aging parents or other relatives. We will also end up ignoring the reality of the one in three of the nation’s women who live in poverty or on the brink of it and who are frequently pushed out of a job and into despair.
On a personal level, the trick is to balance encouragement with expectation. To be clear—to ourselves, our families, and our employers—that putting yourself forward is important at the right moment, but so is pushing back against rules, structures, attitudes, and assumptions that still support a straight-on career path and stigmatize any worker who deviates from it, deferring promotions and bigger jobs to be able to spend time with loved ones. To see the whole picture, not just the shining role models at the top, but the employees, every bit as talented and motivated, who were pushed or shut out of leadership opportunities as their lives took unexpected detours.
Telling whole truths and seeing the whole picture is the right place to start. But we can’t do this alone. The men in our lives have their own mantras, serving up their own preferred version of the truth or simply the truths they grew up with. They too need to ask some hard questions.
2
HALF-TRUTHS ABOUT MEN
Over the past five decades, feminism has opened new doors of change through the process of questioning our assumptions about women, gender, and the language, categories, and stereotypes that we cling to. It is now time to start questioning our assumptions about men.
The three mantras that I examine here do not pop up nearly as often on the feminist radar as phrases like “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at the same time.” But they are often pulled out as trump cards whenever discussions of women, work, and family arise. I have heard them often from men themselves, as well as from women who have absorbed these messages as the accepted order of things. The first one, “Men can’t have it all either,” immediately deflects attention away from what remains a genuine inequality between many men and many women. The second, “Children need their mother,” has taken on the sanctity of mom and apple pie, at least in the United States. How on earth could you challenge that? And the third, “A man’s job is to provide,” goes all the way back to the Bible.
These statements are also half-truths. But determining what is true, or at least plausible, and what is a mass of sticky, biasedbelief—like the popcorn glued to the floor of the movie theater—starts the process of unpacking our certainties and convictions. We have to be able to see them clearly before we can begin to dislodge them.
HALF-TRUTH: “MEN CAN’T HAVE IT ALL EITHER”
I N THE LAST FEW YEARS , many people have criticized the entire idea of “having it all.” Some criticism came from feminists who argued that Madison Avenue had created the construct of women having it all as a way of selling stressed-out working mothers a bill of goods—literally. Rebecca Traister at
Salon
proposed that we do away entirely with the phrase “having it all,” pointing out that it is a frame that inevitably makes women seem selfish and piggish, no matter how much we try to explain that all we are asking for is a career and a family too, just like men have. It is also a phrase that strikes an ugly, unfeeling note at a time when millions of people are struggling to have enough to make ends meet.
To complicate matters further, many men are quick to claim that they don’t have it all either. The most common point made is that while women who have careers and families can’t pursue their careers as fully as they would like, men who have careers and families can’t spend as much time with their families as they would like. That is a trade-off that many men feel they have no choice but to accept.
When I first started hearing men push back, my knee-jerk reaction was to be skeptical. Of course no one has it all, if by that we mean having everything you want and
On a personal level, the trick is to balance encouragement with expectation. To be clear—to ourselves, our families, and our employers—that putting yourself forward is important at the right moment, but so is pushing back against rules, structures, attitudes, and assumptions that still support a straight-on career path and stigmatize any worker who deviates from it, deferring promotions and bigger jobs to be able to spend time with loved ones. To see the whole picture, not just the shining role models at the top, but the employees, every bit as talented and motivated, who were pushed or shut out of leadership opportunities as their lives took unexpected detours.
Telling whole truths and seeing the whole picture is the right place to start. But we can’t do this alone. The men in our lives have their own mantras, serving up their own preferred version of the truth or simply the truths they grew up with. They too need to ask some hard questions.
2
HALF-TRUTHS ABOUT MEN
Over the past five decades, feminism has opened new doors of change through the process of questioning our assumptions about women, gender, and the language, categories, and stereotypes that we cling to. It is now time to start questioning our assumptions about men.
The three mantras that I examine here do not pop up nearly as often on the feminist radar as phrases like “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at the same time.” But they are often pulled out as trump cards whenever discussions of women, work, and family arise. I have heard them often from men themselves, as well as from women who have absorbed these messages as the accepted order of things. The first one, “Men can’t have it all either,” immediately deflects attention away from what remains a genuine inequality between many men and many women. The second, “Children need their mother,” has taken on the sanctity of mom and apple pie, at least in the United States. How on earth could you challenge that? And the third, “A man’s job is to provide,” goes all the way back to the Bible.
These statements are also half-truths. But determining what is true, or at least plausible, and what is a mass of sticky, biasedbelief—like the popcorn glued to the floor of the movie theater—starts the process of unpacking our certainties and convictions. We have to be able to see them clearly before we can begin to dislodge them.
HALF-TRUTH: “MEN CAN’T HAVE IT ALL EITHER”
I N THE LAST FEW YEARS , many people have criticized the entire idea of “having it all.” Some criticism came from feminists who argued that Madison Avenue had created the construct of women having it all as a way of selling stressed-out working mothers a bill of goods—literally. Rebecca Traister at
Salon
proposed that we do away entirely with the phrase “having it all,” pointing out that it is a frame that inevitably makes women seem selfish and piggish, no matter how much we try to explain that all we are asking for is a career and a family too, just like men have. It is also a phrase that strikes an ugly, unfeeling note at a time when millions of people are struggling to have enough to make ends meet.
To complicate matters further, many men are quick to claim that they don’t have it all either. The most common point made is that while women who have careers and families can’t pursue their careers as fully as they would like, men who have careers and families can’t spend as much time with their families as they would like. That is a trade-off that many men feel they have no choice but to accept.
When I first started hearing men push back, my knee-jerk reaction was to be skeptical. Of course no one has it all, if by that we mean having everything you want and
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