Career And Family: Can We Really Have Both?

I spent many years establishing a rewarding professional life before having two children—just as my biological clock was winding down—and ever since then I've felt as though I won the lottery. A great career! A wonderful husband! Two beautiful, healthy children! Lucky me! Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that Having It All—the quintessential goal of recent generations of women—has gone out of fashion. Who knew?

One day I opened the newspaper to discover that today's young moms have nothing but scorn for the choices we baby boomers made. "The new breed of wife has learned from the '80s and '90s wives that 'having it all' is a myth," proclaimed Susan Shapiro Barash, a gender-studies professor at Marymount Manhattan College, in the New York Post.

A myth? Gosh, you could have fooled me. My own life, and those of countless peers who also enjoy happy families and challenging careers, seemed to have worked out so well. But apparently we've been deluded—or simply misguided—in our pursuit of the goals we set out to achieve so long ago.

According to Barash's book, The New Wife: The Evolving Role of the American Wife, this superior young woman has no intention of wrestling with the inevitable hassles of juggling a job and a family. She has a far cushier existence in mind for herself. "She wants a pleasurable, struggle-free life—and has no doubt she can get it," Barash, who interviewed 500 women around the country, told the Post.

A pleasurable, struggle-free life—boy, that sounds nice! Perhaps this is why the New Wife has so much company in going after her goal. Anyone who reads the news has been bombarded lately with "trend" stories about women giving up their careers to become stay-at-home moms—picture-perfect domestic icons who dote on their kids, attend every soccer game, and volunteer at school fairs. Needless to say, all this free time is made possible by the income-producing labors of their hard-working (and high-earning) husbands.

And, yes, it really is a trend. Reversing a pattern that has held for nearly 30 years, the workforce participation of married mothers with a child less than one year old dropped from 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.