Wonder Woman? (She doesn’t exist)
Now take this Wonder Woman, the most successful female you know, and run her through a quick perfection counter, the kind of checklist we regularly assign to women we encounter.
Is your most successful woman in a perfect relationship with the partner of her dreams? Does she have perfect children, born at carefully arranged intervals and each now ensconced in a respected university? Is she at the top of her career? Is she earning serious money and investing it well? Has this woman saved the world yet, or at least made a significant contribution to ending poverty, fighting hunger, or combating global climate change? Is she fulfilled? Thin? Unwrinkled? And does her home have hand-crocheted table runners and organic kale growing in the yard?
I didn’t think so.
And yet, every day, in articles and blogs, in play groups and boardrooms, women (and to some extent, men) are subjecting each other to this constant stream of scrutiny; this relentless expectation of across-the-board perfection, with no quarter given for personal idiosyncrasy or the occasional mistake.
Sheryl Sandberg, wife, mother, and Facebook COO, is being lambasted for writing a bestselling book that didn’t manage to solve all the problems facing women in the workforce. Marissa Mayer, trying to save Yahoo! from disaster while tending to a newborn, is crushed for not allowing her employees to telecommute. IMF director Christine Lagarde is attacked for daring to wear designer suits on the job, and pop sensation Adele for failing to lose all of her maternity weight.
All around us, women are constantly being held to superhuman standards.
It wasn’t always this way. In the genteel days of the early 20th century, young women were expected, really, to follow only one path: To marry as well as they might and bear children shortly thereafter.
By mid-century, women like my own mother were able to attend college, earn an income, and contemplate a life outside the home. But these options, still, were few and far between, restricted to women with both the means and the will to fight convention.
I came of age in the early 1970s, when revolution was in the air and young girls were being urged, for the first time, to be whatever they wanted. Yet, quietly and pervasively, girls of the 1970s were still hearing the contradictory lures of an earlier age: Be pretty, be popular... and never let the boys know how smart you are. The women of my generation barged across the gender divide on the shoulders of the feminists who had fought for us. Greedily, we grabbed the power they had bequeathed. But, surrounded still by more ancient expectations and stubbornly ignorant, as many of us were, to feminism’s central cry for collective action and social goals, we promptly forgot much of what they had struggled for, choosing instead to focus on our own careers, our own children, and our own intricate pathways to some sort of success.
One of the most invidious results of that forgetting is that women today spend an inordinate amount of time attacking one another. Just look at the uproar that has surrounded both Sandberg and Mayer this past year, or at the blog postings that regularly emerge any time a woman dares to publish some view of how she has chosen to live her life, love her husband, or raise her kids. Women in the workforce quietly whisper that female bosses are the worst; women on the playground indelicately dissect other mothers’ choices to return to work.
Today, young women have opportunities that would have confused and confounded Lady Mary. Heirs now to 50 years of feminist advocacy, they can finally run companies like Facebook or media organisations such as Time. Thanks to the pill and the patch they can control their sexual and reproductive lives.
But the young women I see around me each day are also being barraged by a wide and often wholly contradictory set of expectations. They are, first of all, simply expected to make it in the world of work. At the same time, though, women are also still expected to be the primary caregivers at home. Meanwhile, insofar as this generation has adopted the Tiger Mom ethos, they have also — horribly and ironically — addled themselves with the burden of hyperparenting.
Contrast this with the women of the Mad Men era, who were content to leave their offspring to play in puddles, eat the occasional biscuit, and even do their own homework.
The good news, once again, is that the choices are virtually unlimited: Women can marry whomever they want; they can have babies without husbands, and sex without commitment. The bad news, though, is that it’s not clear that all young women really want to embrace the carefree lifestyle promoted in Girls or Sex and the City.
It’s tough. Women of earlier generations were almost certainly frustrated by the long list of romantic options — affairs, divorces, same-sex partners — that remained forever out of reach. But women today face an upside-down problem: The expectation that in love, as in so many areas, they are somehow expected to have, and do, it all.
So what, then, does it mean to be a woman of consequence in the 21st century? And what does it take to become one?
To begin, it’s crucial to recognise that being a woman who matters does not mean being a woman who does it all. On the contrary, building a life of consequence demands a certain narrowing of vision, a commitment to excelling in one area, perhaps, but not all. Men do this all the time, and we applaud them for it. Take Steve Jobs, for example, truly a person of consequence. Was he a perfect father and husband? I have no idea, because stories about him rarely touched upon these aspects.
Women need to employ this same kind of focus. Rather than condemn Adele for a few extra pounds, we might just revel in her extraordinary music. And rather than hold ourselves to unrealistically broad expectations, we might try to narrow our vision, identifying our individual strengths, nurturing our particular skills, and not devoting too much time or energy to things that fall further afield. There are millions of women (and men) who live lives of consequence every day. They are not famous, most of them. They are not perfect. They do not do, or have, it all. But they are building lives that matter, and nurturing talents that touch the lives of others. Which is in the end, perhaps, the best we all can do.
Debora Spar is the president of Barnard College and author of the forthcoming book Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection.
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