Can We Agree That “Having It All” Is A Worse-Than-Useless Standard?

The content of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s much-discussed Atlantic piece is not as bad as the white-baby-with-mean-feminist-mommy cover would indicate. And yet in some ways the cover is accurate, because a lot of unobjectionable content is wrapped around an anti-feminist framing device. The two most obvious problems are that 1)blaming femimism for policy and cultural deficiencies feminists oppose but have not successfully displaced makes no sense, and 2)”having it all” is an inherently anti-feminist question that assumes women will be primary caregivers. (No man “has it all” either; the fact that nobody questions how Antonin Scalia can be a federal judge with 9 kids doesn’t mean that he “has it all,” it means he’s not expected to do certain things women still are.)

Anyway, many people have said it better than I could, so read Beyerstein, Geier, Givens, and Covert. Rebecca Traister is especially good:

What does “having it all” even mean? Affordable childcare or a nanny who speaks Mandarin? Decent school lunches or organic string cheese? A windowed office or a higher minimum wage? Public transportation that reliably gets you to work or a driver who will whisk you from kindergarten dropoff in time for the board meeting? Does it mean never feeling stress or guilt? Does it mean feeling satisfied all the time?

It is a trap, a setup for inevitable feminist short-fall. Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the “have it all” formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism – as opposed to persistent gender inequity – that’s to blame.

[…]

We don’t lay the same booby traps for men. We don’t constantly quiz and evaluate and poke and prod and take their emotional temperature, asking if they feel fulfilled and happy, if they have everything they want, if their every youthful aspiration has been met sufficiently, if they feel that they’re measuring up at the office, in the kitchen, in bed. If we did, we might find out that they – especially younger ones, increasingly used to sharing workplaces and domestic and familial responsibilities with women – also feel stressed, guilty, anxiety-stricken, unfulfilled, questioning. But it’s not likely that we would then use their admissions of discontent to diagnose a larger male inability to balance effectively, or conclude that they are not realistically able to maintain the dominance they’ve enjoyed for millennia because having so much power is a) bad for them, b) unnatural or c) impossible. We’d probably just blame their dissatisfaction on feminism.