FIRST THINGS October2013

NO HAPPY HARMONYCareer and motherhood will always

tragically conflict, Elizabeth Corey argues.

t least once a semester, a

young female student will

.come to my office with

questions about an assignment, and after we have finished our official busi-

ness, will mention her concerns about the future: whether she should apply

to medical school or take the less demanding physician's assistant route, or

whether she should marry right away and move with her husband for his

job. Often she is the one with the better opportunity, and she wonders if she

can expect her fiancé to follow her as she pursues graduate education at a

prestigious East Coast school. Even if she isn't in a romantic relationship, she

wonders what it will mean for her goals when she is. Inevitably, she confesses

that she is worried about the difficulty of pursuing both family and career.

Elizabeth Corey is associate professor of political science in the Honors College at Baylor University.

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NO HAPPY HARMONY

The decisions are not simple. "Why," asked Taylor,a former student, "if I sense a professional vocation,should I not pursue it? Failing to do so would be likeburying my talents in the ground." Her insight is per-haps the one unproblematic and entirely admirablelegacy of feminism: Because women are human, theyshould be free to pursue excellence, just as men do.

Another student quoted to me a line from the post-communion prayer of the Anglican liturgy, wherethe congregation beseeches God for the grace andassistance to "do all such good works as thou hastprepared for us to walk in." She confessed that shehas always loved this prayer because she sees herselfas blessed with multiple talents, but has never beenquite clear about how to pursue them all.

T^ hese sorts of conversations weren't com-mon when I graduated from Oberlin Col-lege in the early 1990s. Nobody talkedof marriage or children. The very ideaof marriage was considered odd and old-

fashioned, although most of my friends did marryeventually, after a period of experimentation andcohabitation. Perhaps this is still the case at Oberlinand elsewhere, but my students at Baylor worry aboutmarriage and family.

They are no less ambitious than women in anyother American college, and most are as focusedon success as are their male peers. But many comefrom conservative Christian backgrounds, where thenatural differences between men and women are cele-brated and mothers often stay at home. They appre-ciate that a woman's role in the family is somethingunique and valuable, and they are not persuadedby radical feminist arguments that marriage andmotherhood are mere oppression. How then, theywonder, can the longing to have and care for chil-dren be combined with a sincere desire to achievesomething of value outside the home? •

Thus they ask a question at the forefront of pop-ular literature about women and work: How canwomen "balance" professional interests and family?Like countless other women, I've had to juggle my ob-ligations as a mother and wife with the demands firstof graduate study and then of teaching and scholar-ship. But I've slowly come to realize that this quest forbalance, the desire to reconcile radically conflictingdemands, is misguided. Work and family evoke fromus two distinct modes of being and of relation to oth-ers. The conflicts between these modes cannot, if weare honest with ourselves, be wished away or ignored.

I've never had much interest in academic femi-nism. At Oberlin, I was inundated with the mostradical varieties of feminist thought and practice.

Words that are now mostly laughed at—herstory,womyn—were used in earnest back then. The wom-en's studies department brought in feminist activistsas lecturers, and the library routinely featured posterpresentations about the objectification of women ontelevision and in print. There was one single-sexwomen's dormitory at Oberlin, intended as a havenfor self-identified lesbians or for those who were"seeking." All of this was foreign to me—anotherworld from the one I had left behind in conservativesouth Louisiana.

Recent feminist writing, though, has be-gun to say not that women should forgetabout being wives and mothers and startto act more like men but that they shouldsomehow play both roles at once. They

should strive for success in the same way as men butalso be wives and mothers.

The most famous example of this genre is Anne-Marie Slaughter's autobiographical essay in theAtlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," whichmade the rounds last year. Having given up a promis-ing career at the State Department because she felt aduty to spend more time caring for her teenage son,she returned from Washington (with some regret) toresume her position as a tenured professor at Prince-ton. But she sees this as something of a failure, or atleast an unsatisfying compromise. She hopes that oth-ers will not have to make such choices in the future. Ifonly there were as many women as men on corporateboards and in the Senate and on the courts, and per-haps even a woman president. This is her solution.

