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Abstract
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” published in 2012, generated huge response, well beyond what already has become typical in the intensifying mommy wars in the United States. It also drew considerable attention globally. Within one week of publication, Slaughter’s “lament” attracted a million readers. Slaughter’s explanation of why she quit her high powered job, and then Yahoo’s choice of the then-pregnant Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive, provoked another round of mommy wars. The research reported here on how journalists dealt with the controversy compares the US, with its tradition of heated controversy over working mothers and neoliberal opposition to structural supports for families, and Israel, where attention to Slaughter was somewhat surprising, given the presumption in Israel that mothers will work outside the home. Journalistic discourse in both countries tended to frame the work–home conflict as a women’s issue, to be addressed by women journalists, and not men. Moreover, writers tended to address the issue anecdotally, in terms of personal experience but ignoring structural issues and structural solutions and ignoring how solutions for middle-class professional women or women at the “center” may not work for other kinds of women.
Notes
1. One-third of Israeli employed women work part-time (Osnat Pichtelberg-Bramtz and Ronit Harris Citation2011).
2. Princeton, New Jersey, where her family lives, is nearly two hundred miles from Washington, DC.
3. Given that the debate is about normative ideals, statistics about working women and public opinion are not offered here, but Suzanne M. Bianchi and Melissa A. Milkie (Citation2010) summarize recent research.
4. African American, middle-class mothers are usually assumed to prefer a collective mothering ideology rather than the intensive mothering ideology of white, middle-class women; however, Crowley (Citation2015) found more pronounced mommy wars discourse among African Americans. UK data suggest that less well educated and economically disadvantaged parents practice good parenting but poor people are seen as poor at parenting because the activities of advantaged parents became the benchmark for assessment (Esther Dermott and Marco Pomati Citation2016).
5. Israel has the highest birth rate among developed countries, at #101 overall, with the second highest developed country, Ireland, ranking #125 and the US ranking #150, and birth rates in the five biggest developed economies (also Japan, Germany, France and Britain) have dropped significantly in recent years; see http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=25. Ranked by fertility rates, Israel and the US are similar relative to one another, albeit with somewhat different numbers.
6. The notion of “choice” (Maria Charles and David B. Grusky [Citation2004] call this “egalitarian essentialism”—combining the feminist rhetoric of choice and equality with support for stay‐at‐home mothers) also obscures larger cultural and economic vectors.
7. In 2015 Random House published Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. We focus on the arguments and debates provoked by the original article.
8. The Hebrew was translated into English by the second author.
9. Caroline Whitbeck (Citation1984) argued that maternal instinct resulted from neither biology nor socialization but rather from the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and postpartum recovery.
10. Israel has a mandatory fourteen-week maternity leave; women employees cannot return to work until they have had at least six weeks of recuperation.