Happiness and the liberal imagination: How superwoman became balanced

Feminist Studies

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2014, Pages 144-168

  Rottenberg, Catherine ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84901717650     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. See, for example, Christina Scharff, "Disarticulating Feminism: Individualization, Neoliberalism and the Othering of 'Muslim Women,'" European Journal of Women's Studies 18, no. 2 (2011): 119-34
2. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage Publications, 2009).
3. Introductory comments to Anne-Marie Slaughter's lecture on "Beyond Work/Life: Changing the Debate and Making Change" at Princeton University, December 3, 2012, http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/archives/videos/item/ beyond-worklife-changing-debate-and-making-change.
4. For a sample of the hundreds of responses, see Carolyn Anderson, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All (at the Same Time)," The Blog, June 26, 2002, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-anderson/why-women-still-cant- have-b-1628352.html
5. "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," Feminist Daily (blog), Dec. 10, 2012, http://feministdaily.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/why-women-still- cant-have-it-all
6. Avantika Krishna, "Anne-Marie Slaughter Is Right: Women Still Cannot Have It All," PolicyMic (blog), 25 June 2012, http://www.policymic.com/ articles/10165/anne-marie-slaughter-is-right-women-still-cannot-have-it-all.
7. Anne-Marie Slaughter, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," The Atlantic, July/August 2012, 85. An online version is available at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it- all/309020.
8. See, for example, Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (New York: Penguin, 2012)
9. Bernie D. Jones, ed., Women Who Opt Out: The Debate Over Working Mothers and Work-Family Balance (New York: New York University Press, 2012)
10. Barbara Ehrenreich, Anita Ilta Garey, and Karen V. Hansen, eds., At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
11. Slaughter, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," 100.
12. In The Beauty Myth, for example, Naomi Wolf draws on this understanding of emancipation by describing women's progression from the "feminine mystique of domesticity" to the current state where, she claims, women have more freedom than ever before in history because they have entered the public sphere in increasing numbers. For Wolf, the remaining impediment to women's enjoyment of their newly found emancipation is what she terms the "beauty myth." Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: Morrow and Company, 1991), 10.
13. For examples of the critical responses to Slaughter's piece, see Linda Hirshman, "The 'Having-It-All' Crisis Isn't About Women, It's About the 1%," Atlantic, June 27, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ 2012/06/the-havi.ng-it-all-crisis-isnt-about-women-its-about-the-1/258894
14. Rebecca Traister, "Can Modern Women 'Have It All'?" Salon, June 21, 2012, http://www.salon.com/2012/06/21/can-modern-women-have-it-all
15. Kelsey Wallance, "Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Atlantic 'Women Still Can't Have It All.' Can Anyone?" Bitch, June 21, 2012, http:// bitchmagazine.org/post/anne-marie-slaughter-in-the-atlantic-feminist-magazine- women-work-life-balance-children-career.
16. See Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2010)
17. Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)
18. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
19. See Charlotte J. Rich, Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009)
20. Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
21. This dominant narrative, of course, presents a relatively linear and uncomplicated account of progress. Moreover, the narrative, as many scholars have already underscored, elides all those women who did manage or were forced to bridge both spheres at the same time. Yet, I do think it important to stress the discursive power and continued dominance of this narrative. For example, Pamela Stone and Lisa Ackerly Hernandez underscore the incredible effectiveness of this either/or framework but from a very different perspective. As sociologists, they point out that it has only been since the 1970s that shifting social norms made it possible for increasing numbers of middle- and upper-middle-class women to work fairly continuously throughout their childbearing and childrearing years. Indeed, Stone and Hernandez assert that it is only relatively recently that increasing numbers of women of the educated professional class could begin to envision, anticipate, and "live lives" in which they would simultaneously combine work and family. See Pamela Stone and Lisa Ackerly Hernandez, "The Rhetoric and Reality of 'Opting Out': Toward a Better Understanding of Professional Women's Decisions to Head Home," in Women Who Opt Out, 36.
22. Slaughter, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," 89.
