Unfinished Business (26 page)

We can break through our current political logjams. We can reinvent ourselves once again, as we have many times before. We can be exceptional once again, not only for the speed of our computers and the power of our armies, but for the strength of our communities and the quality of our care.

In many ways this book is a love letter to my own family. They've always been the foundation of everything that I've done and all that I am; it's no surprise that you've met various Slaughters and Moravcsiks within these pages. Still, over the past few years, as I've learned to look at the world through the dual lenses of competition and care, I've come to see many of my own family members differently, with newfound respect.

All my life, I've been keenly aware of how fortunate I am to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early 1930s, as my mother was, or the 1900s, as my grandmothers were. Until recently, I saw these women in terms of what they could have been if they had only had the opportunities I have had. I'm still grateful that I came of age when those opportunities were expanding dramatically, but I now see these women—my foremothers—as having contributed just as much to society as their husbands did. They invested in their families; they educated and inspired their children, sons and daughters alike, to be what we have become; they cared for those in need, both immediate relatives and beyond. In the dry language of sociology and economics, they were the custodians of human capital. In a richer and more sensitive rhetoric, they were the nurturers of humanity itself.

My Belgian grandmother, Henriette Madeleine De Bluts
Limbosch, married my grandfather, a medical student, in 1932, and had my mother and my uncle in quick succession. When the Germans occupied Brussels in May 1940, my grandfather refused to surrender with the Belgian army and instead managed to join the Allied Forces at Dunkirk and be evacuated to England, where he later joined the Special Air Service. After living under occupation for two years, my grandmother decided she would join him. Thus began a six-month saga worthy of Hollywood. She was an attractive young woman of thirty-four who would not take no for an answer.

My brothers and I grew up on the stories of her flight. She eventually dictated her memories of the entire six-month journey—from France to Switzerland, through Spain to Portugal, and finally by boat to London. Whenever her friends in the Belgian Resistance tried to arrange a way for her to slip across the border from occupied into free France, the response that came back was “Yes, but without the children.” On that subject my grandmother was adamant. She had no idea what the war would bring, and she simply would not leave her children behind. As she explained to my mother decades later,

Looking back now, with some life experience and age, I fully realize that it was total repression of the possible looming dangers. It also was, I guess, because I have a very optimistic personality. Often I have tried to imagine myself in a difficult situation, asking myself how on earth I was going to get out of it, and never would I think that I could not resolve the problem or get out of the plight I would be in. No, I never considered that I would not be successful in this particular endeavor and that it could really be disastrous for myself and my children.

I have to smile when I read that passage. It is so much Grandmère, a woman of such iron determination that when her doctors told her much later in life that she would only hobble due to a loss of cartilage in her ankle, she simply gritted her teeth, endured the pain, and continued to stride the streets of Brussels at a ferocious pace. She managed her household, her husband's surgical practice, and the family's investments, bringing a detailed perfectionism to everything she did. She was often strict and demanding—she used to correct the thank-you letters I sent her in French and send them back to me—but she was also willing to put in an unlimited amount of time with her grandchildren on schoolwork or any other projects to help them succeed.

I have always looked at my grandmother's life and thought that her combination of determination, optimism, management ability, and ingenuity would have made her an amazing CEO—Belgian business might never have been the same! I still wish that she had had a much wider range of choices about how to live her life. But I now see a woman who made it possible for my grandfather to tend countless grateful patients, raised two successful children who have each contributed to the world in their own way, provided a critical safety net for several of her grandchildren, and brightened and improved the lives of many people.

Grandmère understood that the web of care requires work. She was a creature of duty. Her mother had insisted that her spine never touch the back of a chair when she sat (a posture lesson she tried but failed to pass on to her daughter and granddaughters). That same upright acceptance of the roles society assigned her gave shape and purpose to her life, caring not only for her husband and children, but also for her parents, my grandfather's parents, friends, neighbors, and even Marie, her longtime housekeeper. It is society as a whole that assigns value and prestige to
what people do; as I see it now, she added every bit as much social value caring for her family and community as her husband did caring for his patients.

My American grandmother, whom I knew as Ma, was cut from quite different cloth. Born Mary McBee Hoke in 1902, she grew up as an only child in Lincolnton, North Carolina, a small town where her family had lived for generations. When her father was named to the supreme court of North Carolina, the family moved to Raleigh. Her mother died suddenly when my grandmother was only eighteen, leaving her to be her father's companion for a few short years until he died as well.

