Making It Work With Detail And Candor, Three Women At Top Of Their Fields Describe Dilemmas Of Balancing Careers And Family Goals

“Divided Lives: The Public and Private Struggles of Three Accomplished Women” By Elsa Walsh (Simon & Schuster, 284 pp., $23)

Superwoman is not real. Even if she were, she likely would rip off her “S,” take off her cape and neatly fold it and walk away from any one of the three situations the real-life super women face head on in Elsa Walsh’s new book “Divided Lives: The Public and Private Struggles of Three Accomplished Women.”

Walsh, who writes for The Washington Post, uses her interview skills to dig deeply into the lives of three highly accomplished women - television journalist Meredith Vieira, orchestra conductor and first lady of West Virginia Rachael Worby and breast surgeon Dr. Alison Estabrook.

These are three women who try to do it all and have it all and feel guilty or conflicted if they fall short. Vieira wants to be at the top of her profession but also wants to have a family and be the best possible mother. The vocal Worby struggles with being what is expected of her as a politician’s wife and being herself and pursuing her own career goals. Estabrook, an outstanding surgeon, fights the usual suspect - sexism - as she attempts to be the chief of breast surgery at a New York medical center where male candidates are sought instead. When she discovers that her 1984 starting salary was $40,000 less than her male peers, she balks. Next, she has to spend years fighting hospital officials and working herself into the ground until she is finally named chief.

In the end, the battle faced by these three women is in trying to make peace within themselves to survive sanely in a world where change moves at a snail’s pace.

For “Divided Lives,” the author purposely chose women who share the advantages of wealth, education and professional opportunity. Many readers undoubtedly will find themselves asking what struggles could a woman making a six-figure income have compared to a woman who earns an average or below-average income?

But, Walsh explains in the introduction to the book: “If these women of privilege were finding the challenges of balancing their lives a struggle, then that said something important about the condition of women generally and made it worth exploring just what is not working.”

The book opens with one of the most interesting and conflicted of the three situations - Vieira’s story. It is 1989. She is 35, nine months pregnant with her first child after three miscarriages in two years. About to go on a six-month maternity leave from the prime-time magazine show “West 57th,” Vieira is called into the office of David Burke, the president of CBS News.

He asks her the question of a lifetime: “Would you like to do ‘60 Minutes’?”

Diane Sawyer, the first female correspondent on the show, was leaving to go to ABC and CBS wanted Vieira to come aboard. However, Vieira’s reaction was not the one network executives expected. She hesitated.

“Though she knew it was irrational, Meredith could feel her anger rising, and she wanted to leave before it became apparent. She thought she had made it clear for such a long time that she just wanted to go away and have this baby, take a leave… . Now the network was dangling in front of her the one carrot that she might not be able to resist. She wasn’t prepared to reshuffle her future plans right then and there, but she knew her own weakness. She was driven and this was the one job she had coveted since she began her TV career… . She was furious, not just with Burke and CBS, but with the situation, with the timing, and mostly with herself. Turning down the job would be nearly impossible, however much she protested.”

After an internal tug of war and some tough negotiating in which Vieira worked out an arrangement she felt would accommodate her work and family life, she took the job. However, things did not work out as she had planned. The job demanded more travel than she had negotiated. Top-level co-workers began to resent her part-time status. She began to feel guilty about spending so much time away from her baby.

Eventually, after some ugly office politics and disputes with CBS officials, Vieira was pushed out of her “60 Minutes” job.’As long as I hold down a job I am going to struggle with this question: Will I be a good enough mother?’ she said. ‘But this job at least allows me an opportunity to try to be the mother I want to be and to stretch myself.’ “

Divided into three sections that look at each woman’s dilemma, Walsh’s book is a quick and interesting read.

A point of criticism: The author does a better job of laying out the issues involved with Vieira’s and Estabrook’s story than she does with that of Worby, which is the middle story and tends to slow things down.

Overall, “Divided Lives” works. It is not a self-help, how-to book, but rather a look-at-this book, an examination that sheds a different light on much debated subjects. In opening the doors to three private lives, the author shows how far the inequities of our society have pushed us.