Spar - Wonder women : sex, power, and the quest for perfection

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To my parents,

Judith and Martin Spar

Contents

Prologue

Im pretty sure I remember the moment I knew I was having it all. It was December 1992, in the womens bathroom at LaGuardia Airport. I had just an hour between flights and so I had rushed straight for the stalls, cramming my bags against the door and pulling off my blouse. Then I perched on the less-than-inviting seat, took out the little Medela Pump in Style and began feverishly to pump. From the stall next to me, I heard a gasp of surprise and a hasty flush. Cmon, I scolded silently, this is New York. A lady in the bathroom with a breast pump is nothing. After several long minutes of whirring and pressing, fumbling and swearing, I collected my paltry three ounces, pulled the pump and myself back together, and dragged the whole lot out to the sink area. There, before two confused Asian travelers and the girl from Cinnabon, I tossed the milk Id never use down the drain and tried again to reconfigure my five-weeks-postpartum belly into something that vaguely resembled a business suit. And thats when I realizedwryly, ironically, totally deprived of sleepthat I really was having it all.

It wasnt supposed to be so hard. Like many women of my so-called postfeminist generation, I was raised to believe that women were finally poised to be equal with men. That women, after centuries of oppression, exploitation, and other unnamed bad things, could now behave more or less like men. We could have sex whenever we wanted, children whenever we chose, and career options that stretched to infinity. The first woman astronaut? Of course. The first woman president? Why not? This had been the era, after all, when Barbie ditched the closeted Ken for careers in medicine and firefighting, effortlessly acquiring little Skipper along the way. Women of my generation, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, no longer felt we had to burn our bras in protest. Instead, with a curt nod to the bra burners who had gone before us, we could saunter directly to Victorias Secret, buying the satin pushups that would take us seamlessly from boardroom to bedroom and beyond.

But somewhere, somehow, the reality shifted, and instead of lacy strings I was struggling with a nursing bra that defied all notions of femininity and a blouse that refused to close fully over it. I had a five-week-old baby at home, a three-year-old who still hadnt realized quite what had befallen him, and a plane to catch to Michigan. Whatever happened to Barbies breast pump? And why wasnt it working for me?

I am one of those women who was sure I would never consider myself a feminist. In fact, Ive spent most of my lifeprofessional and personalsteering explicitly clear of any feminist agenda. I didnt take a single womens studies class in college or graduate school and never joined any kind of womens group. Based on what I saw on the television news, I always presumed that the feminists were too shrill and aggressive for me. They seemed to hate men, which I didnt. They had hairy legs, which I didnt. And they always looked so angry . I never felt that their Birkenstock-infused lifesyle had anything in common with mine. Oh, sure, we were all women, bound together by the dubious joys of our shared biology. We bled, we bred, we got a bit grumpier every four weeks or so. But a common cause? I didnt see it.

Instead, throughout high school, college, and graduate school, I devoutly believed that I could be a successful woman in a mans world, that I could remain feminine without being feminist . So I studied hard in high schoolbut worked even harder at my cheerleading skills. I read military history and nuclear strategy in collegeand devoted at least part of my newfound knowledge to impressing the ROTC guys I dated. Even when I became one of the few girls in most of my classes, I saw this state of affairs as entirely positive: professors tended to notice my hand whenever it went up, and I never lacked for male companions. When I graduated from college in 1984, one of my favorite professors wrote a letter of recommendation that I took, at the time, as wonderfully positive. Debora, he wrote, is the best woman Ive ever taught.

When I started graduate school at Harvard University the following year, the women before me had suddenly disappeared. Accusations of sexual harassment had ripped through the department, forcing two male faculty members to be ushered quietly into newfound research projects abroad. In their wake, six female graduate studentsmost of the female contingenthad departed as well, apparently reluctant to study in what had become a quietly stressful environment. I should have worried. Instead, I jumped into this new life of the ostensible mind and came to believe that being a woman at Harvard was a very good thing. The university needed female graduate students; it wanted to show off its female graduate students; and the undergraduates whom we taught seemed delighted to have female instructors. The only obvious sign of gender tension was the doors. Every time I entered a faculty office, the professor would swing the door wide open, announcing to his assistant and the world, it seemed, that nothing untoward could possibly occur inside.

I fell in love my first day of graduate school and, three years later, married the boy from the dorm room next door. He took a job in Boston so that I could continue my studies and we soon had our first child. I went into labor moments after the final page of my dissertation rolled out of the printer. One year later, when my son was one and my dissertation polished, I became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and skipped off into the working world, fully confident of my ability to juggle baby, husband, job, and self.

Throughout this time, I assiduously avoided any contact with feminists. Although I was vaguely aware of the literature that had roiled through my own field of political science, I didnt like the little I knew of it. Radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin, for instance, who catalyzed an entire field of feminist inquiry, asserted that all sex was rape, a position I found both offensive and absurd. I had no interest in reading that stuff.

So life moved on. I left the University of Toronto for Harvard Business School and eventually had two more children. I stayed cheerfully nonfeminist, swearing to the young women in my classes and office hours, in presentations and during interviews, that yes, of course, they could have it all.

Somewhere along the way, though, the resentments started to accumulate, spurred by a seemingly endless march of annoying little events. Like the department chair who responded to news of my second pregnancy with undisguised shock. Pregnant! he exclaimed. How the hell did you find time to do that? Or the colleague who suggested that I conclude my MBA course by jumping out of a cake. There were the student evaluations that focused on my legs, and the executives who pulled me aside to whisper what they had really been thinking about during my class. After a while, it started to get to me. And eventually it drove me wild.

It wasnt a dramatic transformation. I didnt toss my wardrobe or stop shaving my legs. Most of my male colleagues remained in my address book, and most of my makeup stayed in my drawer. But I started sharing stories more frequently with my few female colleagues and started to think more explicitly about what connected my own experiencesthings Id kept pretty much to myselfwith those of the women, and men, around me. I began peeking into areas of research I had avoided until this point and found myself counseling other women in ways I had never expected. Eventually, and somewhat to my dismay, I was asked to help solve the womens problem at Harvarda problem, I hasten to add, that is almost certainly no worse than the womens problem at Yale or Princeton, IBM or Google, JPMorgan or Bank of America. I didnt solve the problem. But I did realize that there was one. Or, more precisely, that women across even the top tiers of American society were struggling, continuously and consistently, to make it in a world that remained predominantly male, a world that, despite decades of scrutiny and attention, was still stacked against them.