She was a young woman of means with a large circle of friends in the mid-1920s; her house quickly became the center of her set's social life. She had graduated from what was then Saint Mary's College—a school that then ran from elementary school through the first two years of college—and read law briefly with a local attorney. She traveled on her own, to Boston and even to Europe. The picture I have of her is of an independent, energetic, daring young woman ready to shape her own life.

Then she met Edward “Butch” Slaughter, an assistant football coach at North Carolina State University. She fell in love; they married in 1930. Shortly thereafter my grandfather took a job as the line coach at the University of Virginia and eventually moved his young family to Charlottesville, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Charlottesville was just several hours to the north, but in Ma's eyes it was a completely different world: stiffer, more formal, and more socially conscious. She became the coach's wife rather than the judge's daughter; she devoted herself to her family but never recovered her former self-reliant and social self.

At her funeral I talked about her love of words, how her children and grandchildren could recite the poems that she had memorized in her own childhood. I always thought she would
have been a wonderful English professor. Or a lawyer, using her phenomenal memory for detail to build her case. She could sit down next to anyone from anywhere in the South, ask a few questions, and figure out how our family and theirs intertwined at some point over the past two centuries. The failure to harness that talent for a more productive use than identifying “kissing cousins” is a classic example of how societies lose out when they do not allow their women to achieve their full potential.

I have thus always thought of Ma's life as a prime example of unfulfilled potential. And yet, to me, her first grandchild and only granddaughter, she was everything a grandmother should be. I wear her Saint Mary's school ring, with the initials MMH, on my little finger; rare is the day that I do not look down at it and remember her. When I think of how her unconditional love and unflagging support for my every move have been part of the bedrock on which my own achievements have been built, I value what she did as much as I regret what she could not do.

I've changed my lenses on some of my current family members as well. After my article came out, a close childhood friend wrote and observed how different my father had always been from hers and from the other fathers we both knew growing up. I wrote Dad an email thanking him and wondering, for the first time, how it was that he came to be so progressive for a man in Virginia in the 1960s. He told me that as a trial lawyer he had handled a certain number of divorce cases in which men left their wives, who then had no means of supporting themselves. He vowed at that point that his daughter would never find herself in that position.

I thus now see my father more in the round. I realize that his support for my career came not just from pride in what he thought I could accomplish but also from care—a determination that I be able to support myself if need be. But as progressive as he
was, it never would have occurred to him to raise his sons—my brothers—to embrace caregiving as much as he raised me to be a breadwinner. One of those brothers, Bryan, has a busy legal practice, four children, and a very equal marriage to my sister-in-law Jen, who is also a lawyer. Jen chose to work part-time after their first child was born, but Bryan is a deeply committed father who attributes their division of labor much more to relative earnings than to desire. It would never have occurred to
me
before I wrote this book that Bryan might in fact want to work more flexibly at some point while his children are growing up so he could spend more time with them.

I also once would have interpreted Jen's choice to slow down as a decision to take herself off the fast track, reflecting a level of career ambition that was simply lower than mine. I would have seen her as a “mother who is working part-time” married to a full-time professional—exactly the way the labor market types the millions of women who have made the same decision. I now see her as the talented lawyer and manager she is, one who has chosen to focus more on her family for this period in her life. I see the ways that her choice benefits all of us as a society. And I see that when the frenetic activity of raising four children draws to a close, as it inevitably will, she will still have at least fifteen years of active working life ahead of her.

I hope that after reading this book you will look around and see the world—including your own family members—differently too. Above all, I hope that we can all imagine different and much more equal lives for our children. When I look at our sons, a lump comes to my throat. They were twelve and ten when I left for Washington in 2009, still very much boys. Now they are young men, towering over me in ways I simply cannot get used to, with their own friends and plans and dreams. As I write this, with Edward leaving for college, they are on the edge of the nest.

That makes it a particularly poignant moment to reflect on what has always been one of my deepest fears about having sons. The old saw “A son is a son until he takes a wife; a daughter is a daughter for the rest of her life” does not apply so much with my brothers and sisters-in-law, but I have certainly seen its truth often enough with my friends. When women take over as the caring anchors of their own families, they so often tend the relationships with their parents and siblings much more closely than with their in-laws.