23. Although I take serious issue with Slaughter's progress narrative, once again, I do think it important to highlight the effectiveness of this dominant either/or discourse and how it has shaped gender norms as well as the public debates on the possibility of women combining work and family. One has only to think of the so-called mommy wars, which pitted professional women against women who were choosing to stay home with their children, or the "mommy-track debates" - spurred by Felice Schwartz's 1989 article in the Harvard Business Journal - which brought public attention and scrutiny to the question of whether women with children faced diminishing career opportunities by being "mommy-tracked." See Felice N. Schwartz, "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," Women in Management Review 4, no. 5 (1989).
24. Slaughter, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," 98.
25. The classic example is, of course, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
26. For a discussion of the racialized aspect of the New Woman, see Catherine Rottenberg, Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2008), 92-108.
27. See, for example, Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)
28. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988)
29. Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman.
30. See also Catherine Rottenberg, "The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism," Cultural Studies, published online Nov. 18, 2013, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502386.2013.857361#Ut17Uyg8Iy5.
31. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 24.
32. See Kate Taylor, "Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too," New York Times, July 12, 2013, ST1.
33. See Judith Warner, "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In," New York Times, August 11, 2013, Sunday Magazine, MM25.
34. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 21.
35. For a challenge to the notion that women are "opting out," see Jones, Women Who Opt Out.
36. For examples of how work-life balance discussion has entered the university, see the following websites: http://www.princeton.edu/main/facstaff/ life
37. http://provost.upenn.edu/faculty/current/work-life-balance
38. http://www.princeton.edu/hr/working/profiles/balance
39. http://www.employment.harvard.edu/benefits/worklife
40. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/11/having-it-all-at-harvard.
41. For an example of self-help or motivational books, see Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011).
42. Anne-Marie Slaughter, lecture on "Beyond Work/Life: Changing the Debate and Making Change" at Princeton University, December 3, 2012, http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/archives/videos/item/ beyond-worklife-changing-debate-and-making-change.
43. See Ehrenreich, Garey, and Hansen, At the Heart of Work and Family
44. Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift
45. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Home Becomes Work and Work Becomes Home (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
46. See, for example, Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift.
47. Slaughter, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," 89.
48. Statistics taken from Emma Gray, "Women and Poverty in the United States: 18 Essential Facts and Statistics," Huffington Post, Aug. 29, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/women-and-poverty-united-states-facts- statistics-n-1838384.html#slide=1444671.
49. Wendy Brown, "Civilizational Delusions: Secularism, Tolerance, Equality," Theory and Event 15, no. 2 (2012).
50. From the webpage of The Journal of Happiness Studies, http://link.springer.com/journal/10902.
51. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
52. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 155.
53. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 112.
54. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 37.
55. See Rebecca Traister, "Can Modern Women Have It All?" http://www.salon.com/2012/06/21/can-modern-women-have-it-all.
56. Statistics taken from Debora Spar, "Why Women Should Stop Trying to Be Perfect," Newsweek, Sept. 24, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/news- week/2012/09/23/why-women-should-stop-trying-to-be-perfect.html.
57. See Lindy West, "No One 'Has It All,' Because 'Having It All' Doesn't Exist," Jezebel (blog), June 22, 2012, http://jezebel.com/5920625/ no-one-has-it-all-because-having-it-all-doesnt-exist
58. Traister, "Can Modern Women 'Have It All'?"
59. See, for example, Brown, States of Injury
60. Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1983; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
61. Joan Wallach Scott, "The Vexed Relationship of Emancipation and Equality," History of the Present 2, no. 2 (2012): 149.
62. See Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996)
63. Susan Jeanne Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005).
64. See Wendy Brown, "Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," Theory and Event 7, no. 1 (2003)
65. Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History
66. Scott, "The Vexed Relationship," 148-68.