‘Have it all’ mea culpa is too little, too late for girls today

FOR many, Helena Morrissey, the mother-of-nine and ennobled City boss, has exemplified the notion of the modern superwoman. But she has now confessed her regret at having helped ‘create the myth that it’s easy for women to have it all’.

In a deeply personal article for the Daily Mail, she wrote about the agonies of going back to work after the birth of each of her children (for her youngest, she only took 11 weeks maternity leave) and how she ‘had this constant nagging feeling my priorities were all wrong’.

And yet, she says, she kept up the front, pretended nothing was wrong, ‘doubled down on creating the impression I could “do it all”.

‘Looking back,’ she adds, ‘I wish I hadn’t helped perpetuate this illusion that we can breeze through big life events, such as having a baby or enduring a miscar- riage, and carry on as if nothing much has happened.’

It’s never easy to admit a mistake. It takes courage and self-knowledge. So I am grateful for her candour. But I believe it’s too little, too late. The damage is done. The world has changed irrevocably for women, and no amount of hand-wringing can put the genie back in the bottle.

Morrissey’s mistake was not that she chose to ‘have it all’. It was that she, and many others, sold it so well. They made it look so easy. They highlighted the good bits – financial success, career advancement, being an all-round ‘girl boss’, as my daughter would say – but drew a veil over the realities.

There was a kind of machismo associated with the ‘have-it-all’ culture, one that refused to acknowledge the truth of what it took to keep the show on the road. Not just a selfless, sympathetic husband (Morrissey’s is a retired journalist who was happy to stay at home) but also an army of staff.

For someone like Morrissey on a big salary, none of that was presumably a problem. But for the vast majority of women juggling work and children, it’s not so easy after a day’s work if they have to get the bus home to pick up the kids from school – then make supper and get the house in order.

But thanks to high-profile ‘role models’ like Morrissey, all this is now expected of the rest of us. As are a million other things. Being able to ‘snap back’ into our pre-pregnancy shape, to defy ageing, retain our enthusiasm for sex when quite honestly we’d rather saw off our own leg.

Or pretending to be fulfilled when there’s not an hour when you’re not doing something for someone else: employer, spouse, child, parent.

And the worst part is, there’s no escape.

The world has changed. Most families need two salaries to be able to put a roof over their heads. The idea that work for a woman is an exciting choice, not an obligation, belongs to another age. In short, women have thrown off their domestic chains only to find themselves shackled to a far more exhausting treadmill. And yet we are still the only ones who can have babies.

Which means that if we choose to have children we’ll be obliged to ‘have it all’, aka work our socks off until we collapse or lose our marbles. No wonder so many young women today are putting off having babies, or deciding not to have them at all.

They’re not stupid. They know what’s in store. They’ve seen my generation’s self-sacrifice on the altar of equality. True, we changed the world. But perhaps, as Helena Morrissey now admits, not necessarily for the better.