What do we tell young women entering adulthood, perhaps finishing college, thinking about their future, about what life choices to make and how to make those choices? What do we tell young women who’ve grown up with “girl boss” memes and mom blogs portraying maternal perfection? What do we tell young who’ve grown up in an era when acting “like a man’, whether in dating and sexual behavior, or in other pursuits, is an aim? When assuming the garb and the superficial behaviors statistically associated with males is the way to lean in, to be a boss, to advance within a patriarchal society. But who are nonetheless women, and as such, are probabilistically likely to eventually seek to have and care for a family and find the aforementioned advice hard to juggle. What do we tell young women who’ve been cheered to be hard charging careerists, with no context or nuance, with no attendant conversation about how one considers and perhaps integrates or balances a family life?
When we don’t tell young women the truth? When we don’t have honest, complete, contextual, nuanced conversations, what do we get? What do we create? We get incredible levels of burnout. We get women dropping out of the workforce at high rates. We get increased rates of stress, anxiety, depression and stress related illnesses. We get familial and spousal conflict and high rates of divorce. We get heartbreak and disenchantment.
Why aren’t we having these true, complete, and nuanced conversations with young women? Every one on one conversation I’ve hard with women who are striving to maintain careers and raise families, while unique in it’s own ways, has reflected so many of these shared struggles. Yet I don’t think I hear cultural conversations that reflect this nuance and complexity. Maybe Im missing them> Maybe. But it seems to me that most of what I hear is a preponderance of the of the being a true modern women means you should lean in to your career (with no talk of trade-offs) ilk or perhaps the occasional uber-traditionalist singing praises of leaving the career path and embracing stay-at-home motherhood as the holy grail (and none to logistically or financially feasible for so many!).
Who would be having these conversation with young women? Their moms? Moms who came of age during second wave feminism, through the fight for equal rights? I wonder if these moms, who may have seized upon the access to career opportunities, who jumped into work that was accessible to them for the first time, simply felt they couldn’t talk about the conflicts, about the competing values, about the time tradeoffs, for fear of losing the gains, for fear of playing in to the opponents of women’s rights, to those who wished to enforce conventional norms and limits for women, or for fear of seeming ungrateful. And then daughters who saw moms who seemed to do it all, to handle it all, while sacrificing their own passions, hobbies, health, who maybe behind closed doors struggled, drank a few too many glasses of wine, felt lost in their marriages.
What other options are there? Who was, who is, out there to tell the complex truths to young women? I am honestly struggling with this. I feel like I’m flailing around in the surf trying to get my footing and being unable to get purchase on something solid. The only moment recently I felt like my feet glanced against the ground, Im thinking the only way is for everyday working women with families to speak up and tell the whole truth in a public way, without fearing that they will be seen as weak for admitting challenge, conflict, hardship. Without being seen as unprofessional or unambitious for admitting their attachment and commitment to their family, for admitting they might not want to work 50 or 60 or 80 hrs a week. Without being seen as throwbacks or failures for pointing out that one might need to think about family goals at the same time one might be considering important big steps toward professional development, that one might in fact choose to moderate the size of their professional leaps, the degree of their inward leans with an eye toward hopes for building and nurturing a family. I think this is essentially what Im writing about every time I write, in one way or another. And I suspect it will be that way for a long time, that I will keep being compelled to tell this same story over and over in a slightly different way until I feel like I’ve gotten my feet planted on the sand and I can look around and see that the conversations in the world about women and work and motherhood are changing.
Afterword: Despite being a longtime fan of the Femsplainer’s podcast, I only recently became aware of Danielle Crittenden’s book “What Our Mother’s Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Women”, published in 1999. I’ve begun reading it. She addresses an array of topics some aligned with my rant above. And yet 22 years later, I worry that we are still reckoning with the same confusions, misinformation, identity crises, and elusive happiness.