To continue the childrearing series, I wanted to think through the subject of how women having children and having a career fit together. If you missed Part 1 and Part two, hop on over and read them and I’d love your comments/thoughts/reactions. There have been a flurry of articles lately claiming that women can’t ‘have it all’ (or at least not all at once). The argument is that while the women’s rights movement made great strides in terms of getting women into the workplace, the structure of the system is such that women are still at a disadvantage, especially if they want to have children. I’m not so interested in trying to answer the question, “Can women have it all?” I don’t actually think this is an answerable question. For one, ‘having it all’ is different for every person — for some, having it all would be being an active primary caregiver type parent and working part time at a job you love. For others, it might be being a full-time parent and not working a second job. For others, it would be parenting, having the high-powered career they’ve dreamed of, and volunteering 10 hours a week at a local women’s shelter….My point is that depending on what “having it all” means to you determines whether or not it’s reasonable to assume that you can have it all.
What the articles on the subject say is that women can’t be active, primary parenting figures and have a high-powered career at the same time. Something has to give if you choose to have both. Either your career success is halted, or your children are in daycare to accommodate your work schedule. For some women, this choice is not a huge point of conflict — some women know that they being a parent is more important to them and others know that career success is more important than being with their kids all day long. But other — and I suspect, most — women feel at least somewhat conflicted about this choice.
To use an example I’m probably most familiar with… the academic career is an interesting site for thinking through this issue. In some ways, an academic career is much more forgiving schedule-wise than other careers in terms of fitting a child into the mix. Teaching schedules are often somewhat flexible in terms of days/times, many academics have the summers off to do research and writing, you rarely have 40+ hours a week of required show-up time (though, most academics seem to work much longer hours than this when it’s all said and done). If you choose to go the tenure route, however, there are all kinds of other pressures that make hefty demands on your time and energy — publishing, teaching, researching, committee meetings and other departmental service, advising, conferences, funding applications, etc. If you choose not to go the tenure route, you risk sacrificing job stability, a living wage, health insurance and other benefits, etc.
There’s been much talk in our department lately about having babies. After a long hiatus, four women in our department have been pregnant in the last year. Traditionally, I think, there’s been a sort of unspoken understanding that the best time to have kids as a woman in the academy is post-tenure. Once you’ve reached that elusive and hard-won career goal, many women decide to have children. This seems to be a trend coming out of the 197os when women became particularly empowered to pursue their own careers, rather than stay at home and have children. This meant that through the 80s, 90s and 2000s, a whole host of women were waiting until later in life to have children (if they had children at all). In the academy, unless you’re some kind of prodigy, tenure usually comes when you’re in your late 30s/early 40s or beyond. Now, there’s a change in the conversation — that maybe a better time to have kids is actually in graduate school. Though graduate school is hugely stressful for work and financial reasons, there is also more flexibility in grad school than in an early academic career. And taking an extra year or two to finish graduate school has less impact on your career than halting progress in a junior faculty position. Some women say “fuck it, my reproductive life is not going to be dictated by the conventions of career advancement.” And others seem very concerned with the “best time” career-wise to have children. Plus, for most of us, we don’t actually get to choose whether or not we work — we have to work and earn a living because we’re unfortunately not all independently wealthy. So how to negotiate this need with the role children play in our lives (if we choose to have them).
I don’t actually have a clear opinion on this subject one way or another — other than to say that it is a complicated issue and that there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution if what you want is a high-powered career at the same time as you want to be home raising a child. Something’s got to give and I imagine for many who are in this position, it is a hugely conflicted choice. The take-away, I think, is that we should be having this conversation because (as the article above says) it’s actually damaging to other women to keep perpetuating this myth that we can ‘have it all’ if we only work hard enough. It seems to me that the conversation we should be having is not how to ‘have it all’, but how to negotiate the compromises we make to try to have both. Or how to negotiate the compromise with ourselves and others when we decide that one or the other is more important to us. Ideally, we would be able to alter the structure of the system to accommodate this tension — to provide more space for parents to be parents in the workplace. But until that can happen, we are stuck with working towards make work/family balance more just and having this conversation.
Note: I want to point out that in some ways this post is coming from an extreme place of privilege. For many women, there is little choice to have children or not, to work or not, to seek a high-powered career or not. For others, there simply isn’t time or space to have these conversations because of the demands of making a living and raising a child (or children) at the same time under difficult circumstances. Just having this conversation is a privilege.
What do you think?
