Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Choices Ours If We Risk A ‘Serial’ Life

Loraine O'Connell Orlando Sentinel

Choices. That’s what women are making these days. And sometimes their choices seem to fly in the face of their feminist beliefs.

For instance, since the late ‘80s, growing numbers of professional women have cut back on their work hours, gone part time or quit work to devote more time to parenting and other pursuits.

Instead of lauding the fact that many women now have choices, feminist critics decried any attention paid to women’s “downshifting” from the rat race as a “backlash” against feminism.

Today, the critics’ voices aren’t quite so loud or strident. The movement has reached a “synthesis,” according to Anna Quindlen, author and former New York Times columnist.

“We started out with the original thesis of women, that you got to be a wife and mother and that was it,” she told her audience at the annual Women’s Enrichment Clinic held last month in Orlando. “Then we came up with the antithesis: You don’t want to be a wife and mother. You want to run a Fortune 500 company.

“Finally, we came to synthesis: ‘I want some from Column A and some from Column B. Maybe that will be hard and maybe I won’t be able to have it all at once.”’

Quietly, many women have concluded that “serial lives” - one lifestyle choice followed by another, rather than engaged in simultaneously - work best. And that conclusion confuses a lot of people, especially men.

Quindlen, 43, cited her own experience as an example of the confusion. Her decision to leave the Times - at a time when she was rumored to be in line for a leadership position at the paper - evoked a barrage of theories to explain her apparently strange behavior.

Columnists asked: “Had she been passed over for the top job? Was this a hardball way of playing hard to get?” Or was she quitting to be a ‘50s-style mom to her three kids?

That theory “ignored that I’ve worked at home and around school schedules for years,” Quindlen said. “Frankly, if I spend any more time with them, I’m locking them in the back yard.”

Another theory resurrected for the occasion was the trite-but-untrue “fear of success” notion.

“I’m not afraid of success,” Quindlen said. “I am afraid of missed opportunities and lost chances.”

The simple truth was that she wanted to try something she’d never done before: full-time fiction writing.

Only women understood her decision, she said.

“For women, life is a circle,” Quindlen said. “For men, it’s a straight line. They see career as a ladder.”

Some men confided to her that they, too, would like to try another path. But they couldn’t afford to or just didn’t feel they should.

Said Quindlen: “Maybe we women are still better able to make decisions on the basis of our hearts rather than the cookie-cutter vision of success.”

Or maybe while women’s choices in relation to work have expanded dramatically, men’s have remained static.

The reason so many professional women are able to scale back on their careers is that they’re married to men who make a good living.

Quindlen is the first to acknowledge that fact: She says the articles written about her Times departure gave short shrift to the working husband who made her choice possible. And she urges men to follow women’s lead in choosing serial lives. She says the major factor holding so many corporate guys back is their fear of being ridiculed.

Corporate America doesn’t exactly encourage men to work part time or to take a few years off to renew their humanity. Indeed, women still face problems trying to re-enter the work force after a timeout. Quindlen figures the corporate mind-set will change simply because so many corporate managers have working wives.

But even if men overcome their fear of societal disdain, even if corporate America has a change of heart, couples still will face one hurdle before following their bliss: Somebody’s got to pay the bills.

Negotiation is the only way to make serial lives work for both genders: “You follow your sculptor’s muse for three years, then I’ll write my novel.”

Now that’s equality.