Over Easter I have heard much about Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook CEO who has just published Lean In, a memoir with advice to women about succeeding in business and the boardroom. It has certainly caused some debate about why there are so few women in business, but it is by no means the only recent offering of advice to women on how to achieve certain goals.
“Have-it-all” is a phrase I despise, and when I heard Sheryl Sandberg say that she hated it too, I instantly liked her. My dislike of the phrase, like Sandberg’s, comes from the fact that it is only ever applied to women and not men. It creates a stigma not only around women who choose to have a career as well as children, but also families who choose for the male partner to take on most of the childcare and, finally, women who decide not to have children at all. The latter become defined as the women who sacrificed “happiness” for their careers. Their success has to be tainted somehow.
There is a long tradition of handing out advice to young women on when to get promoted, on when to get married and on when to get pregnant, completely ignoring the fact that not everyone wants all of those things.
Now I have not read Sheryl Sandberg’s book, but I do not think that she is trying to tell me how to live my life. Rather, she’s reflecting upon the discriminations she’s faced as a woman in the workplace, and offering me advice on how to get over them. Whether I agree with it or not is my own decision.
What annoys me in the endless advice offered to young women is the assumption that I have no other option but to follow. There is a constant promotion of this one happy ideal of “have-it-all”. It is not Sandberg who makes me angry, but people like Susan Patton, one of the first female Princeton graduates. She advised female students at her old university to find a man whilst they were there and marry him. The justification was “we have almost priced ourselves out of the market”. Perhaps the most insulting comment she made, however, that while a man may marry a woman less intelligent than himself, particularly if she is “exceptionally pretty”, a woman should “can’t” marry a man below her “intellectual equal”. It is sad to think that she places so much emphasis both on how the body image of a woman matters more than her mind, and that relationships are based entirely on how learned the man is. It is insulting to suggest a man without a certain education is not capable of love and support.
I have always believed that feminism is “the right to choice”, not just for women, but for men. And I have the choice to find a partner beyond the confines of my university. I would be surprised if anyone reading this, male or female, didn’t feel the same. The idea of women having to limit themselves in order to “have-it-all” is not an intelligent one.