review: Wonder Women

Given how much time I have for reading at the moment, let alone writing about what I’m reading, I think book reviews may be few and far between in my posts this year. Seeing, however, as I did manage to read the not very long and articulately written Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection (2013) by Debora L. Spar, I thought I may as well review it. 

But not because it has anything very groundbreaking to offer, I’m sorry to say.

What is it about books that reference the fabulous Wonder Woman in the title that leave me cold? The last one I reviewed - by Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger - was also disappointing and often for similar reasons as Spar’s. 

Like a number of high-profile American women writers - I’m thinking particularly of Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg here - Spar is concerned with the idea of ‘having it all.’ I don’t know why I get suckered into reading these books - maybe because I live in the hope that there might be a high-profile, best-selling book informed by feminism that offers a bit more to their wide readership than stories about the author and her friends.

Spar is the president of all-female Barnard College in the US, having moved there from a professorship at the male-dominated Harvard Business School - and some of the most interesting parts of the book are her comparisons between the two elite institutions and their different gendered styles and discourses (comparisons prefaced to the point of parody with ‘not better, not worse, just different.’) I was particularly interested in her accounts of decision-making styles, and mentoring students, as well as the ‘controversy’ over President Obama giving the commencement address at Barnard (‘why would he waste his time talking to a bunch of girls?!”) These could’ve have opened the way for a more specific and nuanced analysis of the way gender operates in higher education in the United States.

Sadly, these anecdotes were almost buried in her much more generalised main focus on beauty, love, sex, motherhood, housework and aging. Not that these topics aren’t important - and the section on aging was particularly interesting - but, given her background in government, business and economics, she could’ve also drawn on feminist research in these areas to look at the broader picture for women.

Like Haussegger - and also Sandberg and, to a degree, Slaughter - the main problem with Spar’s book is its assumptions. It starts from the individual but fails to ‘connect the dots’ and see how individuals are constituted as subjects within the culture in which they live. She does go one better than Haussegger, however, and uses the word ‘patriarchy’ all of once in the book. No other similar term for systemic gender and sexual inequality - institutional sexism, indirect discrimination, structural discrimination, or even rape culture - is used in the book. In fact, while the book looks at internalised violence - such as eating disorders (Spar is an anorexia survivor and writes poignantly about what drove her to this: the quest for perfection of the book’s subtitle) - it barely touches on violence against women, rape culture, sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis of sex.

Spar’s thesis then is that her generation of women have sacrificed themselves on the altar of perfection thanks to three main sources: their mothers (of course! for having expectations that their daughters will have careers as well as families), the media (about which there is actually very little critique), and ‘the feminists’ (not feminists, or feminism, or even named women with a feminist agenda, but ‘the feminists’ - there’s a distancing phrase if I ever I saw one!) (pp16-20). 

Despite the mention of ‘power’ in the book’s subtitle there is very little analysis of the way power is created and disseminated. For Spar, power simply seems to mean ‘being in power’, and her answer appears to be for career-focussed women to join the echelons of power and transform it from within. But if you only understand power as a construction of consciously rational individuals then the only way you can make sense of inequality is by resorting to the level of crude conspiracy theory: a bunch of rich white guys get together and plot to keep everyone else in the entire world under their thumb. Sure, this might be the effect of patriarchy and/or capitalism and/or white supremicist culture but it’s not really how it works nor why it persists.

The other thing that irked me was her attitude towards feminism.  She is at pains to point out at the beginning of the book that, even as she became highly educated and took on high-powered jobs, she actively distanced herself from ‘hairy-legged feminism’ (aargh - self-hating cliche alert!). Now that she’s older and wiser, and has tried to balance the main competing demands of being female (i.e. having a career and having kids), she’s begun to see that feminism might in fact have lots of interesting things to say about her experiences.

Mmm hmmm.

