Women can’t have it all – because the game is rigged

[kpete]

Work-life balance is a myth. It’s time for women to stop blaming themselves and start demanding change.

BY
LAURIE PENNY


Can women have it all? That this is still a major ethical dilemma of mainstream feminism shows how far we’ve still got to go. Yes, even though they’ve taken the nudes out of Playboy. The answer is less important than the fact that the question is vapid. Here's a better one: when did the message that ‘girls can do anything’ get twisted into the edict: ‘girls must do everything?’

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The message of “Unfinished Business” is that in order to keep everyone happy, you must simply try harder. It’s difficult to please your boss, your husband and your kids at once, so you must think harder about how you’re going to do it without dissolving into a tangle of shredded nerves in a crumpled skirt-suit. All of this is just an updated version of what we have been told for centuries: women are supposed to work twice as hard as men, for half the reward, a saying I've always understood as a coded threat.


Somehow, modern women have allowed ourselves to be convinced that the right to work outside ‘the home’ is the only liberation that matters - never mind that working-class women and women of colour have always worked outside the home. Slaughter isn’t really talking to them, a fact that she acknowledges in three lines in the introduction, before going back to reframe the debate towards those women lucky enough enough to have a supportive partner, a lucrative career, and the option to pay other people to look after their kids sometimes. Note that nobody is asking whether the nanny can have it all, even if she wants it.

For those few women who might be able to have ‘it all’, the programme sounds utterly exhausting. As I toiled through the latter chapters of career advice, wondering exactly when this notional working mother is meant to sleep, I realised with horror that Slaughter is talking to me. Specifically to me, and to people like me- middle-class, largely white women in professional careers who are at the stage of thinking seriously about how we might to juggle work and children. We’re not supposed to ask if we want to do that, only how we’ll manage.




http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/women-can-t-have-it-all-because-game-rigged

[leftyladyfrommo]

1. Germaine Greer said that what have gotten so far is all the work.

So many women seem to just be working themselves to death.

It's all right to not want to do everything. It's all right to want to raise your kids right. It's all right to want to just work at your job and not be married and not have kids. It's all right to want to have kids but not want to be married. It's all right to not care if you don't make a lot of money. It's all right if you don't want to be married, have kids. It's all right to just not want to be married at all.

It's all right to just pick and choose. You don't need to die at an early age of exhaustion.