In Newsweek, Debora Spar, president of Bar-nard College, suggests a more "feminine" visionof reform. This includes sharing child care amongneighborhood women and generally seeking solidar-ity with others in similar situations, as women inother countries have (supposedly) always done—notcompeting but cooperating. She diagnoses the prob-lem as excessive individualism and competitiveness;we should foster communitarian arrangements forworking women. If only women were nicer to oneanother and more supportive!

Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Face-book, sees the answer in the empowerment of wom-en. "We hold ourselves back in ways both big andsmall," Sandberg writes in Lean In, "by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pull-ing back when we should be leaning in." But menmust do their part as well. "A truly equal world,"she writes, "would be one where women ran halfour countries and companies and men ran half ourhomes. I believe that this would be a better world."

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FIRST THINGS October2013

Of course these approaches have received criticismfrom those who say the writers don't get the difficul-ties of working-class women or betray the feministcause by encouraging young women to give up thefight for equality in the workplace. But many readersare grateful for a genre that seeks to confront the dif-ficulties of having children and careers without sim-ply saying either "work harder" or "stop working."

Yet this is precisely where such literature fails. Itpresents the problem as one that admits of solutionprimarily through political or social reform. But theproblem Slaughter, Spar, and Sandberg describe isnot at root sociopolitical. It is rather that the personalqualities required by professional work are directlyopposed to the qualities that childrearing demands.They are fundamentally different existential orienta-tions, and the conflict between them is permanent.

Flexible hours, parental leave, working fromhome, and other policy changes are necessary forwomen to flourish as professionals and mothers.But the core of the problem is more spiritual andpsychological than political or social. A failure torecognize this is frankly to succumb to ideologicalblindness. To quote Spar again: "Feminism wasn'tsupposed to make us miserable. It was supposed tomake us free." But "feminism" is not a lived life; it isa political movement, a set of ideas abstracted fromexperience and propounded as ethical imperatives.It should not surprise any thoughtful person whenreality does not conform to the dreams of ambitiouselites with bright ideas.

Taylor, my biblically articulate student, sees thatshe has a talent, and she feels called to develop it,which means giving herself to the hard work of pur-suing excellence. To do so she must focus on her-self, for the sake of the gifts she has been given. Theproblem is not that this work is time-consuming orthat it reduces or eliminates a woman's ability to doother things. The problem is that the serious pursuitof excellence requires a self-culture. The excellenceis within us and must be developed: my musical po-tential brought to fulfillment, my academic aptitudedeveloped and realized through education.

Many of the women in my classes areparticularly captivated by the ideathat a major component of humanhappiness is the pursuit (if not theachievement) of moral and intel-

lectual perfection. In working through Aristotle'sEthics, for instance, they find a compelling way ofunderstanding what they do every day in their class-work. Like Aristotle, they are pursuing moral andintellectual virtues. And of course they are pushing

themselves to reach concrete, worldly goals: to ace theMCATs, to write a really fine short story, to masterancient Greek, to play a Bach fugue with confidenceand proficiency.

Yet in the midst of all this work, these youngwomen are aware of the ever-present danger of pride(as are my male students, though perhaps less often).They have felt the futility of what Hobbes describedso vividly as "the perpetual and restless desire ofpower after power." They sense that other activitiesand other modes of life offer a very different kind ofgood: Worship, poetic contemplation, and love arequintessential examples.

My students know that motherhood is more likethese activities than it is like the pursuit of excellence.They sense that caring for others requires us to putaside (at least temporarily) the quest for achievement,not just to make time but to create space for a dif-ferent mode of being. Worship and love: These re-quire no particular talent or cultivation of the sort Ihave been describing. They are gifts of the self, notachievements of the self.

T^ h e contrast between excellences weachieve and love we give appears in thedistinction between ratio and intellectusthat Josef Pieper highlights in Leisure:The Basis of Culture. Pieper wanted to

recover an authentic notion of leisure in a contempo-rary world that seems to value only work, achieve-ment, and endless practical activity. In ratio, reasonserves extrinsic ends and the achievement of particu-lar goals. Intellectus is receptive, and even passive inthe sense of "suffering," to experiences that cannot becontrolled. We pause from our striving toward goalsto pay attention, to observe, and ultimately to love.

