Only in America would a woman with a husband, two children and her dream job at the State Department (with a back-up position as a tenured Princeton professor) complain that she can’t have it all.
And only in America would the media gather around and commiserate.
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who considers herself one of the feminist elites, writes about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”
Her essay is accompanied by photos of pouty little girls, which seem appropriate given the tenor of Slaughter’s piece. (She’s taking questions now online that she will answer on Friday, and I have refrained from sending her this one: “Did your jaw break when it hit the ground?” It’s one my father used on me when I was about 7.)
Slaughter worked as a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a job that involved long hours and being home only on weekends. Slaughter’s husband, also a Princeton professor, took care of their two sons. When one son started having problems, and she was faced with the choice of giving up her tenured spot at Princeton or her high-powered (as she describes it) job with Clinton, Slaughter returned to Princeton.
“My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed,” Slaughter writes.
Quickly changed? She has to be kidding.
Feminists couldn’t even get the ERA passed. Even worse, in the last three decades, there has been a steady whittling away of abortion rights – the most important right for females and necessary in achieving equality between males and females.
Yet even Slaughter’s heroine, Hillary Clinton, referred to abortion as a “sad, tragic choice” to appease opponents. (How many young women could have been saved from the tragedy of poverty if they’d had an abortion? How many of those young women, thanks to Clinton, believe a zygote is more valuable than a girl or woman?)
Nevertheless, Slaughter insists, “The best hope for improving the lot of all women … is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone… .”
So the corporate world needs more Carly Fiorinas? And Washington, D.C. needs more Hillary Clintons?
Sorry, but I have seen no evidence that female corporate executives are that different from their male counterparts. Male or female, a corporate executive’s first priority is to the bottom line.
I worked for Gannett Co. Inc. for 16 years, and there were many women in its corporate ranks. One of the most high profile was Cathleen Black, executive vice president/marketing of Gannett and publisher of the chain’s largest newspaper, USA Today. For many years, Black also served a lucrative stint on the board of Coca-Cola, resigning after she was named school chancellor in New York City. It became a conflict of interest that she was affiliated with a company pushing soft drink sales in schools while many children suffered from obesity. That she was a mother of two children didn’t stop her from promoting Coke’s best interests even at the detriment of other people’s children.
Here in Oregon this week, we will swear in the state’s first female attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum. She has already distinguished herself by accepting at least $200,000 in drug money towards her campaign – including $70,000 from a man currently under investigation by the state Department of Justice.
As a candidate, Rosenblum pledged to make marijuana enforcement a low priority, which is fine considering medical marijuana is legal, and possession of small amounts is treated like a traffic citation. However, she seemed to tease that she might be in favor of legalizing it, and the marijuana lobby embraced her.
“Given her willingness to pander to the marijuana crowd, Rosenblum takes office having created significant political and legal conflicts of interest for herself as the state’s top law enforcement official,” Willamette Week reported.
One of her donors, the owner of High Hopes Farms, was featured recently in The Oregonian. He has a huge marijuana grow in Southern Oregon that includes varieties containing a THC level of 26.7 percent (vs. the 1.5 to 3 percent that Rosenblum might have smoked in her college days).
Rosenblum campaigned on being an advocate for children. How is encouraging more and stronger drugs going to help children?
Anne-Marie Slaughter would probably be supportive of Rosenblum, if for no other reason than because she is female and highly educated.
“I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place,” Slaughter concedes. Two sentences later her high regard for herself goes over the top:
“We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks,” Slaughter writes of her special sisterhood.
I don’t want to be led by Slaughter. My mother, who was a high school graduate and worked mostly as a waitress, would have considered Slaughter to be as useful to the common woman as Nancy Reagan.
Slaughter acts like she has stumbled onto a profound truth when she states that family is more important to women, while for men, work comes first. She wants to change this so that family comes first to both men and women.
Should that day come, high-powered jobs like the one she used to have may cease to mean anything. America could be a very different country, no longer a world power. There are people in Portland, where I live, who would like that. But have they thought it through?
In one revealing anecdote that Slaughter shares, she writes, “As Secretary Clinton once said in a television interview in Beijing when the interviewer asked her about Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: ‘That’s my real life.’ ”
Being Secretary of State is not real? Perhaps Atlantic magazine should have illustrated Slaughter’s essay with a little girl playing dress-up in her daddy’s clothes.
It’s hard to believe that Slaughter even worked for the State Department. Did she not notice what is happening to the rights of females on this planet? Has she not heard of the Muslim Brotherhood? Has she not read about the Pope’s attack on nuns? Does she honestly think that highly educated, feminist elites are going to save the world?
