The New Eve - Lewis Robert [8]
Meredith Vieira, a former host of The View and now a coanchor of NBC's Today show, gave an insightful interview to Time magazine's Jeff Chu. Chu asked, “You quit 60 Minutes to focus on your family, but you now seem to juggle motherhood and work well. What do you say to women who want to have it all?” Vieira replied, “I hate that expression. When I left 60 Minutes, I had women who came up to me very angry and said, ‘You know, you were proof you could have it all. How dare you leave?’ I thought that was ridiculous—I would lie to myself to create a lie for everybody else? You have to prioritize. If you can fit in job and kids and be comfortable with it, great. At that point, I realized I couldn't do it and give my kids and husband what they needed.”25
My question is, Who's teaching young women that they can't have it all? The truth is, virtually no one. And when someone like Shriver or Vieira ventures out to admit that having it all is a myth, she is usually skewered and quickly dispensed with by so-called progressives who hold that “having it all” is the Holy Grail for women.
Of course, you can escape this difficult balancing act by simply eliminating children from the equation altogether. Young women are increasingly choosing this option as they see female icons like Oprah and Rachael Ray lead by example. In an interview with Good Housekeeping magazine, Ray, the megastar of Food Network, admitted that the demands on her time meant that motherhood would not likely find a spot on her calendar anytime soon. Said Ray, “Now I'm in my late 30's, and I've committed to so much work in the next three years that I think it would be really selfish to attempt to have a child.”26
Selfish to have a child? Or could it be that this new womanhood is so “into self” that there is no room for loving children? This me-first attitude is part of the new fruit offered to young, modern Eves. It is glamorous and appealing. But before reaching for this fruit, you would do well to heed the words of Sylvia Ann Hewlett. When she set out to interview scores of highly successful women who were well into their careers, she assumed she would hear stories of celebrity status, power, and money that made children an easy trade-off. But “this is not what these women said. Rather, they told haunting stories of children being crowded out of their lives by high-maintenance careers and needy partners… . I was taken aback by what I heard. Going into these interviews I had assumed that if these accomplished, powerful women were childless, surely they had chosen to be. I was absolutely prepared to understand that the exhilaration and challenge of a megawatt career made it easy to decide not to be a mother. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I talked to these women about children, their sense of loss was palpable. I could see it in their faces, hear it in their voices, and sense it in their words.”27
There you have it. Some of America's most successful women confess that the thrill of climbing to the top is not so fulfilling when they leave behind some of their greatest feminine callings to get there. But it will take much more than an occasional confessional from successful businesswomen to correct the course many women are on today. What is needed is a multitude of wise mentors. Some women are already doing this, but we need more.
I believe younger women would love for older, life-smart women to step forward and courageously speak into the