Unfinished Business Read Free Page B

and faced a horizon of expandingopportunity as a member of the America that has steadily grown richer over the past three decades, rather than the America that has stagnated and fallen behind. I live in a version of the nuclear family—two married heterosexual parents, two biological children combining the DNA of both parents—that is now a minority of American families.
    In the process of writing this book, responding to reflections, questions, and critiques from many different people from many different backgrounds, I have realized time and again just how much my own experiences inevitably shape my assumptions about how others think and feel. As I have tried to put myself in others’ shoes, I have confronted again and again the obvious but too often overlooked point of just how much
money matters
. Money gave Andy and me the ability to afford excellent daycare when the kids were young, a full-time housekeeper as they grew older, the comfort of living in a neighborhood with great public schools and libraries.
    Money buys a safety net, relieving stress and providing resources and resilience against the buffets of fate. Yet millions of American families are working as hard as they can without the resources to absorb even one unlucky break. Their “family choices”—whether and how much to work versus whether and how much to stay home to care for children or parents—are not really choices at all; they are driven by economic imperatives. As I challenge my own long-held beliefs, I continually remind myself that my story is not theirs.
    I emphasize this point because if we want to move forward—for women and men, for our workplaces, and for our society as a whole—we must first step back and take a hard look at what we reflexively believe to be true. We must question the conventional wisdom, aphorisms, memes, and stories that inform or justify our choices and shape our worlds. We have to ask ourselves why weare so certain of our often-buried assumptions about the way things are, both for ourselves and for millions of others whose lives we can only try to imagine.
    We can only change and bring about change if we can genuinely open our minds to new thoughts and possibilities, for everyone.

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HALF-TRUTHS WOMEN HOLD DEAR
    As a professor who had thousands of meetings with students and gave hundreds of lectures over twenty years, the single question that I heard most frequently, hands down, was from young women asking me how I managed to balance work and family. Even after foreign policy talks at other universities, once the audience had thinned out a young woman would invariably raise her hand and ask me what advice I would give to women seeking to have a career and a family at the same time. I am hardly alone in this; any of my female colleagues would say the same thing. We understand why these young women ask us this question and feel proud that they are looking up to us.
    But the answers are complicated. I could have told my students that the only way I had managed to have a high-powered career and a husband and two sons was by being a tenured professor at a top university married to another tenured professor at the same university. But that could be deeply discouraging, and it’s not the whole truth; drive, hard work, and good fortune each played a role in charting the course of my career. Moreover, many other women manage to combine careers and family successfully in less flexible and fortunate situations.
    Later on, I could have said to any of the young women I metin Washington, “Look, I’m on the edge of perpetual crisis here. My teenage son is having all sorts of issues; my husband and I are desperately trying to figure out how to manage him while I’m gone five days a week; I’m torn up inside and asking myself daily whether this job is worth the personal cost.” But that too would have been pretty discouraging and, again, not the whole truth. My situation could have been very different if my kids were