Anne-Marie Slaughter and the fiction of 'have-it-all' feminism
When Anne-Marie Slaughter's article "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" hit the web this week, the reaction was what you have come to expect with any in-your-face article about gender: polarized, vitriolic, and most of all, extensive.
There was both stinging criticism and emphatic praise for Slaughter's piece, which argues that women cannot excel both as high-powered professionals and moms in America today ("having it all"
, as we have been long promised by feminists. And, as detailed by the New York Times, Slaughter's assessment has furthered debate into how moms should handle work, and contrasts with Facebook exec's Sheryl Sandberg's "higher-harder-faster school of female achievement".
Slaughter ultimately feels that women can achieve far better career-family balance – that we can "have it all" – but not until major cultural shifts against phallocentric structures like "time macho" workaholism take place. Some people were not very happy, however, with the article's presentation of feminism: that it had lied to a generation of women and grossly oversimplified the tricky realities of working motherhood. Slaughter wrote:
"Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating 'you can have it all' is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk."
More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/22/annemarie-slaughter-haveitall-feminism?newsfeed=true
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getting in trouble in school, with minimal or no child support coming in, combined with all the household drudgeries involved in maintaining a roof over your heads, (all those glamorous, exciting things, you know, like paying bills, laundry, and cleaning bathrooms, blahblahblah), means we had it all, well....my, weren't both my sisters and I the lucky ones!
Yes, we really had it all for several years there; that's a hard, cold fact. We survived, and what didn't kill us definitely made us stronger, and wiser. We're certainly never going to "have it all" ever again. 
I haven't read the book, so I don't feel qualified to comment on it, but...
I think that the materialistic concept of "having it all" really is primarily a symptom of Americanism/(Globalism). Another way of selling the American Dream while straining the workforce for profit. Feminism didn't tell me how or what to be, it simply helped make me more aware of some of the struggles I face, and that my predecessors faced, and that we can choose to be who and how we are, and want to be, and reinforced that I am not internally bound by the restrictions of patriarchy. Feminism helped me understand and define many of my obstacles, struggles, and choices.
Maybe some women got a far more materialistic message from Feminism; maybe I'm just lucky that I was not smart enough to understand that part of the manual. Those stupid Virginia Slims commercials somehow never got into my head.
It wasn't some misguided dictate of Feminism that landed me in a temporarily almost impossible to manage situation for awhile, it was a somewhat bizarre chain of events mostly borne of a chaotic, materialistic greed driven system/society, and some necessary choices on my part.
Since my children grew up, the old battles seem to have ended for awhile, and my life has been pretty wonderful, and Feminism has played a big part in helping me to understand how to manifest this wonder - now that I have the time and space to actually think about it.
Single mom with two kids, me and my younger brother. She got to "have it all" when Dad left and she had to re-enter the work force.
I remember a lot of magazine articles in the 80's, or advertizing, it's getting hazy--showing a woman in a suit holding a baby. They were geared toward women with high-end or executive careers. There was the unspoken expectation that superwoman could hold down both roles without even breaking a nail. There was a Diane Keaton movie called Baby Boom in 1987:
I'm not really sure what the message was we were supposed to get from all of that. Only having a child made you human if you were a woman in a professional career track, otherwise people would think you were an unfeminine ball-buster?
make more profit for United Global Enterprises, Inc.
From my POV, it's not Feminism that has lied to women. The big lie is the corporate media manufactured illusion of the "Ideal Feminist Superwoman".
My simple concept of Feminism is that it is a collection of individuals and movements aiming at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women.
But after reading the whole article, I re-evaluated and realized that I am not at all qualified to make judgments here. Now I don't even know if I'm "qualified" to even post on DU anymore.
I'm very much of a different culture than the majority of Americans. I have never lived in a city, and only lived in or near a town for brief periods, and I don't feel intrinsically a part of Euro-Judeo-Christian collective consciousness. Having many material things, being wealthy, has never been a goal, or marker for success in life, for me. So, even though I am relatively well educated, after reading the article, it struck me that my perspective, opinions, and observations are, to an extent, that of a cultural outsider, forcing me to question their validity in terms of the position of women in American society.
Even when I was struggling with everything, I lived on the fringe of a system that I never believed in, and even saw, as a child, as a dangerous illusion, and a trap. I only really participated in it to any significant degree when it literally came for me, and forced me into it, and was my only reasonable option.
Anne-Marie Slaughter sees change coming from deep within a system in which she is clearly fully immersed. I see, and have always seen, the system as a trap, and a sucker's game, a broken system that I can basically only change as an individual by how I conduct my life and to the extent that I can control my circumstances. And I'm all for assisting collectives inside and outside the system, collectives that I feel further social evolution, by deliberately acting to establish a world where the well being of people, and of all beings, and not the profits of a few individuals, are the primary considerations for social and economic activity.
Uh-oh! I need to go...a hornet just got into my little house somehow; I'm going to try to gently convince her to move toward, and then fly out of, an open window. I'll do my best to only frighten her as little as I possibly can, so that she can get back outside, and make her way home again.