Her book then quotes from feminist research, gives a potted history of key moments in white Western feminism, and provides pithy epigrams from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as well as Tina Fey’s Bossypants. She writes that her book espouses a ‘revised and somewhat reluctant feminism,’ a ‘softer and gentler form’ that isn’t so invested in proving women’s equality and quits blaming men. And despite her book’s avowed interest in power, she actively says she’s not interested in ‘examining the power hierarchies that undeniably still separate men from women’ but rather in ‘practical issues’ (pp 10-11).

Doh! 

Is it just me or does she not really get what ‘the feminists’ have been not shaving their legs to tackle? What is the ‘softer, gentler’ feminism meant not to threaten? And as for not blaming men (yawn) see my previous comments about patriarchal structures. The quest for equality is not so much about proving that women can do what men can do, but dismantling the structures and systems that disempower women: substantive equality. I don’t know what’s ‘impractical’ about that.

Genuinely empowering women to be leaders in their communities is undoubtedly transformational, as numerous commentators including Marilyn Waring, Amartya Sen and even Sheryl Sandberg have pointed out. The crucial point, however, is in what leadership means. Spar et al seems to understand leadership as a means for top-down transformation within existing power structures, while for others it means grassroots action, self-determination or changing the nature of power itself.

In short, I’m kind of bored with these ‘can we have it all?’ books. Nobody has it all. Creating the desire to ‘have it all’ is part of the ideology of capitalism not feminism. I’d like to hear more from women who are less concerned about buying into this mythology - even if it to critique it. Today, for example, I read about research on the experiences of young Maaori and migrant women in New Zealand maternity services and the biases, barriers and stigmatisation they faced in accessing those services. 

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself, could it be that commercial publishers have much more of a vested interest in selling books that trade in desire and fantasy rather than changing the world?

review: Wonder Woman

Unfortunately, this is not a review of the comic, film or TV series of Wonder Woman, the feminist super-hero, but a review of Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger’s 2005 book Wonder Woman: The myth of ‘having it all’.  

Its starting point is a provocative and visceral article entitled 'The Sins of our Feminist Mothers' Haussegger wrote for The Age in 2002. In it, she bared her soul about the recent and devastating discovery in her late 30s that she was not able to have children. Her article went further, questioning whether feminism has sold women a myth: that despite its important gains, it had made women like her believe that they could ‘have it all,’ when in fact they might really have to choose between career success or children.

This book grew out of the huge reaction, both positive and negative, to that article: 

That sense of being sold ‘a crock’ was a common theme in the outpourings. What fascinated me about many of these letters, emails and commentaries was that it seemed no matter where a woman stood, be she mother, mother-to-be or non-mother, something was wrong. It was as if a scabby old scar had been ripped off a festering wound. (p 25)

Haussegger clearly intends her book to be a Betty Friedan-esque expose of a kind of modern-day ‘problem with no name’ (p 289). She tries to connect her own experience with that of the women who responded to her article - both the mothers who felt short-changed by the experience of motherhood (whether finding out having kids was not all it was cracked up to be or missing out on career opportunities) and the women who did not have children (whether the ‘child-free' women who adamantly insisted on their right not to breed, or women who did not have children for one reason or another).

On the positive side, the personal stories that Haussegger recounts in the book are incredibly moving, and her ability to connect with the women telling them is certainly part of that. Reading about Carolyn, a woman who struggled with numerous fertility treatments for well over a decade was almost unbearable, and left me hoping her story had a happy ending. It did. In her early 40s, Carolyn eventually gave birth to a much-wanted son. Other women who struggled with fertility, and whose stories feature in the same chapter, were not so fortunate.  

What is clear from the stories Haussegger tells is that women occupy a spectrum when it comes to their reproductive capabilities: from the extremes of the militant child-free women who voluntarily sterilised themselves to women who know from a young age that being a mother is a core part of their identity and thrive on having large families. Whatever position women occupy on this spectrum, both their humanity and their rights are not solely defined by their biology. It’s not simply a question of mother versus non-mother, and it’s  shame that Haussegger presents it that way.

