Can Women Have It All?

Following yesterday's International Women's Day, Billie Downer asks whether women  can have it all.

I recently read a book about three power women in New York City: six figure salaries, taking care of a family and attending New York’s most elite parties was part of the day job for the women I was reading about. But the book also focuses on the difficulties faced by women with glamorous corporate jobs, juggling work and family.

This inspired a conversation with two of my friends: can women really have it all? Girls of our generation, at least it seems to me, are taught from a young age that their sex will not hold them back and that the future holds whatever they want it to. So in this conversation three eighteen-year-old girls, myself included, looked at what they want to be in the future.

The answer: in a very successful job, a stay at home mum looking after the family and doing Pilates between dropping the kids at school and having a chilled-out life selling tomatoes on the side of the road in Tuscany. The obvious conclusion from this is that this is impossible. But is it possible at all to find a balance between family, work and relaxation?

(source: The Guardian)

Anne Marie Slaughter, University Professor at Princeton University and mother of two, believes that society is selling young girls a ‘fiction’ and, in her lecture entitled ‘Why Women Can’t Have It All’ Slaughter speaks about her experiences as a career woman and a mum and the impossibility of succeeding comfortably in both.

But I’m still crossing my fingers. As far as I’m concerned, my future as career woman, mother and tomato seller still awaits me.