the many little signs that my interlocutor was reassessing whether I was really a “player.”
    In short, even as a woman who was still working full-time as a tenured professor, I had suddenly become categorized and subtly devalued as just another one of the many talented and well-educated women who showed great promise at the start of their careers and reached the early levels of success but then made a choice to take a less demanding job, work part-time, or stop working entirely to have more time for caregiving. I continuallysensed that I had disappointed the expectations of the many people in my life—older women, my male and female peers, even a few friends—who had somehow invested in the arc of my career.
    All my life I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the ever so faintly superior smile in the face of another woman telling me that she had decided to take time out to stay at home or pursue a different, less competitive career track to have more time with her family. I’d been the woman hanging out with the dwindling number of friends from college or law school who had never compromised our career aspirations, congratulating one another on our unswerving commitment to the feminist cause. I’d been the one telling female students and audience members at my lectures that it is possible to have it all and do it all regardless of what job you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making women feel that it is
their
fault if they cannot manage full-time careers and climb the ladder as fast as men while simultaneously maintaining a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot). The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me profoundly wrong that the millions of women and a growing number of men who made choices similar to my own should not be affirmed and even celebrated for insisting that professional success is not the only measure of human happiness and achievement.
    In 2012, I wrote a piece for
The Atlantic
, putting down all the thoughts about women and work that had been simmering in my brain. The article was called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a title I was soon to regret but that undoubtedly sold more magazines than the more accurate but decidedly less catchy “Why Working Mothers Need Better Choices to Be Able to Stay in the Pool and Make It to the Top.”Within five days, the online versionhad received more than 400,000 views; a week later that number had reached a million; today it is one of the most-read articles in the 150-year history of
The Atlantic
, with an estimated 2.7 million views. Clearly, it seemed, a sizable group of women and a growing number of men wanted another round of the now fifty-year-old conversation about what true equality between men and women really means.
    In the months that followed, I received hundreds of emails from people who had been moved by my piece. Jessica Davis-Ganao, an academic who is raising two young children, one with a genetic disorder, while trying to get tenure, wrote, “I just read your article in
The Atlantic
and had to close my door because I couldn’t stop crying. You have articulated a struggle I have been waging for the past few years.” Another comment that has stuck in my mind came from a mother who said I had “given her permission” to stop working