Women, Family, and the Expectations of Leadership

“Women do almost as well as men today as long as they don’t have children.”

-- Professor Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University, 2010

In EEOC v. Bloomberg L.P., 778 F. Supp. 2d 458, 485-486 (S.D.N.Y. 2011), a major gender discrimination lawsuit, Chief Judge Loretta A. Preska of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York declared, “[M]aking a decision that preferences family over work comes with consequences…perhaps unfortunately, women tend to choose to attend to family obligations over work obligations thereafter more often than men in our society.  Work-related consequences follow.”

We see this pattern not only in the fast-paced, high-pressure world of financial journalism, but across a spectrum of jobs, including the highest leadership posts in our government. While the last three men nominated to the Supreme Court (Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Stephen Breyer) have all been married (with seven children among them), the last three women (Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Harriet Miers) have all been single and without children.

As freelance writer Robin Marty noted, “When men are able to rise to high-powered positions, dominating the roles of CEO, upper level management, and yes, Supreme Court Justice and even President, all while at the same time being able to raise a family, but women can only pursue these options without being encumbered by children, there is still a major hurdle to overcome.”

Others, however, appear nonplussed by the sacrifices demanded by politics or business at its highest levels. As Kathryn S. Wylde, President of the Partnership for New York City, told the New York Times in the wake of Judge Preska’s historic ruling:

I am among the first generation of ‘liberated’ women professionals who took for granted we would have to sacrifice personal time and family life to achieve our professional goals. Younger women tend to assume ‘equality in the workplace,’ along with the notion that they can and should ‘have it all.’ I don’t think that is possible for men or women, and certainly not in the competitive environment of New York City.

Thus, before we can even figure out how to overcome the hurdle Marty described, we must first decide how or whether to characterize it as a hurdle in the first place. This effort requires us to examine the appropriate balance between professional duty to our community and our personal lives.

This week, Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, wrote in the Times Opinionator, “Our desires should not be the ultimate arbiters of vocation. Sometimes we should do what we hate, or what most needs doing, and do it as best we can.”

On the one hand, it seems plain that people need and deserve to live enriching lives beyond the toils of our labor. If, as a great ancient philosopher once said, humans are “luminous beings” and not merely “crude matter”, it stands to reason that our professional passions are but a small part of our souls.

On the other, as Christina Rossetti wrote in her poem-turned-Christmas-carol In The Bleak Midwinter, each of us must do our part, particularly the “wise men” who have been granted opportunity to little credit of their own.

And yet, what Marino misses in his piece—and what so many people who view work and life as a “zero sum” game fail to understand—is how love, family, and personal fulfillment can and do enable professional success and should be viewed as assets rather than liabilities, particularly among leaders in business, politics, and law.

It’s no secret that finding internal peace and happiness in life is brutally difficult, even for those blessed with the material trappings of the developed world. Waving that quest off as if it is a distraction from our core functions is neither helpful nor realistic. Indeed, while some of us can dupe ourselves into thinking that somehow we can do the professional without regard to the personal, life eventually hits you upside the head and it becomes crystal clear that the foundation of success in any realm—the font from which all-else flows—is intimate human connection: familial, fraternal, romantic.

*   *   *   *   *   *

While it may be acceptable to expect professional athletes or master chess players to have an almost monastic devotion to their craft—the skill and dexterity needed to succeed at the highest level being almost directly tied to their hours of practice—political leaders are different animals.

Being a “political junkie” does not dovetail with being an effective representative. Sure, politicians need to have an understanding of the levers of power and should have a strong historical/procedural understanding of the body to which they are elected; but successful leadership in government requires so much more.

It requires an understanding of the diverse perspectives of your constituents, while simultaneously being confident in one’s own conception of First Principles. It requires a keen awareness of the values of the community and the emphasis placed on certain elements of life that may not at first glance appear to demand prioritization. And perhaps more than anything else, it requires empathy with the real problems of real people (as opposed to obsession with the political problems of political people).