What lets this book down, then, is its attempts to connect the stories together into a political analysis. Haussegger makes clear that she’s read several key feminist works, yet she somehow manages to lay ‘the blame’ for all women’s dissatisfactions with their lives at its door. It’s quite astounding that terms like ‘patriarchy’ (or a similar structural term) or even ‘power’ barely rate a mention in the book. Even the notion of assigning blame to someone or something for what, at least in Haussegger's own case, sounds like a particularly cruel twist of fate, seems to stop at the level of the individual and her ‘choices’ (or 'non-choices'). 

Several of the chapters in the book see either the women she quotes or Haussegger herself blaming ‘other’ women for their problems. A particularly egregious example is provided by one of the child-free women who, in the course of asserting the validity of her own life-choice (fine), took a swipe at all people who care for children on more than a casual basis by saying that all they do is ‘sit around all day’ (and paid parental leave is an 'unfair advantage' that involves 'getting paid to sit around all day' p 239)! Frankly, this is both offensive and wrong, and not exactly a great basis for solidarity around respecting all the subject positions that women occupy. 

Rather, the heart of the issue is that a patriarchal system primarily defines all women by their biology - how they look, how sexually available they may or may not be, whether or not they have children - regardless of whatever else they have to offer. That will manifest in different ways depending on what other subject positions an individual woman occupies: some women will be derided for being successful in traditionally male roles and not having children (just this week, yet another extremely offensive and sexist attack on Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard proves this point), while others will be seen as ‘doing nothing all day’, as well as losing out on any number of economic benefits, because they are stay-at-home mothers. Blaming each other or an abstract spectre called ‘feminism’ for this only serves to leave dominant structures of power intact.

Commentator Leslie Cannold is spot on about the central problem of this book:

While Haussegger is a wonderful raconteur, and demonstrates a clear gift for exploring emotions - her own and, through interview, those of others - she desperately lacks any capacity to think her way out of the complex problems she explores in Wonder Woman.  

Despite having read most seminal and popular feminist texts ... she clearly failed to absorb their central and most important message: that the personal is political. Without this understanding, or some structural framework to make sense of her experience and those of other women in terms other than those proffered by liberal individualism, Haussegger lacks the tools to extricate herself from the circular path of self-blame and DIY solutions that have characterised her journey, and to cut a clear path forward for her female readers. (Cannold, The Age)

And it got me thinking about the way she defined the problem too. 

‘Having it all’ seems a popular fantasy of the new millennium. In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter provocatively opined in The Atlantic that, for women ‘of her demographic’ - ones who have reaped all the apparent advantages from the feminist revolution - ‘having it all’ (i.e. successful career and family) was still not a realistic possibility and young women were being done a disservice to be told that it was.

While elements of both Slaughter’s article and Hausseger’s book resonated with me, I was principally left wondering about this mythical notion of ‘having it all’. This seems like a distortion of feminism to me. ‘Having it all’ sounds much more like the acquisitive language of capitalism - particularly when it is mentioned in the same breath as ‘choices’ - rather than the language of feminism - which has drawn on revolutionary language like ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberation’ or rights-based language such as ‘equality’ (ideally, of the substantive rather than the merely formal kind), or ‘the right to choose’ (i.e. the right to self-determination and bodily autonomy when it comes to reproduction). It also implies that all men ‘have it all’, which is clearly far from the case. 

I’m not the only one perplexed about the ‘having it all’ fantasy. Commentator Tressie McMillan Cottom says that Slaughter’s article left her cold because she did not relate to its concerns, whether from the subject position of her race or class, or ideological orientation: 

The article seemed to not only take for granted that all women have been told that they should have it all but that all women have–if not intimate–then definitely not adversarial relationships with power .... More often than not, power has worked to undermine my reality and my existence. And I don’t mean that in some fuzzy theoretical sense. I mean that when power, for example, starts talking about reforming welfare it is usually meant to be an act made on people who look like me; people with whom I identify even if I do not share their economic status. (Cottom, The Atlantic)

I too was somewhat bothered by both Slaughter and Hausseger’s analysis which speaks mostly to women in elite positions of power. This is not to downgrade the many challenges that women have faced to access those positions and crack the glass ceiling. Rather it is to note that most working women - and men, for that matter - are not CEOs or star journalists or politicians - they’re people making ends meet or, where they have some choice in the matter, trying to engage in work that matters to them (which may not be of the most well-remunerated kind). An analysis that fails to take account of this - and other realities, as Cottom attest - can only ever be partial and limited.

