Moms’ Limits
Conway’s right: One spouse has to put the kids first
KELLYANNE Conway is turning out to be a very prescient woman. It’s not just that she became Donald Trump’s campaign manager when most strategists had written him off or that she continued to say he would win long after the media had determined his case was hopeless.
She also demonstrated significantly more forethought than many working mothers when she said on Wednesday that it would be impossible for her to serve both in the Trump White House and as a mother to four children under 12.
Speaking at Politico’s “Women Rule” event, she described conversations she recently had with men about the possibility: “I do politely mention to them the question isn’t would you take the job, the male sitting across from me who’s going to take a big job in the White House, the question is would you want your wife to . . . Would you want the mother of your children to? You really see their entire visage change. It’s like, oh, no, they wouldn’t want their wife to take that job.”
Conway has, of course, outraged feminists with this statement. Her “attitude ... feels ripped out of ‘Mad Men,’ ” wrote Suzanne Monyak in Slate. (How did we ever describe backward attitudes before “Mad Men”?)
She continues: “The problem with Conway’s comments is not that she values her family or spending time with her young children. It’s that she seems to believe that it is the onus of the woman in a family to sacrifice her career opportunities so that her husband may have his.”
Maybe. But most women — I’d guess Conway is among them — don’t see it as an onus at all.
Conway didn’t suggest that her own husband is standing in the way of her career advancement, though he may well prefer she not take a job that requires her to be on call 24-7. Indeed, he may think the way other men she spoke with think — that their wives are doing a pretty bang-up job as mothers, and it’s pretty hard to do that with a gig at the White House.
At any rate, since her husband works at a large law firm, it would probably require him to quit entirely or hire round-theclock child care. Because two high-power careers are rarely compatible with a quality family life. Someone, as I tell my friends when they first have children, has to be the “backup plan.”
It’s a lesson that Ann Marie Slaughter learned the hard way a few years ago. Slaughter took a leave from her job at Princeton University to become the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department. She left her husband, a professor with a flexible schedule, in charge of her two adolescent sons in Princeton while she commuted back and forth Washington each week.
Slaughter had assumed, like many women in such positions, that once your kids reach a certain age they don’t need you as much. And also that parents are in some sense interchangeable. But she quickly learned, as the article title noted, that women “still can’t have it all.”
Slaughter learned the wrong lessons from her experience, of course. In the book that was adapted from the article, she writes that if only women had more support from their husbands and the government, they could get everything.
But as a recent Gallup poll suggests, less than 40 percent of women who have a child under 18 even want to work outside the home at all.
Anyway, Slaughter had a husband with a flexible schedule and plenty of financial resources but her sons apparently still needed their mother in a 50-mile radius.
That’s not to say careers for moms can never work. Valerie Jarrett, a single mother of one child, said Conway should give the White House a shot. Jarrett told the Politico gathering: “I wouldn’t have traded the last years for anything.”
She suggests that you just have to have a chat with the president where you say your family comes first.
Most women, even those who were instrumental in a successful presidential run, know they can’t say that to the occupant of the White House. And it would be absurd to try.
In the meantime, Conway seems to have a pretty good deal running her own polling firm. Like many mothers of young children, she probably likes being her own boss. And she’s certainly no slouch of a pollster. (I’ve never had trouble getting her on the phone for an interview).
Indeed, she probably is as close to having it all as most of us — men and women — can reasonably imagine.