Unfinished Business Read Free Page A

and stay home with her kids for a while, something that she had truly wanted to do but had not dared.
    The welcome was not always warm, however. I was accused of perpetuating “plutocrat” feminism—that I’m only concerned with the high-class problems of powerful women like myself. Some critics took issue with the entire concept of “having it all,” calling it perfectionistic folly to imagine that we can have big careers and be highly devoted parents at the same time. Other critics claimed that my article would undermine the years of historic, hard-won gains of women in the workplace.
    I soon got a chance to engage both criticism and praise directly as I traveled the country, gave speeches, listened to questions, and grappled with answers. Gradually, I allowed myself to break free from an entire set of deeply internalized assumptions about what is valuable, what is important, what is right, and what is natural. The process was like going to the optometrist and havingher flip the lenses in that little machine, with the letters on the far side coming in and out of focus until gradually what had been a complete blur becomes sharp and startlingly clear.
    Feminist pioneers like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem broke free of stifling stereotypes that confined women to a world in which their identities were defined almost entirely by their relationships to others: daughter, sister, wife, mother. The movement Friedan and Steinem led, following in the nineteenth-century footsteps of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and their fellow revolutionaries, takes its place with the civil rights movement, the global human rights movement, the anti-colonial movement, and the gay rights movement as one of the great struggles for human freedom of the twentieth century.
    But it is a movement that remains unfinished in many ways. And at the turn of the twenty-first century, I am increasingly convinced that advancing women means breaking free of a new set of stereotypes and assumptions, not only for women, but also for men. It means challenging a much wider range of conventional wisdom about what we value and why, about measures of success, about the wellsprings of human nature and what equality really means. It means rethinking everything from workplace design to life stages to leadership styles.
    I want a society that opens the possibility for every one of us to have a fulfilling career, or simply a good job with good wages if that’s what we choose, along with a personal life that allows for the deep satisfactions of loving and caring for others. I hope this book can help move us in that direction.
    But one step at a time. To get there, let’s start with the world as it is, not as many of us would like it to be.

Part I
Moving Beyond Our Mantras
    When Betty Friedan wrote
The Feminine Mystique
, she titled her opening chapter “The Problem That Has No Name.”She described it as “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.”She began to believe that it laid in the “discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform.”
    Friedan purported to speak for all women but was actually chronicling the emotional distress of millions of suburban housewives. Her audience was large enough to help launch the second wave of the feminist movement—no small achievement. Still, the world she described was certainly not the reality for millions of other women who had neither time nor inclination to grapple with an idealized vision of femininity. They were already in the workforce by necessity rather than choice.
    For my part, I grew up in a white upper-middle-class suburban household, albeit at a time when that still meant staying in roadside motels, riding Greyhound buses, and learning alongside the children of plumbers and electricians as well as doctors and lawyers. I have been well educated