Unfortunately, especially given her public profile in Australia, Haussegger's book falls into this category.

Timing it right

A couple of years ago, when I was only just pregnant, I went to a birthday lunch attended by a range of extended family members who were, shall we say, of a significant age. At one point, I got talking to a woman who was I’m not sure how many cousins removed from me.  I don’t know how we got onto the topic of children - I was still within the 12-week wall of disclosure and hadn’t broadcast my condition - but she told me about her brood of children and how she’d had a fifth child  at the ripe old age of 40, well after her first four, who were evenly and properly spaced in her twenties. Bumping into an acquaintance at the doctor’s surgery while going to a routine check-up, she was told ‘Oh Mrs C_____, you’re the talk of the town!’

OK, it was a small town, but still. Clearly, even a married woman couldn’t avoid the gentle opprobrium of being the talk of the town for having what was thought to be an inappropriately-timed baby, a visible sign that the couple in question were still getting busy at an unseemly age.

This was, of course, a wee while ago now.  Mrs C______ was the talk of her town in the early 1970s, having had most of her children, as was the done thing, in her twenties in the early 1960s.

In New Zealand, as in a number of other western countries, the average age of first births has risen sharply since the mid-twentieth centruy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the average age of first births was much lower, averaging in the early 20s. In the 1975, the median age was 25. In 2012, Statistics New Zealand established, with the usual caveats that: "the median age of mothers giving birth to their first child is roughly 28 years, two years younger than the average across all mothers. The median age for both childbirth and birth of first child has remained steady since 2001. The median age of women giving birth to their second child is roughly 32 years.' Furthermore, women are, overall, having fewer children. 

Clearly, women’s consensus on when ‘the right time’ is to have  a baby has shifted in the last half-century. But this ‘consensus’ is not only the result of individual ‘choice’ (and biological capability), but also societal pressure. Teenage mothers are frowned on, as are mothers over forty. Even those past their early 30s receive some censure, not least in the description of their pregnancies. At 34, my first pregnancy was clinically described as “geriatric primigravida’ or, in other words, ‘way old at time of first pregnancy’ (humph!). Furthermore, societal approval or censure depends on who it is having children - if white and middle-class, you should be having children and are being selfish by leaving it late or not at all; if brown and poor, you should be having few to no children, so as to minimise bludging off the state.

But it is not simply societal pressure that polices ‘the right time.’ Finding ‘the right time’ - assuming a woman has some choice in the matter - to have children in order to balance the competing demands of career - and again assuming this is something a woman wants - and family has been a plank of second and third-wave feminism. And it varies from woman to woman, career to career.  Emily Monosson’s edited collection about the experience of women scientists, for example, traced the consequences for each mother in the timing of their children. Some had their children as graduate students, and several of those then had to negotiate ‘alternative career paths’ or effectively position themselves as unecumbered in order to fight for tenure (a couple had partners who took on the full-time care-giving role in order to do this).  Others had their children once they had received tenure, but had to either change the focus of their work - for example, pursuing a policy path rather than a lab-based path - or fight to be taken seriously by minimising the ‘distractions’ from their work. In no case did any of these mothers have an easy time of it.  Those who came closest were those whose partners shouldered the traditionally female role of primary care-giver.

There seems to be an idea that if only the magical right time can be found, women can plan their families and careers, with minimal financial and emotional penalties for motherhood.  But when is it?  Early, so you can physically recover more quickly, have more energy to parent, and years yet to decide on a career? Or later, so you can establish yourself in a career, negotiate good benefits and be a more mature parent?  There are pros and cons to both. On the web, parenting sites, medical sites, financial planning sites, life-coaching sites, and even respectable news sites too abound with varying answers to the question of ‘when is the right time to have children’?

