"perfection". The ideal as sold by the media is to be the perfect career woman with the perfect job, yet still spend the perfect amount of time with the perfect kids who get perfect grades, have a perfect husband and a perfect sex life in your perfectly kept house, all while maintaining that perfect skin and perfect size 3 figure...
This obviously isn't going to happen, but it's the image that gets sold to us. I suspect too many of those now-exhausted women who Slaughter is trying to convince were betrayed by feminism somehow bought into that perfection ideal, but it wasn't (at least to my knowledge) feminism that was responsible for that image. Feminism's idea was that you shouldn't have to be just a wife and mommy, or just a career woman, or just anything. The idea that either job, or any job, had to be done to a certain ideal was a media product, and a heavily photoshopped one at that.
That being said, there are still a lot of obstacles thrown in the way of working women with kids by the current corporate culture- one of the points Slaughter made in her article was that of making school schedules match work schedules, really resonated with me. I remember the difficulties of finding decent child care for swing and grave shifts, and also the difficulties of working all night and then having a child up all day that needs supervision. Simple things like that, so easily fixed if our culture would ever give a little.
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