From the Independent:
Research into the attitudes of 1,500 women with an average age of 29 found that 61 per cent believe “domestic goddess” role models who juggle top jobs with motherhood and jet-set social lives are “unhelpful” and “irritating”. More than two-thirds agree that the man should be the main provider in a family, while 70 per cent do not want to work as hard as their mother’s generation. On average, the women questioned want to “settle down” with their partner by 30 and have their first child a year later.
Vicki Shotbolt, deputy chief executive of the National Family and Parenting Institute, said: “This is the generation of young women who have seen the ‘have it all’ ethos up close and personal, and they have realised that it doesn’t work.
What’s particularly bizarre about the concept of “having it all” is that as it would be better described as “doing it all”, the obvious shortcomings would seem to be as obvious as the problems of working two full-time jobs. A woman can’t expect to make a home, be a mother and work a full-time job successfully. I mean, if none of the great, Super Bowl-winning coaches have been able to simultaneously wear two very similar hats as coach and general manager in the NFL, why would a woman expect to be able to pull off wearing two very different ones with any reasonable degree of success?
While I have macro and demographic concerns about women in the workforce, (at this point, women are more responsible for lower real wages in the US than globalization, and without insufficiently-Americanized immigrants, the US birthrate would be sub-replacement rate), I have no personal problem with it. I have far more respect for the competence of the woman who comes to me and says: “look, I have children and I need to leave every day at two, can we work something out?” than the one who tries to hold down the full-time job, is constantly trying to duck out of the office to deal with one emergency or another and is always frazzled. I’d much rather pay more to have two of the former working overlapping schedules than deal with one of the latter.
Feminists have not done women or society at large any favors by denigrating the desires of women who wish to put their families first. For all its pretenses, feminism has never been about choice, as Simone de Beauvoir made very clear when she explained how feminists must remove homemaking as a potential choice for young women, because too many women would choose it.