It's a key issue covered by Anne-Marie Slaughter in her provocative 2012 article, ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’, in which, among other things, she debunked the myth of ‘finding the right time.’ She comments:

The most important sequencing issue is when to have children ... the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make. You should be able to have a family if you want one - however and whenever your life circumstances allow - and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.

A range of books by other feminist writers - Anne Crittenden, Madeleine Kunin, Marilyn Waring, to name but a few - have detailed exactly what these trade-offs are: loss of income, loss of status, loss of future benefits (such a retirement savings), increased insecurity in the event of marital breakdown. And an increasing percentage of women in western countries - up to 30% of women of child-bearing age - are apparently deciding - or failing not to decide - that the trade-offs are not worth it. 

Yet that still means around 60-70% of women still are having children, planned or unplanned, old, median-aged or young, rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, aware of the costs involved ... or not. These are for a range of reasons - familial pressure being a frequently cited one - but one could not really consider them ‘rational choices’ if the pros and cons were solely rationally weighed up. One of my husband’s former co-workers once said that ‘there would never be a right time to have kids if you ever really thought about it.’  Ensuring that both individual women and societies don’t ever ‘really think about it’ seems a given.

I mean, if a society really thought about what it takes to raise children then it would channel its tax dollars into measures that support families and encouraged the gun-shy (rather than coercing the downright ’nos’, of course) into parenthood: paid parental leave for all families, universal family support payments throughout childhood, paternity leave, properly subsidised and adequately remunerated childcare, and so on. 

Now, when is the right time to have that conversation?

eating your cake too?

As I’ve been experiencing, thinking, reading, and writing about motherhood and feminism, there’s been something that has continued to bug me. The more I encounter the language of ‘income penalties’, ‘mommy tracks’, ‘balancing acts’, and ‘having it all’, alongside the demands for high-quality childcare, extended paid parental leave, and family subsidies, the more it bugs me. And what might ‘it’ be?

It’s cake. The having of and, more especially, the eating of it too.

As I read Rebecca Asher’s book Shattered, which articulated policy programmes for more equitable parenting parental leave, I found myself questioning her assumptions. She talked about ‘income penalties’ faced by mothers: assuming a heterosexual, stable couple - not always a given - one or other parent would suffer an income penalty by staying at home, for however little time, to look after young children in terms of lost earnings and opportunities. But, even if our hypothetical couple were able to get their young child into high-quality childcare so both parents could work full-time at demanding careers without any discernible penalty, someone pays the income penalty. Parents pay less than they earn to the carers of their children: early childhood care is still an overwhelmingly female occupation, and still a comparatively poorly-paid one. Based on this policy solution, solving ‘income penalties’ for one group of parents, means shifting the financial penalties of parenthood on to someone else.

I also wondered about measures of success based solely on income. If I take my own example, measured solely on income, I have lost very little  by staying at home for over a year. My income has risen as it would’ve whether I was actually doing my job or not. Despite the lost earnings over a few months, the threat to my career is fairly negligible. I appreciate that that is far from the case for every mother, even ones in similar positions to me. But it does make me wonder about the narrow definitions of success: income level (high and continually rising), career trajectory (aim for the top and keep going till you get there) and conspicuous consumption (buy as much as you can for as much as you can). Without being naive about power and how it is exercised, isn’t this buying in to extremely narrow patriarchal definitions of success? 

I think this is true, but, at the same time, women do earn less than men (even if they don’t have children), and there are fewer women in power. Patriarchal definitions of success might be narrow, but they are still powerful and pervasive. It is still depressingly common to hear of women who are fired, demoted or otherwise pushed out of their careers by getting pregnant or having children. In Emily Monosson’s edited collection Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out (2008), a graduate scientist describes being fired for getting pregnant .... in 2006. She has successfully taken action against her institution, but warns others that sex discrimination based on motherhood is still a real and present danger, even in apparently liberal academic institutions. 