Parenting requires ignoring for a time the individ-ual quest for self-perfection and excellence and focus-ing instead on the needs of another person. This canbe done only in what Pieper calls "leisure." He doesnot mean inactivity or the absence of responsibilitybut the setting aside of goals, which is the conditionof attention and activity that isn't striving. In leisurewe are available, disponible, which is why Pieper usesthe term as a synonym for contemplation.

Leisure in this fuller sense is not part of the livesof modern feminist writers. By their own admission,they are consumed with a quest for individual bet-terment, for greater efficiency, and for time-savingstrategies in daily life, going so far as to recommendbetter techniques for punching the numbers on amicrowave oven. They frankly confess that they wishto be consummate achievers in the workplace as wellas in their personal lives, as they train for marathons

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NO HAPPY HARMONY

and eat healthfully to avoid gaining weight in middleage. They reap the rewards of all this focused work:promotion, money, attractiveness, and, most impor-tant of all, honor and recognition, much of it welldeserved. They then expect to transfer this mentalityand the same kind of pursuit of excellence directlyinto motherhood and childrearing.

But, if I am right, these two endeavors re-quire different orientations of the self, andwe simply cannot approach marriage andfamily in the spirit of achievement at all.If we try to do so, we will find ourselves

frustrated and conflicted. For well-behaved or smartchildren are not markers of our success; children areends in themselves, to be loved and cared for as indi-viduals. They need from us something other than ourtalents; they need us, full stop.

Most women see this difference, at least to somedegree. Caring for children takes place, for the mostpart, in private. There is no payment. Most of thetime there is no audience. There are no promotionsand few thanks. We often talk of trying to be a goodparent, and rightly so, but it's not an achievement, atleast not in the same way that being a good pianistis an achievement. It is a kind of self-giving differ-ent from self-culture. The mode of being demandedby children isn't of the sort that allows mothers (orfathers, for that matter) to engage in the self-culturethat's such an important part of any sustained pursuitof excellence.

And what do the children themselves desire? Theywant patience, calm, and the full attention of theirmothers, which are exact opposites of what the hecticpace of professional work often requires. Children donot want a parent who is physically present but mul-titasking; they want that parent to look at them andlisten to what they have to say. They want attentionas they swim, draw, or play the piano. This requiresPieper's leisure, a categorically different kind of fo-cused activity that is not in the service of achieve-ment. The sorts of endeavors that allow us to use anddevelop our God-given talents are very different fromcaring for the children God has given us.

It's fashionable nowadays to call unpleasantsituations "tensions" and to identify problems as"challenges," as if by denying fundamental andsometimes tragic oppositions we might wish themaway. Such words are used again and again in thecontemporary essays I've been describing.

Their authors imagine solutions that strike meas evasions. "The best hope for improving the lotof all women," writes Slaughter, "is to close theleadership gap: to elect a woman president and fifty

women senators; to ensure that women are equallyrepresented in the ranks of corporate executives andjudicial leaders. Only when women wield powerin sufficient numbers will we create a society thatgenuinely works for all women. That will be a societythat works for everyone." This is just the kind of Uto-pian political prescription that emerges throughoutthis literature. Everything is about power—gainingand keeping it. Women will remake the world!

The assumption is, as I said, that motherhood andprofessional work are two of the same kinds of en-deavor, activities on the same continuum of achieve-ment. A recent feature in the Wall Street Journal hasmade such an argument more explicitly than I wouldhave ever dreamed possible: A movement is nowafoot to conduct family life on the model of a busi-ness. We should call business-like family meetingsand compose a "family mission statement." Childrenshould be assigned tasks and receive "performanceevaluations." If we could just get the family to actmore Hke our junior colleagues all would be well. Thechild qua employee would happily entertain himself,helping with the laundry, while we efficiently crossout items on our to-do lists. All of life would now beone long round of tasks—but at least we'd be "gettingthings done."

