Breaking news: Women Want Time For Families and Isn’t Sarah Palin Awful

Wow, I spent so much time on that last post that there’s not enough left to deal with another item on today’s WSJ opinion page, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman’s “Let’s Talk About Palin’s Family Challenges.”

Actually, that’s probably a good thing.  Otherwise I’d be wasting time over what is, when all is said and done, yet another example of progressive goal-post-moving.  For it seems that, after all those years of feminist agitation, women not only don’t want to “have it all,” but look unfavorably at those who do:

What Sarah Palin did not do, however, is put an end to the latest national conversation about “trying to have it all.”  Because the question we're all asking isn’t can she do it, but why is she doing it?  Mrs. Palin, you see, happens to be bucking a new national trend.  Even as most mothers across America chuckle appreciatively about pit bulls and lipstick and applaud her bravado, they are making choices that look very un-Palinesque.
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Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn’t build and don’t want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours.  We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children.  Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin’s case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life.  More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success...

Note the subtile criticism: Sarah Palin has bought “the onwards-and-upwards drive to... the West Wing,” which her more sophisticated sisters (who, in days of yore, dumped their kids into daycare at the earliest opportunity) have decided they no longer want.  How, um, old-fashioned.  Didn’t she get the memo?

It’s because she’s actually pushing the combination of professional and personal ambitions beyond the sensibilities

And, heaven knows, one must never do that!  Somebody might get a case of the vapours.

of this generation of working moms. As women, we may be awed by her, but she’s not necessarily a role model for so many professional women who now say they want to do it differently...

You get the drift.  But before leaving this, I might point out that women with families have always had to balance work and home, and that, outside of the New York-Washington-Los Angeles hothouse, many of them have chosen “nontraditional” forms of employment to better accommodate family needs.  Some of them even get assistance from their husbands.  None of this is new. Except perhaps to (unmarried?) media people.^[1]

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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 22:40:31 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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