In the spring of 2001, a friend who was graduating from Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School gave me a wallet-sized yearbook photo with a lovely message on the back, which I carry to this day. Well aware of my outsized ambitions, my friend took pains to urge me to “never close my mind to a family life.” It was an incredibly poignant piece of advice from someone one year my senior by the clock, but ages ahead in the consideration of what factors make a life worth living.

And yet, even as I recognize the prescience of her words, it is a challenge to beat back the uncertainty that comes from a political world that demands more of us than most are willing to give and, perhaps more importantly, more than it should demand if we want our representatives to have the perspective of a well-rounded existence that is so cherished by the polity at large.

Enon: Dimensionality, Time, and the “Awful Miracle” of Life

“Even as our own universe settled down to a comfortable homey expansion, the rest of the cosmos will continue blowing up, spinning off other bubbles endlessly, a concept known as the multiverse.”

--“Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun,” New York Times (17 Mar. 2014)

In 2010, Paul Harding—a native of Wenham, Mass.—won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, Tinkers. It was an unlikely victory, to say the least. After years of receiving rejection letters from publishing houses—many of whom, in Harding’s words, wondered if he understood “the pace of life today”—Tinkers was published by tiny outfit Bellevue Literary Press.

This week, I picked up Harding’s second novel, Enon, for no other reason other that the fact that the novel was set in Wenham, the sister town to my hometown of Hamilton, Mass (referred to, in the novel, as Hillham). It is a funny feeling to intimately know the seemingly fictional places Harding describes (the Tea House, William Fairfield Drive, Peter Hill, the golf courses, Enon Lake, the canal) and to have taken part in many of the traditions referenced in the book (the Memorial Day parade from the Civil War Monument to the cemetery and back evoking the most visceral memories).

 

Whether you feel those nostalgic sentiments or not, Enon challenges our vision of the world as being a unitary whole, and instead insists on the multidimensionality of time and space.

“Just beneath our feet, on the other side of the surface of the earth, there is another, subterranean Enon which conceals its secret business by conducting it too slowly for its purposes to be observed by the living.”

That “other” Enon is itself, multidimensional. “[T]hat old earth…the cross sections of years and centuries and generations, folded up into the curled layers of prehistoric winters and antique summers.”

It’s an image that comes naturally in small, New England towns, where the weight of history is acutely felt in a way that never can be in a metropolis that is constantly reinventing itself (like New York) or a young city at the edge of a continent that remains, to this day, on the frontier (like San Francisco).

In Massachusetts, town after town greets natives and travelers alike with the same signage, proudly announcing—in understated but no uncertain terms—the town’s date of incorporation (which is almost invariably before the founding of the American Republic). Indeed, if population is the hallmark of the town lines of the Plains and the Rockies, in New England, it is history and time.

My mother often said that the afterlife is another dimension and that her loved ones communicate with her through space time in the form of birds that come to frequent our backyard feeder (I’ve asked Mom—if indeed she has the choice—to return to me in the form of the black-capped chickadee, the official bird of the Commonwealth). It’s a comforting concept, albeit one that I’ve never had the spiritual stomach to truly believe. And yet, it seems eminently believable—scientific even—in the wake of both our continued discoveries regarding the origins of the Universe and the magnetic pull of history.

For some of us, that pull is so profound that the reality of existence in our given moment seems wrong. As the protagonist of Enon describes it, the fear of falling into the “old earth” described above was that the odds seemed so impossibly slim (“one in a million or even slighter”) that one would reemerge in the right place at the right time and not be “hoisted from the ground a dead Puritan or quadruped fossil.”

But if that is indeed true, then it would seemingly follow that those who do “fall” into tears in the space time continuum are, more often than not, spit out into a world far removed from their soul’s internal clock.

Despite this possibility, Enon challenges us to view the “curse,” “condemnation,” and “provocation,” of having been “conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth,” as a miraculous opportunity to be present in whatever moment you happen to find yourself, and to simply and unabashedly feel.

Bowling Together: "Being Somebody" in Modern America

 “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1874

On August 14, 1851, Rev. Horace Bushnell of Hartford, Connecticut, delivered a speech titled The Age of Homespun, in which he mocked the effort of historians to catalog famous dates and persons and insisted that the truly valuable acts of our world are those performed by the “average” citizen.

