Why Women Still Can't Have It All

In the summer of 2012, one magazine essay detonated the national conversation about women and work: Anne-Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," published in The Atlantic.

Slaughter wrote from an unusual vantage point. From 2009 to 2011, she had served as director of policy planning at the State Department — the first woman to hold the job — working for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Then she left, returning to her professorship at Princeton. The official line was a two-year public-service leave ending on schedule. The real reason, she wrote, was her family: two teenage sons, one going through a difficult patch, and a husband holding down the home front in Princeton while she worked punishing hours in Washington.

Her argument was bracing in its directness. "Having it all" — the high-powered career plus the thriving family — was, she wrote, not currently possible for women, and the feminist movement had done women a disservice by suggesting it was simply a matter of will. The obstacles were structural: workplaces built around the life pattern of a man with a full-time wife at home; schedules that punished anyone who needed flexibility; a culture that treated caregiving as a private indulgence rather than socially essential work.

She proposed no single fix, but a direction: flexible work as the norm rather than the exception, revaluing caregiving, men taking on equal shares at home, and — crucially — honesty from successful women about the trade-offs, instead of the "you can have it all" pieties that left younger women blindsided.

The essay drew fierce responses from all sides — from women who had made it work, from those who felt Slaughter's elite vantage point missed the struggles of working-class women, and from those who saw it as surrender. But it permanently changed the vocabulary of the debate: after the summer of 2012, "having it all" was a phrase people used in quotation marks.