“I’m not sure. I don’t know,” she says. There’s a tinge of anxiety in her voice.
“But you’re so smart,” he says. “You were on the dean’s list. I thought you wanted to go to law school.”
A pause. “I would be getting out of law school just at the moment I want my children. I certainly don’t want to go work in an office. I saw my mother do that. I want to be with my children, not kill myself moving up the career ladder.”
I heard this theme again and again as I traveled all over America and Europe talking about my book “Great Dames: What I Learned from Older Women,” a collection of biographical portraits of 10 enduring and enchanting women such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Kay Thompson (author of “Eloise”) and civil-rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley, who made their marks on the last century. I have had a rare and lucky chance to listen to daughters, mothers and grandmothers as they talk about the choices they face–and the choices they’ve made. Many young women express surprising ambivalence about their working mothers’ lives and are attracted to a different goal: to be with their children as they grow and not rely on babysitters, as their mothers did.
Every generation resists the one before it. For years, I fought my own mother’s great-dame strategies. “The poet Yeats believed the mask you put on is the mask you become,” she said, a mantra that was wholly antithetical to my generation’s passion for speaking out. Some of our daughters look at our lives and, instead of our accomplishments, they see complete exhaustion. Cultural historian Ann Douglas calls this period of American life “a serious retro time.” Medical and law schools and boardrooms are now more welcoming to women yet, according to a recent study, 67 percent of women in two-career marriages wish they could work at home. The romance for fun and profit strategies of several of the great dames that seemed phony and anachronistic to my generation of 1970s pioneers suddenly are recycled weekly by the “Sex and the City” libertines and the date-desperate Ally McBeal.
My generation of women has made a complicated journey. Out of college in the 1970s, we were filled with our own sense of power. Some of us have hit glass ceilings, operated households from mobile phones or let nannies raise our children. Is our generation having a collective nervous breakdown, questioning the choices we made as younger women? More and more when my friends and I get together our conversations are of our mothers and our daughters, our fears and doubts and pride, as we examine the last 25 years of our lives. “My daughter is giving up her career to have children,” one high-powered friend sadly told another recently, unhappy that she had not been more of an inspiration to her child.
In the 1970s twentysomething Manhattan women gathered for consciousness-raising groups. Today, women of their age are flocking to, yes, cooking clubs, where the conversation seems more Jane Austen than Andrea Dworkin: “I want to be married by the time I am 28. So that means I have to be engaged by the time I am 27. Figure a year to date… That means I need to meet my future husband this year.” The question for them, as it has always been for ambitious women, is which will take precedence in the tangle of love and power and career.
Recently, a letter arrived at my house from a member of the Brown University class of 2004. “It is absurd that you can ‘report’ that women are returning to a 1950s way of thinking, when all professional and academic statistics show exactly the opposite and so does your very own daughter.” The letter writer was, in fact, my daughter, Casey, who at 18 is seeking to live out what I had hoped for her–complete independence in her gender-free mind. Will she be able to? Susan Faludi has observed that we have seen a 160-year panorama of women advancing and retreating; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s progress was threatened by late Victorian political and religious mores which accused women who postponed childbearing of triggering “race suicide.” As the flappers advanced and women voted, the 1920s and ’30s also saw a new wave of labor and federal laws that forced thousands of women out of work. There were fewer women doctors in 1930 than in 1910. This history has reverberated through the decades right up to this moment when it echoed in my own house. My mother used to write me: “Your need to work is a coping mechanism for not having the proper man in your life.” In this she was repeating a belief articulated by a Barnard College sociologist, who decreed the rise in female autonomy was responsible for the collapse of the family. We are told that the 21st century belongs to women as we ascend to leadership in every field, yet pediatricians and the breast-feeding lobby terrorize working mothers who prefer formula. And the rise of Martha Stewart’s empire, with its promise of having the actual time to spend at home working on spun sugar lanterns, has become a feminist porn fantasy. In my more optimistic moments, I try to view the quivers on the fault line of second-wave feminism as expressions of human freedom, not a frightened step backward.
“The women’s movement is supposed to be about choice,” Charlotte said in a recent episode of “Sex and the City,” as she told Miranda that she had decided to quit her work at a gallery. “And if I choose to quit my job, that is my choice.” Miranda, Carrie and Samantha had tried to change her mind, but she was adamant. “My choice,” she said. It was impossible not to hear the anguish in her voice.