[In] our historic pictures, we are obligated to sink particulars in generals, and so to gather, under the name of a prominent few, what is really done by nameless multitudes. These, we say, led out the colonies, these raised up the states and communities, these fought the battles. And so we make a vicious inversion, not seldom, of the truth; representing as causes those who, after all, are not so much causes as effects, not so much powers as instruments, in the occasions signalized by their names—caps only of foam, that roll conspicuous in the sun, lifted, still, by the deep under-swell of waters hid from the eye.

Bushnell’s simple conclusion: “True worth is for the most part unhistoric.”

I thought about Bushnell’s thesis as I unforgivingly traversed the dusty clay streets of Easter Island with my then-67-year-old mother in May 2012. Perhaps to ward off utter exhaustion or to refrain from saying what she really felt about my insistence that we walk every last inch of one of the world’s most mysterious and secluded locations, Mom took the opportunity to talk at length about her childhood, our family, and what she dreamt of as a child growing up in the small Berkshire village of Lee, Mass.

One of the most striking things that Mom said, with a tone of considered disappointment, was that she “always through she’d be somebody.” This struck me as an odd statement, and a troubling one. Mom was (and is) so many things to so many people. Within our family alone, Mom is the third child of a civil servant father and a homemaker mother, a sister to three brothers and sisters, a mother to two (and a surrogate for more), not to mention an ever-patient and forgiving spouse (right, Dad?) for 40+ years.

Beyond the familial, Mom’s life has been equally infused with meaning. She won multiple national teaching awards during her 35-year career as an educator (mainly at Swampscott, Mass. public schools). She’s been treasurer of our local library, a deacon at the First Church of Wenham Congregational, and an ever-present volunteer at Appleton Farms in my hometown of Hamilton, Mass (just to name a few of her many activities).

And of course, neither of my parents can travel the North Shore without bumping into old students who remember Ms. Airoldi (later Mrs. Kalloch) and Mr. Kalloch fondly as critical players in their emotional and intellectual development.

So how could it be that my mother didn’t think she was somebody?

In 1995, Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote an article in the Journal of Democracy titled, “Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.” The article, which Putnam eventually turned into a book in 2000, was centered on the idea that the “vibrancy of American civil society” (what Putnam terms “social capital”) had notably declined in the second half of the 20^th century and that such a deterioration was having a multitude of unintended and unhealthy consequences on the state of the American republic.

Putnam continues to be one of several thinkers whose work has had a profound effect on the way I approach politics—so expect to see more of him in “First Principles” posts in the months to come. For the purpose of this post, Putnam’s observation is critical to understanding the answer to the question posed above.

Simply put, I think my mother’s conclusion is a product of how our society has slowly but surely chipped away at viewing community connections and social linkage as critical elements of a life well lived.

 

Everyone plays a role in how a society functions. Everyone is somebody to someone—and often many things to many people, all at the same time. And everyone needs to value each other’s contributions to our collective effort as citizens to make a freer, more just world for our neighbors, whether down the block, across the country, or around the world.

I’ll end—if you will indulge me—with one more familial vignette. Like my own mother, my mother’s mother, Mildred Anson Airoldi, played a variety of roles in her community. One role was as a volunteer at the local information booth on the Lee Town Green (see photo), which still stands at the corner of Main Street and Park Street.

Like many Berkshire towns—from Stockbridge and Great Barrington in the south to Williamstown and Adams to the north—Lee has long relied on tourism to boost its economy, especially as manufacturing fled in post-war period. My grandmother would welcome visitors to the Gateway to the Berkshires, whether they came to enjoy a concert at nearby Tanglewood in the summer, our famous foliage in the fall, or snow sports in the winter.

My grandmother was doing her part for her community. She was part of a world in which we “Bowled Together” and which that togetherness was valued. It’s a world that has, in some ways, passed us by. But it is also a world that can inspire us to do better—to appreciate the roles we play in one another’s success and to remember that while the world will long be full of unvisited tombs, it must never forget the people who inhabit said tombs. Those people were somebody.