Other essays in Monosson’s fascinating collection detail the lives and choices of women scientists who are trying to balance careers and motherhood. Covering a period from the 1970s - where women scientists were still a relative rarity - to the 2000s - where young women make up around a third of science graduates, the book describes varying routes to success. Some of these involve the traditional route, with high levels of support from partners, extended family and quality child-carers (all, I note, to make the impact on the institution rather than the families negligible). Others involve paths less taken that were not in any way planned or expected.  

One could argue that the authors of the essays are at pains to champion their own choices and inevitable compromises, but I think there is more to it than that. After having children, priorities change, and passions can become more focussed: while all of the women in this book are scientists - in the broadest definition of the term - many have turned their passion for science into policy, teaching, advocacy, and research that can be conducted outside the laboratory. They do so partly in the hope of making the world a better place, partly because there is better flexibility in public service, teaching and non-laboratory-based work, and partly because they want to role-model female career success for their children (especially their daughters). 

Inspiring as these stories are, they also got me thinking. These women are highly-educated and ambitious, yet most have made sacrifices to start families and maintain a career. With one or two exceptions in the thirty-four stories on offer, their partners did not sacrifice to the same level. Is it then the case - however much we might not want to admit it - that it isn't possible to have your cake and eat it too?

Anne-Marie Slaughter, professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University, is no longer so sure that it is possible, at least not without serious societal change. Imbibing the second-wave feminist mantra that women can have it all, Slaughter was able to balance her academic career and family to some extent. Until she took up a powerful position in Washington DC at as the first female director of policy planning at the State Department, that is.  After two years of relentlessly long hours, and continual travel, she gave up her role, returned to her teaching job at Princeton, and wrote a provocative article, published in July 2012 in the Atlantic: ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’.

Slaughter frankly says:

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.

Slaughter believes that It is time for women in leadership positions to recognise that ‘although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination’.

She then identifies a series of ‘half-truths’ women tell themselves about having it all, all of which try to address structural problems at the individual level:

• ‘It’s possible, if you’re just committed enough’: and if you can’t balance career and family, and let the former slide to focus on the latter, you are ‘letting the side down’.
• ‘It’s possible, if you marry the right person’: sure having a supportive partner is great, and a woman’s career can flourish if her partner is effectively the ‘stay-at-home mum’. It’s more unusual, but it is still essentially the same breadwinner-homemaker model.
• ‘It’s possible, if you sequence it right’: have babies young, then try to get ahead (um, then you’ll be at least a decade behind everyone else, and be battling ageism as well as sexism) or progress your career first, then have babies (fine, but then you might experience physiological problems you hadn’t anticipated or risk being marginalised during a crucial career advancement period). Bottom-line? There is no right time.

To be clear, after dealing with these ‘half-truths’, she does not then go on to say women can’t have it all, so why bother trying? Instead, she offers some hard-won insight on what cultural changes need to be made to enable women - or more particularly, women of her demographic (i.e. ‘highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place’) - to be successful at home and at work. These include: changing the culture of ‘face-time’; revaluing family values; redefining the arc of a successful career; rediscovering the pursuit of happiness; and enlisting men. 

As a teacher, she sees a role for herself in creating future generations who will be able to have it all:

I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.

After reading about the women scientists, and about Slaughter’s experiences, I sat looking at my own piece of cake. I opted to stay at home with my baby for nearly eighteen months, during which time my job was held open for me. I was only paid for a fraction of that time, but I have still received incremental increases in my rate of pay. I had the option to determine when and how I would return to work: full-time, transitioning from part-time to full-time, or part-time. For now, I have chosen to return part-time, and have a job-share partner, who also has a young child. It may not seem like a high-powered return to work, but, for now, it is working for me and my family. The time out has made me really think a lot more - and in concrete and practical ways - about what I (and we) want our lives and priorities to be. I want a successful career - and I have a few ideas up my sleeve about how that might unfold in the next three decades - but I also want a successful family too.

So rather than having my cake and eating it too, I think I’ll have a small piece for now, and save the rest for later.