Thatcher knew women couldn’t have it all

Oh, no, not another woman telling her fellow women how they should live their lives!

We had barely recovered from Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University professor and former bigwig at the U.S. State Department, telling us that we can’t have it all, when along came Facebook bigwig Sheryl Sandberg. Suddenly, we were required to nod dutifully in agreement with her instead of with Slaughter, like so many bobble-headed dogs in the rear windows of cars.

That’s because it turns out Slaughter was all wrong. Sandberg says we can have it all, as long as we have a user-friendly husband who’ll heat up the mac-and-cheese at suppertime for the children we won’t see very often because we’re at the office so late every night. Sandberg advised us to “lean in.”

Now, however, we need to lean back, because it seems that both Slaughter and Sandberg are all wrong, and the person we really need to listen to is Susan Patton.

A human-resources consultant and 1977 alumna of Princeton, Patton recently wrote a letter to the young women attending her alma mater and told them they’d better spend their university years looking for a husband. If they choose not to go big-game hunting, then they should be prepared to find themselves 30-something, childless, husbandless, and I guess, hopelessly set on course to becoming the resident cat lady in their condo complex.

Well, right in the middle of everyone reading the latest book on the topic and fretting about the formula for living the illusory perfect life that nobody can possibly achieve, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher died.

It doesn’t really matter whether you cared for her politics or not (I didn’t), but here was a woman whose toughness and realistic perspective on life is worth a dozen Sandbergs, Slaughters and Pattons sowing fields of angst among today’s women.

“Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the high road to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction,” Thatcher said.

Right on, Maggie. It’s all about what you know is right and important, not what a Susan Patton or a Sheryl Sandberg tells you. And what’s right for you is really nobody else’s business. Other women have to decide what’s right for their own lives. So let them do so — and get on with paddling your own canoe.

Or as another iron lady, the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, said: “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.”

Neither of these admirable women said that their advice was the shortest route to the perfect life. They didn’t talk about how women could achieve that perfect life. They knew there is no such thing. They were aware that everyone’s life has its share of pain, loss, setbacks, failures, remorse, regrets and if-only scenarios.

For every choice made, there’s a choice left unmade — Robert Frost’s road not taken — and some, but not all, of the choices that remain unchosen will, inevitably, come back to haunt you.

Here’s what Meir said about that in her 1975 autobiography My Life: “I stayed up at night to cook for (my children) Menachem and Sarah. I mended their clothes. I went to concerts and films with them. We always talked and laughed a lot together. But were my sister Sheyna and my mother right when they charged me for years with depriving the children of their due? I suppose that I shall never be able to answer this question to my own satisfaction and that I will never stop asking it. Were they proud of me, then or later? I like to think so, of course, but I am not really sure that being proud of one’s mother makes up for her frequent absences.”

You can’t have it all, and you just have to recognize that and go forward.

As Meir said: “To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.”

Just get on with being. Your way.