Having It All or Having Enough?

There’s lots of questions in the blogosphere about whether or not women can have it all. Of course, by “all” we mean, can we work and have families? And do both as well as we can do them?

In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article in The Atlantic she says:

In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

But there are a lot of women in these United States who are not asking the question “Can I have it all?” Instead they are asking, “Can I have anything?” They are the millions of women in poverty. They are the millions of women working full time jobs and not earning a living wage. They are the millions of women doing the same work as their male counterparts and making only $0.77 to every dollar the men make. They are the millions of women who come back to their jobs after maternity leave to find that they have lost their jobs, missed opportunities, and even, ultimately missed contributions into their retirement accounts.

They are the women who are doing 100% of the childcare in their families. They are the women whose co-parents don’t parent, or even pay child support. They are the million of women scared to death of their child’s next illness. They are the million of women who can’t afford healthcare, childcare, education.

They are women who are undereducated, women of color, transgender women, women in domestic violence situations, women in poverty, and women in menial jobs.

There are far more women asking, “Can I have enough?” than there are asking, “Can I have it all?”