When women started to go to work in large numbers as a result of the feminist revolution, we were told that that balancing work life and home life was an achievable goal and one to be pursued with great alacrity. Before that, many women worked in low-paying jobs, earning money as waitresses, nurses, schoolteachers and factory workers and in service jobs as hairdressers, maids and typists. At this point, there weren’t many resources for this demographic. If they had to go home after a day’s work to shop, cook, clean and take care of children without the help of a husband or with a husband who didn’t help, no clear options were available — no one was writing about how to balance their lives or make goals or create a clear vision. For these women, dead-end jobs with no expectations of promotions, raises or recognition were the only reality. Then, quite suddenly, Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” was published and the “problem that had no name” became the problem with a name: the malaise of the stay-at-home mom, the lack of fulfillment of the formerly satisfied homemaker. And so, women started looking for work that was significant, well-paid and on equal par with men in both opportunity and salary. But a new problem emerged. Now that women had careers as opposed to mere jobs, they started to experience what men had experienced all their lives: a commitment to get the work done, even if it took evenings and weekends. The newly important and indispensable woman could not remain in a strictly 9-to-5 job. However, the culture at home was not changing. Although many husbands took up some of the slack, it was still the woman’s responsibility to manage the homefront and the children. The now continuously exhausted woman, who was rushing home from work to find cranky children, difficult-to-keep baby sitters and a similarly exhausted husband started to look for solutions, trying to hone her time-management skills. I never did manage to handle each piece of paper that came across my desk only once. However, I did not buy anything that needed to be ironed, learned the secrets of how to make ready-made look like cooked-from-scratch and delegated to husband and children some household tasks. This is what all my friends and colleagues did, and yet we were nowhere near finding that elusive balance between work and home. Either work suffered or the family did, with frustration and guilt ever present in all our lives. We saw ourselves as failures and tried harder. I have come to realize that, in fact, balance between those two extremely demanding roles is an unachievable myth, and the elusive pursuit only made women feel inadequate. When women are advised to plan, have goals and prioritize, it is assumed we have choices. In fact, life is full of unpredictability, unintended consequences and problems we cannot control. We also must deal with our own ambivalence towards our social lives: How often do we see friends, who do we have time for, how often do we go to fun things like movies and theaters, and is it at the determent of other pursuits? And where does “quiet time” go? By creating the imperative of balancing work and life, we are creating an idealized image of how we should feel, be and what we should want. As our self-esteem starts to depend on how closely we live up to this image, we end up feeling more and more frustrated at what we perceive as our own lack of discipline and time-management skills. The language of work/life balance is one that includes predictability, control, individual achievement, hierarchies of values, constant movement toward goals and compartmentalization of life. It demands that we set priorities, choosing between things are impossible to choose between: Do we finish the urgent report for work or help a child with her equally urgent report for school? We need to re-think achievement, success and status. The price in refusing to be part of the competitive rat race is thwarted ambitions and to make peace with one’s choices is sometimes to forego status. But parenting cannot be delayed, and while some work can be, more often the opportunity for significant advancement is lost in bad timing. This, in fact, is our ultimate choice — for women and men alike. I live by the mottos: “not everything worth doing is worth doing well” and “better is often the enemy of good enough.” As a writer I have come to realize that a book or column never really gets finished — it can always be improved — so at some point, it gets “abandoned” to the publisher. I stop before it is perfect, because it can never be that anyway. It is important to apply that to life in general — for sanity’s sake. — Natasha Josefowitz taught the first course in the U.S. on women in management and is the author of 19 books. She lives at White Sands La Jolla.
