Pink Dresses and Hard Choices

I've just about finished reading last month's "women's issue" of the New Yorker. Instead of the signature snub-nosed man adorning its cover, it features a woman in pink peering through a lorgnette. The articles inside range from a scrutiny of Las Vegas hotel workers to a sketch by playwright Wendy Wasserstein about her over-achieving older sister.

The one that struck me the most, however, is called "Mom Overboard!" and portrays a woman who left the fast track at work to stay home with her kids. Fed up with a child who called the sitter "Mama" and surprised by the "double-edged knife" of the maternal instinct, Sera stayed home with her children--and ended up micromanaging their every waking hour.

I also just finished reading Nancy F. Cott's book from the 1980s, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. In it, she describes the origins of feminism in the 1910s and 1920s. Apparently, women social scientists in the 1920s were asking questions about juggling marriage and a career: "Were wives and mothers able to perform on the job? What careers did they follow? Was the married career woman endangering her husband's and children's welfare? Who did the housework?"

As I was reading, I kept thinking how familiar all those questions seem. Although many aspects of women's lives have changed since the 1920s--it is now expected and accepted that most women will work, and women are closer to parity with men in jobs than they ever have been--it struck me how many of the questions simply haven't gone away. The dilemma of balancing career and family has not disappeared; it has simply changed form.

Before I came to college, I never really thought about such questions. I was going to Harvard. I could be whatever I chose. At 13, I had wanted to be a mathematician; at 17, I had thought I would be an English professor; at 20, who knew what I would want? This was the 1990s; my options were endless.

And they still are, in terms of careers. But in high school, I didn't think about managing life outside a career. My mother had always worked, and yet she still had time to spend with me; I had just assumed I would be able to work and also spend lots of time with my children.

Only later did I realize my mom's career was special; she was and still is a high-school English teacher who works long hours, but who only has to be at work until 2 or 3 p.m. each day. My father, also a high school teacher, could pick me up early so that I wasn't in day care all day.

I also learned later that she made sure to have the last period of school as her free period, so she could leave at lunch and be with me. Even now, as department chair at her school, she gives first priority for free periods to teachers with small children.

So I've given up any illusions of effortlessly balancing career and family, unless I become a teacher, which I'm not sure I will. I don't want to put my kids in day care from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, but what's the option for a two-career family? A nanny whom the kids will call "Mama"? I certainly don't want to become like the New Yorker's Sera, who went from extremes at work to extremes with her children.

I guess there will have to be compromises: part-time schedules for either me or my husband when the children are young, jobs that allow flexibility in hours and in career tracks. But I'm still chagrined by that notion, because no one ever told me when I was young that there would be compromises. As I grew up, the "superwoman" notion was alive and well in my mind.

If I had to make the choice, I suppose I would rather sacrifice parts of my career to spend more time with my family, at least to some extent. Yet that bothers me too, in a time when women can and do achieve high positions in the professional world.

I wonder if the woman in the old-fashioned pink dress on the cover of the New Yorker has ever thought about these things. Somehow, I doubt it.

Sarah J. Schaffer's column appears on alternate Fridays.