I worry about that with our boys. What I want more than anything for them is that they will bring home wonderful mates who will become part of our family and that they will continue to define themselves as sons, brothers, husbands, and, someday, fathers as much as they embrace their professional identities. I hope that they will find work they love as much as I love mine, but whatever they end up doing, I want them to know that I will be as proud of them for putting in the time and effort necessary to build strong families of their own—however they choose to construct them—as for anything else they might achieve. And I hope that they will be equally willing to support and be supported by their spouses—with both cash and care.

Let's hope that by the time they reach that stage, society will agree with me.

Family is the foundation of our flourishing. At least since the Industrial Revolution, we have split work and family into two different spheres, one the world of men and the other the world of women. As more and more women entered the world of work, the relationship between work and family became one of profound tension, each tugging at the other. In fact, however, family makes work possible in the same way work makes family possible.
It's up to us to create the conditions in which the two can reinforce each other.

I am hopeful for the coming decades. The millennial generation, which includes my sons, seems to understand the value of pushing past what David Brooks calls “
the big Me.” Emily Esfahani Smith and Stanford marketing professor Jennifer L. Aaker have written about “millennial searchers,” drawing on research showing that three-fourths of millennials seek “meaningful work.” Although meaning is inevitably subjective, “
a defining feature is connection to something bigger than the self. People who lead meaningful lives feel connected to others, to work, to a life purpose, and the world itself.” Nourishing human connection is the essence of care.

We can, all of us, stand up for care. We can change how we think, how we talk, how we plan and work and vote. We can come together as women and men. We can finish the business that our mothers and grandmothers began, and begin a new revolution of our own.

The thinking in this book is some of the hardest work I have ever done. A week before “Why Women Still Can't Have It All” was published I told my agent that under no circumstances was I going to write a book about work and family. I had a foreign policy book I wanted to write (and still do). Two weeks later I was signing a contract. What changed my mind was the tsunami of response to the article, which convinced me that many more voices need to be heard in this conversation. My first thank-you goes to the thousands of readers who wrote to me directly or who commented, debated, and posted in online conversations after the article came out. Some of you are friends and former students; most of you are complete strangers. I never managed to respond to many of you, which I still regret. But I read what you wrote, including the critiques, and you shaped my thinking.

Your contributions continued through years of what I came to think of as “call and response research.” I gave hundreds of speeches to women's groups: septuagenarians in Sarasota, investment bankers, sales representatives, students, diplomats, lawyers, human resources managers, entrepreneurs, and community groups. Every time, after listening to your questions and comments, I would write down my notes and impressions afterward. One of those encounters haunts me still: the quiet woman who hung back amid the crush of people who came up after a public
lecture and then pulled me aside just as I was leaving to tell me that twenty-odd years ago she had a son who was severely disabled. She left her job, and her dreams, to care for him. She thanked me for my article and my talk, saying that for those twenty years she had felt like a failure. I can still see her face and remember my own emotion at the thought that someone of such courage and strength should carry the additional burden of not living up to social expectations. She is a different kind of role model, one that U.S. society, at least, could use more of. It is we who should be thanking her and the millions like her who put their families ahead of their careers.

As I embarked on this book, I found myself in an entire new world of academic research, commentary, reporting, public opinion, blog posts, and tweets. I suddenly became a member of an extraordinary group of women and men who have been thinking and writing about work and family issues for years, who included me and sent a steady stream of links to articles, books, and opinion. Thanks to my Twitter buddies Nanette Fondas, Cali Yost, Kristin Maschka, Patrick Fitzgibbons, and many others whom I know only by their Twitter handles; to journalists Maria Shriver, Lisa Belkin, KJ Dell'Antonia, Anand Giridharadas, and Tim Kreider; and to banker and philanthropist Adrienne Arsht. A special thank-you to Deborah Fallows, who published
A Mother's Work
in 1985, a book that was thirty years ahead of its time and that she and I would both call
A Parent's Work
today.

