Anne-Marie Slaughter and the fiction of 'have-it-all' feminism

[Zorra]

5. Yes, reality hits. If juggling two "careers" as a single parent, with two teenagers

getting in trouble in school, with minimal or no child support coming in, combined with all the household drudgeries involved in maintaining a roof over your heads, (all those glamorous, exciting things, you know, like paying bills, laundry, and cleaning bathrooms, blahblahblah), means we had it all, well....my, weren't both my sisters and I the lucky ones!

Yes, we really had it all for several years there; that's a hard, cold fact. We survived, and what didn't kill us definitely made us stronger, and wiser. We're certainly never going to "have it all" ever again.

I haven't read the book, so I don't feel qualified to comment on it, but...

I think that the materialistic concept of "having it all" really is primarily a symptom of Americanism/(Globalism). Another way of selling the American Dream while straining the workforce for profit. Feminism didn't tell me how or what to be, it simply helped make me more aware of some of the struggles I face, and that my predecessors faced, and that we can choose to be who and how we are, and want to be, and reinforced that I am not internally bound by the restrictions of patriarchy. Feminism helped me understand and define many of my obstacles, struggles, and choices.

Maybe some women got a far more materialistic message from Feminism; maybe I'm just lucky that I was not smart enough to understand that part of the manual. Those stupid Virginia Slims commercials somehow never got into my head.

It wasn't some misguided dictate of Feminism that landed me in a temporarily almost impossible to manage situation for awhile, it was a somewhat bizarre chain of events mostly borne of a chaotic, materialistic greed driven system/society, and some necessary choices on my part.

Since my children grew up, the old battles seem to have ended for awhile, and my life has been pretty wonderful, and Feminism has played a big part in helping me to understand how to manifest this wonder - now that I have the time and space to actually think about it.