It is worth imagining a hypothetical perfect worldwhere women are equally represented in all politicalinstitutions and cooperate with other neighborhoodwomen in taking care of children (on the model of abusiness), and where formerly recalcitrant husbandsat last do their fair share around the house. Womenare then freed from the "burdens" of taking care ofchildren. But are they happy?

I'm afraid the answer is still no, at least if welisten to Anne-Marie Slaughter. She confessesthat even with a supportive husband who iswilling to shoulder nearly all the child care,she still does not feel comfortable being away

from her son. There's no rational explanation for thisaccording to the theory that we just need more helpand that the roles of men and women are function-ally interchangeable. But there seems to be some-thing in the nature of most women that wants notonly to be sure that children are cared for but to dothe caring themselves.

If this is so, and I think it is, doesn't the "stayat home" argument make the most sense? Shouldn'twomen, and especially those who are financiallystable enough to do so, focus predominantly on fam-ily and children? This idea is worth careful consider-ation, although the mainstream press often treats itas a strange or oppressive view.

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FIRST THINGS October2013

Many women want to stay home, and even seeularelites have begun to see it as a desirable option. Wit-ness the signifieant number of affluent, well-edueatedwomen who have, if perhaps with a bit of shame,opted out of the workforee beeause they reeognizethe benefits to their ehildren. They see that devotingthemselves to home and family yields great goods,whieh inelude an authentie division of labor betweenhusband and wife as well as a mother's ability to giveundivided attention to her ehildren. It is obviouslythe model that feminism has often disparaged, butits appeal endures.

Nevertheless, this option does not present an easy,one-size-fits-all solution to the eonfliet I have been de-seribing. Sometimes staying at home is even promotedwith an ideologieal fervor not unlike that of Slaughter,Spar, and Sandberg. And while I've sometimes felt theappeal of stay-at-home motherhood, it should not beidealized, as if it presented no diffieulties.

To wit: Although the rewards of earing for ehil-dren are great, motherhood ean also be tiring andfrustrating, not to mention lonely. A woman mustbe extraordinarily self-assured to withstand theself-doubt that might eause her to wonder at timeswhether she has done the right thing.

A stay-at-home mother may well be just as tal-ented as her husband, but "the world" takes littlenotiee of the work she does. After a dinner party,Jessiea, who was an honors student at a prestigiouseollege before she gave birth to her seven ehildren,typieally rails against her husband's colleagues fortheir obliviousness to her existenee as a mind. Whenput in these terms, it is not altogether elear who faeesthe more diffieult situation: the "working mother" orthe "stay-at-home mom."

Moreover, the pitfalls of pride are not absent in thiskind of life either. If the identities of working womentend to be bound up with aehievement in their ehosenfields, many stay-at-home mothers I know speak ofthe intense eompetitiveness, usually under the sur-faee, that ean spring up among women who do notwork professionally outside the home. They quietlyjudge eaeh other on the basis of their ehildren's disei-pline habits and aeademie aehievement, or they gos-sip eritieally about the diets, appearanees, marriages,and family lives of those they know.

I've learned not to idealize the mother who staysat home as the natural and obvious eorreetive to theeonflieted, busy, ambitious professional woman. Infaet, these women sometimes pay a high priée forsuppressing parts of themselves that eall out to bedeveloped and rewarded.

Christine, a young, devoutly Catholie woman,told me reeently that over the past few years she has

watehed most of her eollege friends marry and startfamilies. She, however, eonfessed a strong desire topursue a seholarly life, not rejeeting family and ehil-dren but reeognizing other goods, too. Should wediseourage her? Of eourse not. Every time we admita young woman into college or graduate school, weare implicitly telling her that we value her intelleetand wish for her sueeess. But she'll surely faee just thekinds of diffieulties I've been deseribing.

I've assumed throughout that women possess a de-sire to eare for children that they feel more stronglythan men do. Many may balk at this, although I'moften struck by how widespread my presumption isamong conservatives and liberals alike. What elseeould give Slaughter, Spar, and Sandberg the eonfi-denee that increased politieal power for women willmake for a more family-friendly eeonomy?