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The social pressure to get married and have kids, whether or not to bring a kid into this crazy world, raise her/him with animal rights consciousness, and whether or not to have it all… All these issues that you have brought up in your parenting series right very true for me as a 5+ month baby presently kicks and rolls in my womb while I strive to complete a dissertation on horse rescue and slaughter before she arrives on the outside of this crazy beautiful world in June… Perhaps because I am older, 35, and a few years ago got to a place of peace where I felt I had done”enough” satisfactory-to-great things in my life (traveled, curated exhibitions, made films, fell in dangerous love and luckily fell out of it) that when I met my now husband and am now expecting our first child that I felt ready and fully conscious the whole time. Yes, the first trimester was hell. It took me all the strength of the world to pull my butt to the classroom to teach, and of course the chapter I had to produce at that time was a mess. But now we are rolling right along. I always imagined/had a vision that I would write my diss while pregnant, so here we are.. I also had it in my intellectual mind that I should wait until I had a job/tenure before having kids, but as you point out, that often does not happen until much later in life. And it is not the social / medical stigma of having children in your later years that dampens this prospect, it is just that I still want to be available for my kids in their early, crucial years. Of course I say all of this still standing on the other shore from all of this, and it can all change in an instant, but these are my orientations.
In terms of having it all, this is where my personal and academic embrace of Buddhism reacts. The more we want, the more suffering we set ourselves up for. Furthermore, are we critical enough of where these wants and desires come from? From the media, from social norms, or from a place more “true” to our individual and community concerns? When you are pregnant and reading up on childbirth and rearing, you really see the system at work, and it amazing how many women and families go along without any critical reflection. (I’ve also read some pretty depressing blogs about how having a kid “killed” the woman’s life as she had known it; I look forward to focusing on something more than myself and the damn dissertation / academic anxiety! But again, I say this now…) My focus is to be informed and own my choices, therefore the “all” that I am seeking to have is hopefully within my definition and boundaries (and adjusting everyday). I witness so many of my colleagues stress and worry about the dichotomy of having academic success and having a family – does it really have to be such a paradox, is that perspective really our own? And honestly, shouldn’t we just take it one day at a time? I know that is what I have to do when things start to get overwhelming: will we have enough money saved for the baby, will my committee accept the unorthodox way I approach my data, will she be born with/without complications, etc? Let us stay within ourselves rather than strive for an all that we, frankly, shall never obtain; instead, we might just stumble onto a life path we never knew existed and will be better off for it.
Tamar, Love this! Thank you for commenting and sharing your experience of your journey toward motherhood (within the academy). It sounds to me that if you can maintain this attitude once the baby is born and through those early years, you will be in a great place. I agree that the social pressure/expectation that we can have it “all” sets us up for more suffering and that tuning into what’s really important rather than what we’re told is important is a powerful way to resist the potentially damaging impacts of these social pressures. It’s my hope that we can all find peace in whatever we decide our “all” is and feel good about working toward our individual goals.
I have been thinking about your post, and I agree that to even have the conversation is a privilege. Clearly, many of us are bound by economic and social systems that prevent us from being able to choose how we want to live.
When I was younger, I always thought that my career and community work were so important and all-consuming that I would never have children. That changed, of course with the arrival of my first child, and so did my priorities. I knew that I wanted to continue to work in human services and to be in involved in community organizing, but with my first look into that child’s face, I knew that everything, everything, had changed in the most fundamental way.
In the mid 80’s when the message to “have it all” was a strong drumbeat, we were fortunate; my husband and I were both completely on the same page. We wanted to raise our child(ren) ourselves and we wanted to continue to do the work we loved. I went back to work, had my second daughter, and for the nearly 20 years that followed, successfully negotiated a flexible, reduced schedule in every position I held. This accommodation made it all possible. My husband taught at the university and he too, had a schedule that supported our lifestyle.
The fact that I was very clear about the relationship between my family and work – family comes first – allowed me to create a balance between the two. It was, of course relatively easy for me; I am not particularly ambitious and my choice of a career in human services meant that I would never earn a lot of money. At the same time, our lifestyle was simple and we had enough to be comfortable. What I remember is how happy I was to come home from work at the end of a day to my beautiful family.
I guess what I am really trying to say here, is that there was no conflict because, somehow, perhaps it was only dumb luck, I was able have it all. At least, all that mattered to me.
This is so inspiring! I think you have done an amazing job of creating and living the kind of life you want and sharing that life and those values with the rest of your family. 🙂 And I love that you say you were able to have “all that mattered to you” because I think this is such an important point — to define what that ‘all’ is for each of us in a way that’s as free as possible from external expectations and then to celebrate that ‘all’ everyday. Beautiful story and thanks for the really lovely comment!