IT IS with considerable trepidation that I tread ever so carefully into the debate that continues to rage on this page and elsewhere about whether working mothers can or should “have it all”.
In the July edition of Atlantic magazine, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote an extended piece on why she resigned her high-level post as director of policy planning at the US state department to spend more time with her family.
Since Slaughter’s piece was published, hundreds and thousands of words have been written and spoken in response to it. Very few of them have come from male voices. I don’t dare to claim to speak for all males but I feel there are some points worth making in the debate from the perspective of our gender.
First, the central difficulty in Slaughter’s situation was geographic dislocation. She was not making a choice as to whether she worked or not: she had to choose between one high-profile job and another. Taking up an appointment in Hillary Clinton’s state department required a move from New Jersey to Washington DC.
Because her children were still at high school, she and her husband chose not to relocate them from their home in Princeton, New Jersey.
This meant she did not see them all week and had long commutes by air each weekend.
It was difficulties with trying to play an equal parenting role long-distance that prompted her to leave Washington and return home to resume her former – and demanding – role as a professor at Princeton University. It meant she was at home at night more often than not and while she still has to travel occasionally she can now work it around or compensate for it within her family schedule.
This week, many British writers, again almost all female, took positions on both sides of the career-versus-mothering argument, in light of the decision by the leading Conservative backbench MP Louise Mensch to resign from Westminster. She has three young children and told prime minister David Cameron in her resignation letter that “despite my best efforts I was unable to make the balancing act work for my family”.
However, her decision was, like Slaughter’s, forced by geographical considerations. She has, like all her Westminster colleagues outside London, had to juggle the demands of parliament with time spent in and commuting to her constituency. Her situation is further complicated by the fact that her husband, who manages the rock group Metallica, is in the United States a lot. It was their desire to be together as a family more often that prompted her to leave Westminster and move, with her three children from her first marriage, to New York to join her husband.
Similar issues arose for the former Fine Gael TD Olwyn Enright, who gave up her Dáil seat before the 2011 election. She is the mother of a young family and is married to the Donegal deputy Joe McHugh. It is hardly surprising that it became impossible for them to continue to meet the demands of both being Dáil deputies in our highly competitive electoral system and having to be in Dublin, Offaly and Donegal most weeks.
Of the many discussions I have had with women since Slaughter’s article appeared, one of the most fascinating was with former minister Mary O’Rourke. She juggled the demands of constituency, commuting, ministerial office and rearing two sons a generation before Mensch or Enright struggled to do so.
O’Rourke still clearly worries, however, whether she sold her boys and her husband Enda short by giving so much time to politics and spending so much time away from Athlone. It’s a theme about which she put pen to paper months before Slaughter’s piece appeared. We will have to wait until her biography is published in October to see to what conclusions, if any, she came.
The second point of note is that, as Slaughter accepted in her piece, some of the juggling issues she faced arose from the level at which she worked, and some were easier to address because of her financial means.
Women in most families dwell in economic circumstances entirely different from Slaughter’s, with financial pressures shaping the context in which decisions about personal fulfilment through full-time work in or outside the home are made. Many of the women who write and contribute to media generally have the luxury of viewing this debate from better economic circumstances than most.
It seems to me that Slaughter’s article was actually about narrower issues than some have since sought to suggest. It was not about whether as a mother she should want to be with her children all day.
It was about whether as a mother she could see her children for some time most days; be at home most nights; and be available on those days when an emergency for them arose. It was about a desire to be available and spend time with her children to this extent; and to be able to direct their care and parent their lives with her spouse by being on the spot more often.
These are issues and challenges faced by fathers as well as mothers. Many women commentators have again, in this debate, been guilty of repeating outdated stereotypes of men. There has been a working assumption that fathers somehow can have it all. A father’s desire and need to spend more time with his children and be more involved in their lives, while perhaps not as primal, is also strong.
Fathers also struggle with the difficulties of juggling the demands of work and family, particularly when they are geographically complicated. There are men for whom the job or, for a period, the construction projects, the assignment or indeed the court cases require them to be many miles from home for extended periods. For them the issues flagged by Slaughter’s piece are also real.