In the academy and think-tank world, I am grateful above all to Joan Williams, author of the classic
Unbending Gender
and one of the first people I called when the media requests poured in. Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute, Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes of the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College, Sara McLanahan and her colleagues at the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton,
Stewart Friedman and his Work/Life Integration Project at the Wharton School, Robin Ely at Harvard Business School, Chai Feldblum and Katie Corrigan at Georgetown Law School, and Joanna Barsh and the Centered Leadership Project at McKinsey have all done invaluable work and been particularly helpful. That entire community owes a debt to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Kathleen Christensen, who for decades has systematically funded work on women, work, and families.

Many great scholars in microeconomics, psychology, sociology, political science, and gender studies have devoted their lives to the research, analysis, and hard conceptual and theoretical work that have advanced the boundaries of our thinking and knowledge about gender equality. As an academic in another field, I have had to accept that I could not possibly do your work justice, but let me at least acknowledge here my gratitude and recognize that I stand on your shoulders: Claudia Goldin, Cecilia Rouse, Lawrence Katz, Kathleen Gerson, Pamela Stone, Arlie Hochschild, Stephanie Coontz, Lois Hoffman, Lise Youngblade, Francine Blau, Joan Tronto, Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, David A. J. Richards, Mahzarin Banaji, Leslie Perlow, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, and so many more.

The hard work of writing is distilling so much material from so many different sources into a single set of ideas and stories that make those ideas come alive. I am grateful to a small army of student volunteers who self-organized to help me keep track of all the emails flooding into my inbox: Brett Keller, Cat Moody, Alexandra Utsey, Mica Bumpus, and Carl Westphal. Another group of remarkable young women came out of the woodwork to provide research assistance. To Hannah Safford, Berta Baquer, Rebekah Grindlay, Julie Rose, Anne Frances Durfee, Lili Timmerman, Joyce Zhang, and Julia Taylor Kennedy, this book could not have been written without you.

Jessica Grose was indispensable as a researcher, storyteller, and all-purpose sounding board. Grace Rosen played a brief but helpful role tracking down endnotes. And special thanks to my trusty team of readers: Allison Stanger, Bill Burke-White, Nora Joffe Elish, Janie Battle Richards, and Conor Williams. Tom Hale and Michele Norris-Johnson read critical sections on very short notice, for which I am grateful. Nin Andrews offered valuable advice on the title and the cover; Judy Edersheim lent me her life story.

Bob and Nan Keohane's contributions to this book extend far beyond their wise comments. Their blend of mutual love, support, and accomplishment has long inspired Andy and me, and their friendship, wine, and lively conversation at regular intervals brightened long weekends of writing.

I became president and CEO of New America in September 2013. Special thanks go to my colleagues on the leadership team, who were patient and supportive over the many months when I was “finishing” the book. I am particularly grateful to Lisa Guernsey and her early-education team; they opened my eyes to the dramatic impact of care and education from ages zero through eight; also to Liza Mundy, Elizabeth Weingarten, and Brigid Schulte for their brilliant research and writing in our Breadwinning and Caregiving program; and to David Gray for being another important male voice in this space.

I also want to thank David Bradley and his brilliant team at
The Atlantic
—Corby Kummer, Don Peck, Scott Stossel, and James Bennet—for seeing and believing in what ultimately became “Why Women Still Can't Have It All,” without which this book never would have happened. And thanks to my original team of readers—Shirley Tilghman, Martha Minow, Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Kate Reilly, Rebecca Brubaker, and Rebecca Stone.

In a book about care, I must also thank the many people
who have taken care of me in various ways over the past three years: Diane Spiegel, Joyce Hofmann, Steve Kennelly, Aziz el-Badaoui, Jimmy Reed, and my Washington roommates and longtime friends Amy McIntosh and Jeff Toobin.

My editing team at Random House were with me every step of the way. The brilliant, warm, and wonderful woman who convinced me to bring my book to Random House, Susan Kamil, said at our first meeting, “Tell me about your grandmothers,” opening the door to a different conception of the book I wanted to write. With her inimitable combination of praise and persuasion, she pushed me to push myself far beyond my
Atlantic
article.

