The Myth that Women Can “Have It All”

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

On a recent visit to Agnes Scott College, the Atlanta women's school from which she graduated in 1958, my mother heard a panel of students talking about their internships. Particularly memorable was a chemistry major who had turned away from a corporate lab to explore the fragrance business with an internship at a boutique perfumery. But the very existence of the panel impressed my mother.

"We didn't have anything like that when I was in school," she told me, with a hint of anger. "I couldn't get any real guidance about careers." In her day, this selective college extolled the "life of the mind," but also expected graduates to get married, have children, clean floors, and do some volunteer work. With the decided exception of the housework, my mother enjoyed all those things. But, like many talented women of her generation, she was still bored, frustrated, and a little lost. The Feminine Mystique was written for her. She read it avidly, jotting an impassioned declaration of independence, for her sake and mine, in the margins.

My mother's story, and my very different life, suggest that the "problem that has no name" belongs to a vanished era: the relatively short 20th century period in which mass affluence and household technology gave large numbers of women education and leisure but little satisfying work. Without the Great Depression and World War II, "women's liberation" might have come decades earlier. But come it did.

My mother's story, however, is not the whole story. The problem that had no name was not just a woman's problem. I am very much my father's daughter, and thus the child of The Organization Man, Atlas Shrugged, and The Lonely Crowd-works that addressed the dilemmas in which inner-directed individualists of both sexes found themselves at mid-century. (Both my parents read Rand the same year my mother read Friedan.) My father's all male (now coed) college may have offered more career counseling than my mother's school. But chemistry majors weren't celebrated for following their interests into niche businesses. Such self-directed venturing was not just impractical but vaguely disreputable. The word entrepreneur, and the cluster of values it signifies, did not enter the everyday American vocabulary until the late 1970s.

In that sense, too, the problem that has no name has vanished into history, obliterated by the expressive individualism-positive and negative, temporary and lasting, cultural, political, and economic-of the 1960s and after.

So why are we still dissatisfied? Why, at my own 25th reunion two years ago, did a panel of women bemoan the problems of work-life balance and wonder whether they'd made the right choices? Why the angst?

There is, I'm afraid, another problem with no name-or, to be more accurate, a name we hate to speak. It is the problem of middle age, of realizing that life is full of tradeoffs and disappointments; of realizing that even the most satisfying life is never entirely as we dreamed. Having more choices doesn't guarantee happiness. It just gives you a better shot.