Last year, a Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper altered a photo of the White House Situation Room showing President Obama’s national security team watching the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. The doctored photo removed Hillary Clinton and another woman in the room. It turned out the paper, Der Zeitung, had a policy of not running photos of women because the mere sight of them could be sexually suggestive.
The paper apologized if it offended anyone but didn’t change its policy. Why should it? What are the Hillary Clintons and Anne-Marie Slaughters going to do about it? Offer excuses for religious freedom at the expense of female equality? (The photo that was altered initially was distributed by the White House with the requirement that it not be manipulated in any way. Had Der Zeitung sought permission to Photoshop it for religious reasons, it would not have surprised me had the White House said yes.)
Slaughter shows how much of a bubble she is living in when she concludes by offering us this high-profile female role model: Michelle Obama.
That’s right. A woman known primarily because of the man she married.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related: Rosenblum Fails the Vulnerable
If you have no sense of empathy you are labeled a socio-path. To have no sense of irony is just embarassing. Have to go now and cash my White Male Priviledge Check which with 5.00 will buy me a cup of coffee in this town.
Tom,
Nice to see you’re not letting all that privilege go to your head, which is more than can be said for Slaughter’s presumed superiority.
Pamela
One thing about your posts is that I often fail to have anything to offer because it is already well said – thus the most I can say is that I agree. And, it would seem that even though you and I come from potentially differing backgrounds – we have lived in the same universe – clearly not that of most others. Arguably, we have reached many of the same conclusions about society.
I will say this – I read the article once and will need to read it again – maybe several times. It was a hard read. My first impression is that the author is clearly one of the 1% who might be reasonably characterized as an effete elitist. Or borrowing from Spiro Agnew (of all people), the author is a member of “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”
I was struck by the arrogance in her presentation of self-importance. Self-importance is often the omnipresent fault of those who have been presented with opportunities of education and prestige; that, one surmises maybe unfairly, was aided her and/or her husband’s family wealth. Her after high school pedigree (that is what is readily available via Google) reeks of wealth and influence.
She and others like her are going to lead this nation to utopia? I don’t think so.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
Larry,
Thanks. I had forgotten Agnew’s quote, but it fits.
I’m impressed you slogged through Slaughter’s essay. When she complains about how the recent appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court were two single women, she conveniently forgets that the first female Supreme Court justice (Sandra Day O’Connor) and the second, (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) were wives and mothers. They did what they had to do and proved they were as capable as men at a time when American women faced real discrimination.
I’m not naïve about sexism in the workplace. When I worked in newsrooms, the same aggressive reporting that could earn a male reporter a slap on the back might get a female chastised for being abrasive or strident. It’s a double standard you can find in even enlightened workplaces – and with bosses of either gender.
Had Slaughter been my boss, she probably would have counseled me about not having a cooperative spirit.
Pamela
Pamela. I wonder what Betty Friedan might have said in response to Slaughter?
For a bit of amusement -how about this from http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/era.htm: “Anti-ERA organizers claimed that the ERA would deny woman’s right to be supported by her husband, privacy rights would be overturned, women would be sent into combat, and abortion rights and homosexual marriages would be upheld.”
Remember Phyllis Schlafly?
And, if feminism is a “[b]elief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes” – then how can anyone in a democracy justify opposition?
Yet – we seem to be arguing the same issues again. One step forward – two steps back?
Well, Larry, that was a detour down Memory Lane. I found myself rummaging through Susan Faludi’s “Backlash,” still an excellent book. Betty Friedan might have dismissed Slaughter as possessing “female machismo.” Friedan probably would have calculated the publicity factor when deciding what to say about Slaughter. What would get her (Friedan) the most attention? As Faludi points out, at the end of her life Friedan felt ignored by feminists and didn’t appreciate being the “mother of the movement” while more photogenic feminists got to play the glamour girls – particularly since our media culture holds glamour in higher esteem.
Schafly always struck me as one of those women who wanted to be the only woman in the room. The Faludi book has some fascinating quotes from Connie Marshner, who at the time was the highest level woman at the Heritage Foundation. Marshner recalled how impressed she was at Schafly’s ability to “control the women … When she said jump, they did. … You know, it’s very hard to organize women because they tend to be catty. They get all sidetracked on who will get what title. They just waste a lot of time.”
I could never agree with the “New Right” women’s opposition to abortion. But they were very tough compared to feminists on the left.
Pamela