What If Motherhood Was Considered as Ambitious as ‘Real’ Work?

“Women’s professional achievement used to depend on being exactly like men,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of advocacy group New America and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. “Female partners at law firms had bow ties; they looked exactly like men and acted like men as much as they could. They had to be ballbusters, tough as nails, and nobody wanted to talk about childcare.” Slaughter is one of a handful of unambiguously ambitious women trying to redefine the word, a result of her own struggle balancing work and family. Her work raises the question: Why has a perfect balance between the two become the goal in the first place?

In recent years Slaughter, 66, has been self-identifying as a “care feminist,” a pivot from decades as a “career feminist.” For her this includes getting more public investment into childcare, as well as a wholesale reassessment of feminism and success, or imagining what the world would be like if women were truly in charge.

She told me that when she first started talking about all this in the mid-2010s, she met a lot of resistance. Her Davos-going, TED-Talking peers couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that she now thought care could be just as important as career, and ambition could encompass both.

“For my generation, embracing care feminism requires a deprogramming and reprogramming. I was programmed to think that my father’s work was important and my mother’s work was not, except for her professional work as an artist. A lot of the women in my generation thought I was betraying the cause when I began talking about care.”

Seeing Slaughter’s mother’s work, and all the other caregivers’ work, as important pushes us to consider, in all its Sisyphean fullness, the task of maintaining a home and family. In the past five years, a lot of women have been talking about this, labeling it as “invisible labor,” “emotional labor,” the “second shift.” Yet many of us still buy into the career-feminist point of view in which only the hard work outside the home should be celebrated and all the birthday-party planning, well-visit booking, and new-shoe buying is a burden.

But others, thankfully, find a way to talk about the immensity of caregiving and domestic work without degrading it. Yes, they’d like men to do more because care is hard and could hold women back at work. But they also want men to take part in care because it’s an important part of a meaningful existence. The moonshot: Convince men to expand their definition of ambition to include care, leading to a rise in men doing more at home and advocating on behalf of caregivers.

Self-identified care feminist Eve Rodsky thinks while there are some men who are lazy and neglectful, that’s not the driving force behind why women do more caregiving and housework. Instead, she believes, it’s inertia and history. This is how it was in their home growing up, and and this is how it was in their father’s home, and so on.

“We’ve failed to see the home as an important organization, so to speak, in need of respect and rigor,” Rodsky, author of the best-selling book Fair Play, which offers a path forward in sharing care and chores among couples.

“When we talk about care as chores, it can sometimes seem as though it’s the worst thing in the world,” she said. “But caring for other beings is literally the existential reason we are alive, and we can help men see that and what it takes.”