I had to unsubscribe from the Huffington Post feed, because I just couldn’t keep up, so now I look to other bloggers for the heads-up on posts worth reading over there. Mojo Mom identified this post by Laura Vanderkam as a “must-read,” so I did.
Vanderkam suggests that women who have managed to “have it all” – the career, the marriage, and the kids – may have benefited by becoming mothers earlier in life, rather than later, and effectively “raising” their families and their careers at the same time.
(T)he only woman CEO of a Fortune 50 company (WellPoint’s Angela Braly) is a mom. And not just a mom of one kid, as Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work, suggests women should have to make it professionally.
Braly is worth studying, because the general sense from all the mommy-war books out there (from Get to Work to Caitlin Flanagan’s The Hell with all That, and so forth) is that it’s nearly impossible to be a good mom and have a big career simultaneously, or that it requires very stark choices, like having just one kid. Sylvia Ann Hewlett sparked a firestorm a few years ago with her claim that 49 percent of corporate women earning over $100,000 a year were childless at age 40. Then former Harvard President Larry Summers fanned the flames with his statement that the most prestigious jobs required complete devotion to work during your early years, and hence wouldn’t be open to women until they were willing to sacrifice their personal lives.
But for all this talk, many of the world’s most successful women do it all just fine. Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay, has two grown children, as does Geraldine Laybourne, the CEO of Oxygen. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House (a most prestigious job if there ever was one), has not one, but five grown children.
Emphasis on “grown.” Pelosi, 67, got married at age 23 and had her babies shortly thereafter. But many young women these days hear that they should plan their lives in the opposite order. The best way to have it all, we hear, is to focus on building a career — getting tenure, making partner, getting the corner office — and then having children. This leads to a compressed baby-making schedule, since few women manage to have children after age 40 naturally, and even assisted reproductive technologies have limited success on older women.
…I think these women are on to something, and not in a Danielle Crittenden, What Our Mothers Never Told Us anti-feminist kind of way. There is a professional case to be made for having babies young, as long as you’re willing to build a career at the same time.
For starters, even if you do plan to scale back while your kids are very small, career timetables mean less now than they used to. If you — as a woman who knows what she wants — get married at 25, have babies at 27 and 29 and spend two years in business school during that time, you can start focusing on your executive career in your early 30s as your children are getting less dependent on you. Given how many people spend their 20s finding themselves, you may actually be ahead of schedule — and you won’t face the agonizing choice later on of having babies when you’re at the top of your career.
(snip)
One of the most exasperating aspects of the mommy lit out there is that most of the writers are older. They say things like “oh, I worked like crazy until I got pregnant after a year of fertility treatments at age 39, and then I just couldn’t stomach the hours away from my baby. So I had to quit at the peak of my career.” Then they draw some conclusion about the incompatibility of work and family, the injustice of society, etc. …the worst aspect of the whole “career, then kids?” or “kids, then maybe career?” debate is that it buys into the un-feminist notion that the two can’t happen at the same time.
As Avon CEO Andrea Jung, who became a mom around age 30, once told a Wharton audience, “There are a lot of games and concerts that I miss, but never the most important ones. There are also a lot of days and meetings at Avon that I miss — but never the most important ones.” Those ground rules let her raise kids and become CEO, without the stark choices that changing the rules later can make you face.
I’m not a CEO – doubt I ever will be, don’t think I even want to be a CFO, which is more in line with my career track anyway – but overall, this was how it worked for me. I was in my early 20’s with a young child and a young career, and both grew together. Vanderkam’s comment that “When you have kids (early), you build your career according to rules that you’ll be able to live with as a family” is spot-on. You can’t set precedents of working impossible hours, or at least both parents can’t (unless you happen to have an extra wife at home), since you have other demands. You also may have to set some limits on the amount and/or type of activities your kids can participate in, or those hours will become impossible too. (And it’s never too soon to start learning about time management.)
But when I was the younger working mom, I knew few others like me. Most women my age were following the “build your career first” model, and now they’ve got the young kids and are trying to figure it all out, even in some cases “opting out” for awhile. Meanwhile, I’ve gotten to know women 10-15 years younger than I am, college graduates with young kids and lots of potential, and I’ve wondered why they’ve started families so relatively early – but Vanderkam’s post has given me some possible insight about that.
I’m dipping my toe into the “generational feminism” waters here, but I noticed that Vanderkam’s examples of women who had “made it” with career and kids at the same time are all in the front end of the Baby Boomer demographic, and a lot of the “mommy lit” she mentions is coming from later-period Boomers and Gen-Xers. No comment other than noticing.
The thing is – well, actually two things come to mind:
According to most of the research out there, having kids will likely set back a woman’s career and earning potential no matter when it happens – so is it better to have that happen earlier, when there’s less to lose?
It does not have to be a one-or-the-other choice, but it’s pretty unlikely that you can have it all, and have all of it, all of the time. No matter when you try to do it, having a career and kids at the same time will always involve a “juggle,” a “balancing act,” or whatever you want to call it. You can’t give 100% to your family and 100% to your work and be 100% successful at all of it 100% of the time; it’s physically, mentally, and emotionally improbable, not to mention mathematically impossible.
