A Bite of Post-Feminism

When my friend Anne and I had to cram for a calculus exam in high school, she brought a plate of warm cookies to our study session. Perhaps it was the melted chunks of chocolate, or perhaps it was my heightened appreciation for anything and everything that did not pertain to calculus, but a homemade cookie had never tasted so good. “I’ve started baking, and I love it,” she announced when I complimented the cookies. “I can’t wait to be a stay-at-home mom—a glamorous and highly refined stay-at-home mom, naturally. I’m going to read Somerset Maugham all day, and when my kids come home from school I’ll make them brownies.”

That was in November. A few weeks later, Anne received a letter of acceptance from one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation and gladly enrolled.

When I talked with her recently, however, she again brought up her plans to one day commit herself fully to the domestic scene. Nor is she alone: recent surveys of women currently attending Ivy League institutions have shown that a remarkable number already expect to replace their careers with part-time jobs, or simply abandon them entirely, once they start having children.

What makes this phenomenon intriguing is that its subtly yet substantially regressive nature is masked by a veneer of progressiveness. Unlike those of the 1950s, today’s women are not forced to play any traditional female roles. Because of this, some might argue that the gender revolution has pushed through a full cycle: young women like Anne are now assuming the roles their grandmothers once filled, not by default but as a deliberate choice.

And yet, even as I congratulated Anne on having such a clear idea of what she wanted from her future—I was still quite undecided myself—I couldn’t help but feel a little uncomfortable with her reasoning. After all, implicit in the choice she had made was a belief in the necessity of choosing. As one Yale undergraduate interviewed in The New York Times put it flatly, “You can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time. You always have to choose one over the other.”

This was hardly a novel argument, and yet it was rather unsettling that a bright and ambitious young woman should say it and, by all appearances, genuinely believe it. After all, haven’t we—all of us at Harvard, and Yale, and other such places—spent the past 20 years of our lives mastering the art of having our cake and eating it too? Isn’t that how we got here in the first place—by finding that elusive balance between schoolwork and sleep, between dozens of extracurricular initiatives and a fulfilling social life? To be sure, the commitments we juggle now are significantly different from those that lie ahead. But the distinction does little to explain the observed double standard in ambition and levels of self-confidence. The only plausible explanation seems to be that the belief in a mandatory future of “either/or”—either a successful family or a successful career—has been instilled so thoroughly in the social psyche that even the most able and aspiring minds of the generation, which once believed religiously in having it all, now aren’t even motivated to try.

As I whimsically envisioned Anne seated at a sparkling kitchen table and helping her daughter with her calculus homework, however, I also realized this: regardless of whether her decision was progressive or regressive from a sociological or historical standpoint, it could have no connotation either way on an individual level. The time and effort she was investing in her education and personal credentials could not be judged by whether she ultimately became a doctor or a stay-at-home mom, by how she personally chose to define happiness and success.

I mentioned this realization to my mother when I called her later that evening. Since she had raised me while simultaneously pursuing her career as a professor of the sciences, I had expected her to fully advocate the importance of having an independent job. To my surprise, however, she approved of the new generation of Ivy League homemakers. “Some stereotypes are easier to change than others,” she said. “Maybe this will help eliminate the stereotype that stay-at-home moms are less intellectual.” Then she added: “You even used to say yourself that it was so much nicer whenever I took a day off from work and stayed at home. You loved the cookies.”

Rena Xu ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a biochemical sciences concentrator in Eliot House.