Jessica Sindler and Sam Nicholson worked with Susan and helped sharpen many insights. As the lone man in the enterprise, Sam was particularly helpful. I will also never forget his earnest lecture on “the art of omission,” without a trace of the irony that might have accompanied a recent Princeton graduate explaining to a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School how to write! But I will write better in the future in part due to his efforts. The Random House marketing and publicity teams also deserve great credit: Theresa Zoro, Sally Marvin, London King, Poonam Mantha, Leigh Marchant, Andrea DeWerd, and Max Minckler. My terrific copy editors, Amy Ryan and Beth Pearson; proofreader Nancy Elgin; book designer Susan Turner and jacket designer Ben Wiseman; and production manager Sandra Sjursen. And to so many others at Random House, from president and publisher Gina Centrello to deputy publisher Tom Perry to so many of you whom I never met but who wrestled with different aspects of how to title, present, and market this book. Thanks also to Amanda Panitch at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin for being there in the crunch.

My assistant Hana Passen began working for me in September 2012; she has seen me through every phase of the writing
process. I call her my “assistant,” but she is really my life manager, organizing everything and everyone from teams of research assistants to impromptu focus groups who reacted to titles and covers. She also read and commented on multiple drafts of the manuscript. Thank you!

Terry Murphy is proof that allowing people who work with you to put their families first will ensure that they do great work and stay with you for life. Terry began working for me at Harvard Law School in the late 1990s; when she brought her son home from Romania I arranged to let her work remotely as needed. Fifteen years later, she has gotten a Ph.D. herself, become a professional editor, raised a son and a daughter, and remained completely indispensable to me. She has read drafts, provided terrific comments, hunted down sources, and checked endnotes. As a mother, she has also
lived
this book.

Will Lippincott at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin is simply the world's best agent. Through visits, emails, and phone calls, he was always there. I am proud to have him represent me and to count him as a friend.

I have written about my family a great deal in these pages. As always, they were my strongest support group, through three years of holidays and vacations punctuated by “How's the book going?” They provided advice, edits, and refuge to get the final draft done. One of my friends once told me that I “won the parent lottery.” And so I did: My mother, Anne Slaughter, whose physical and spiritual beauty still lights up a room at eighty. My father, Ned Slaughter, who has taught us all the meaning of character and integrity. My siblings, Bryan and Hoke Slaughter, and my sisters-in-law, Laurel Beckett Slaughter and Jennifer Ciocca Slaughter—long may we dance together! A special shout-out to Hoke, who read the manuscript twice, gave me careful comments, and sent so many emails with suggestions that my Random House
team came to know him by name. And to my family on Andy's side: Francesca Moravcsik, who has proved that “phase three” can include becoming a championship senior athlete; my sister-in-law Julia Moravcsik, a strong and resilient single mother; the talented Edward Fletcher, who is cousin and mentor all at once; and Edith Moravcsik, who takes care of us all.

Thanks also to my extended family, who have helped teach me the many meanings of care: Alexander Slaughter, Mary Peeples Slaughter, Mary Hoke Slaughter, David and Jodie Slaughter, Georgean Ciocca, Jean-Michel Limbosch, Christiane Leclère, Caroline Limbosch, Henri Van de Velde, Jean-Frédéric Limbosch, Michèle Werdel, and Patrick Limbosch. And to my nieces and nephews—Jane Slaughter, Libby Slaughter, Cate Slaughter, Michael Slaughter, Gwen Slaughter, and Sean Bowling—I hope that you will read this book when you grow up and that it will help to shape your choices. I am especially proud of my oldest niece, Lilly Slaughter, whose first job was as an assistant kindergarten teacher. She poured the love and lessons her parents taught her directly into her young charges.

Enough. I clearly have
not
learned the art of omission. But this book is dedicated to my three men. Andy, in so many ways this is your story as well as mine: a tale of two strong-willed people with multiple desires and ambitions figuring out what a genuinely equal marriage looks like, with a deep well of love and commitment but plenty of bumps along the way. You have been willing to follow me—to Princeton, to China, to government and back—racking up your own professional successes but also becoming lead parent in ways neither of us fully expected. More than anyone else, you make it possible for me to do what I do. Best of all, you make me laugh—often at myself. Thank you, for everything.

To Edward and Alexander, I have so often felt like the world's
biggest hypocrite writing this book. Writing about my decision to come home to be with you, only to be glued to my computer screen trying to get this done! As you know better than anyone, my definition of being “home” has many permutations. “The next two weeks are going to be rough, but after that…” Still, I am proud and happy to be your mother. And no matter what you may think (or hope!), the business of parenting is never finished.