The observation that women, as a group, undoubt-edly have more ofthe "nurturing" impulse than mendo (stay-at-home dads in New York City and Port-land notwithstanding) does not yield the eonelusionthat sex alone should determine a woman's eourseof life (what I eall "gender determinism"). It doesimply, however, that we eannot come to terms withthe difficulties women faee in the present day untilwe eonsider the way in which we feel the eompetinginelinations in our own souls.

Modern women are right to think thatboth the pursuit of exeellenee and thedesire to eare for others are part of afully flourishing life. Exeellenee in apartieular field requires persistenee,

self-eonfidenee, drive, eourage, and initiative. Theseare eminently admirable qualities. On the other hand,serving or loving another requires the even more ad-mirable qualities of attention, foeus, eare, patienee,and self-saerifiee. The aeeent we plaee on them, andthe way we put them into praetiee, is a matter for allof us to figure out for ourselves.

But we must not deeeive ourselves. We eannot hap-pily harmonize these two modes or pretend that theyare somehow the same in kind. The disharmony ismost apparent at the extremes, when we observe thetwo modes collapsed into one sphere of activity. Wehave all seen, for example, the driven mother whoean talk of nothing but her own sueeesses and thoseof her brilliant offspring, or the woman eontinuallydistraeted by her iPhone, unable to foeus on her ehil-dren as she waits for the next important message toeome in. Something is profoundly disordered.

At the other extreme, we probably know manywomen who have ehosen not to pursue their ownexeellenee. Of eourse there are better and worse

NO HAPPY HARMONY

reasons for this decision, the most admirable ofwhich is devotion to nurturing others. Yet this alsocomes with costs. I've never forgotten Jessica's al-most plaintive confession to me late one night, yearsago, after too much wine. "My husband," she said,"has done the things that I really wanted to do, andcould have, but didn't." The optimist in me wantedto tell her it wasn't too late, but it was, and we bothknew it. ' •

Both the ethical imperatives I've described—"must work" and "must stay at home"—reflect noble desires, the one for talentsfully used and the other for the vocation ofmotherhood. But I worry that both are too

often promoted ideologically, prescribed as answersto the anxieties young women naturally feel aboutwhat they should do. This problem is especially press-ing for those high-achieving college students I havebeen describing, who cannot imagine doing any-thing—be it career or motherhood—halfheartedly.

It's the tacit denial of the tragedy of the human con-dition that I've come to resent in the contemporary

literature about "balancing" career and family. Thisliterature is full of demands for Justice and Equality,its authors motivated by ideas of social perfection:to finally place a sufficient number of women in theranks of management and government and to effecttrue gender equality in the workplace as a whole. En-gaged on a quest to change the world, they write witha fervor generated by a political ideal and employthe language of political advocacy, as if the divideddesires of our souls can be unified by Reform andRevolution. There is a solution for everything, theyimply; we just haven't found it yet.

But this simply isn't so. I know from personal expe-rience that this conflict in the soul does not go away,no matter how pleasant and accommodating our col-leagues may be, or how flexible our schedules. We arelimited, embodied creatures. These limits mean thatwe carmot do everything to its fullest extent at once,and certain things we may not be able to do at all.The tragic aspect of this is that both excellence andnurture are real, vital goods and that the full pursuitof one often, and perhaps inevitably, forecloses fullypursuing the other. 13

MONUMENTS

You're with us still, your names engraved in stone,Inscribed in bronze, recited every May.Fresh flowers—mums, carnations, roses—sayThe pain's still fresh: our grieving's never done.Your serried graveyard markers—though you're gone—Compel reflection on Memorial Day.Our sculptors' art preserves your mortal clay:Each marble image conjures flesh and bone.

We've promised that we'll always keep you here.But memories etched in rock must disappear:The steles raised to keep you in our sightAll fall to dust beneath the centuries' might.Time mocks us when we swear your fame must live:We feign a gift that only God can give.

—Bryce Christensen

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