Is it really possible to ‘have it all’? In Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, Anne-Marie Slaughter unravels the ‘half truths’ that lie behind this claim, examining how the struggle to manage increasingly incompatible life and work pressures remains particularly potent for women due to the continued gendering of caregiving. Drawing upon her own experiences, Slaughter calls for us to forge a more meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship between work and family. Unfinished Business is therefore a compelling and accessible read for all those interested in gender, work and family politics in the twenty-first century, writes Hannah Walters

Walters, Hannah

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blogs.lse.ac.ukhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/03/09/book-review-unfinished-business-women-men-work-family-by-anne-marie-slaughter/#IWD2016 Book Review: Unfinished Business: Women Men WorkFamily by Anne-Marie SlaughterIs it really possible to ‘have it all’? In Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, Anne-Marie Slaughterunravels the ‘half truths’ that lie behind this claim, examining how the struggle to manage increasingly incompatiblelife and work pressures remains particularly potent for women due to the continued gendering of caregiving. Drawingupon her own experiences, Slaughter calls for us to forge a more meaningful and mutually beneficial relationshipbetween work and family. Unfinished Business is therefore a compelling and accessible read for all those interestedin gender, work and family politics in the twenty-first century, writes Hannah Walters. This review is part of a theme week marking International Women’s Day 2016 (#IWD2016). March is Women’sHistory Month and LSE is celebrating with LSE Women: Making History, focusing on #LSEwomen past, present andfuture. If you are interested in finding out more, please visit the LSE History blog.Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. Anne-Marie Slaughter. One World Publications. 2015.‘It’s such a pity you had to leave Washington.’The opening sentence to Anne-Marie Slaughter’sUnfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, thesewords were spoken when Slaughter was director ofpolicy planning for the US state department workingunder then-Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. The firstwoman to hold this position, Slaughter was edging evercloser to one of only a handful of higher appointments inWashington. But her job at the state department meantworking away from her family home in Princeton, NewJersey, where her husband and two teenage sons lived.Commuting between home and work every week tospend weekends with her family, Slaughter – a self-defined career woman and a person ‘shaped by anddevoted to the opportunities, power and promise of thewomen’s movement’ – found herself entering an unstableand utterly unforeseen period of her life. As establishedin a deeply personal opening chapter, Slaughterarticulates how, for her at least, the pressures of herfamily and work lives grew increasingly incompatible asher career progressed and her children reached theirteenage years. With her home and work commitmentseach growing ever more demanding, Slaughter made thecomplicated decision to leave her life in Washingtonbehind, and return to Princeton. Her family needed her.1/4Following this experience, Slaughter penned a piece for the Atlantic entitled ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All ‘(something of an inflammatory title that she quickly came to regret). The piece became one of the most read articlesin the publication’s 150-year history, with an estimated 2.7 million views (xix). Unfinished Business serves toexplicate the central message of the Atlantic piece, as well as to respond to some of the numerous criticismslevelled at Slaughter upon its publication.Focusing upon the seeming incompatibility of work and family in her own life, Slaughter’s central argument tacklesthe ways in which society values caregiving. For Slaughter, the lack of prestige and value society extends to alltypes of caregiving – within our own families as well as in professions such as teaching or nursing – is central to thecareer-life ‘balance’ with which so many women (and increasingly, men) struggle. Slaughter argues:At least since the Industrial Revolution, we have split work and family into two different spheres, onethe world of men and the other the world of women. As more and more women entered the world ofwork, the relationship between work and family became one of profound tension, each tugging at theother (255).This is the central message running throughout Slaughter’s book, and the theme of its three sections: ‘Movingbeyond our Mantras’, ‘Changing Lenses’ and ‘Getting to Equal’. Each of these are meticulously researched, andskilfully unfold Slaughter’s manifesto for all working men and women with families: namely, that we mustdeconstruct the tense relationship between family and work and forge a meaningful, synergistic and mutuallybeneficial relationship between these two near-universal nodes of modern people’s lives.Image Credit: Work Balance Life (pdpics)Part One, ‘Moving Beyond Our Mantras’, explores ideas of ‘having it all’ through a comprehensive list of ‘half truths’,many of which are instantly recognisable from self-help books, women’s magazines and inspirational social mediaquotes. Through this detailed discussion, Slaughter demonstrates how these are not only half truths, but damaginghalf truths, leading to corrosive feelings of inadequacy, guilt and shame on the part of women who are struggling tomanage this monstrous balancing act. For women, Slaughter outlines the following three half truths:2/4You can have it all if you are just committed enough to your careerYou can have it all if you marry the right personYou can have it all if you sequence it rightThese are followed with an exhaustive and meticulously researched discussion of each, detailing the researchbehind each claim and demonstrating, convincingly, that each of these statements is exactly as Slaughtercategorises them: a half truth. Of course there’s a nugget of fact hidden within them, but the image each depicts is amassive distortion of reality for most working women.Slaughter subsequently elaborates on these half truths, filling in the lacuna in the reality each represents:You can have it all if you are just committed enough to your career … and you are lucky enoughnever to hit a point where your carefully constructed balance between work and family topples over.You can have it all if you marry the right person … who is willing to defer his or her career to yours;you stay married; and your own preferences regarding how much time you are willing to spend atwork remain unchanged after you have children or find yourself caring for aging parents.You can have it all if you sequence it right … as long as you succeed in having children when youplanned to; you have an employer who both permits you to work part-time or on a flexible workschedule and still sees you as leadership material; or you take time out and then find a good job on aleadership track once you decide to get back in, regardless of your age  (35-6).For Slaughter, therefore, ‘family makes work possible in the same way work makes family possible’ (255); fordecades, men have enjoyed family and career success in part due to the fact that they had minimal domesticresponsibilities. With more women entering the workforce, these responsibilities become complicated, thus thecentral tension between work and family.While Slaughter herself has forged a glittering career across the fields of law, policy and academia, her analysis isnot limited to these privileged few who are well compensated for their work. Rather, Slaughter makes a point ofacknowledging her own privilege, even if this is the lens through which the central problem of Unfinished Businesswas originally viewed. Moreover, Slaughter explores the lives of America’s millions of low-income hourly workers, forwhom even the limited flexibility of the white collar world is unattainable – for these lower paid workers in the USeconomy, Slaughter notes that almost a quarter ‘have been fired or threatened with job loss for taking time off torecover from illness or care for a sick loved one’ (64). Slaughter discusses in detail the lived experiences of thiseconomic uncertainty for so many Americans, and while the particulars may differ country to country, the broadstrokes – punishing schedules, prohibitively expensive childcare, low-paid women feeling the crunch like no otherdemographic – are instantly recognisable to a UK audience.But what makes Slaughter’s book a truly unique read is the ways in which her own, deeply personal story isintertwined with the narrative. In addition to being a meticulously researched comprehensive overview of the titularWomen Men Work Family, and how these four operate in the twenty-first century, Unfinished Business articulatesone woman’s personal relationship with her own feminist perspectives on work and family, and how these interactwith the lived experience of a working mother. That said, to categorise Unfinished Business as anything other thanan advancement of long-held feminist goals of equality is to misunderstand the book’s central message: UnfinishedBusiness is not an apology, but a manifesto. As Slaughter notes:3/4I am increasingly convinced that advancing women means breaking free of a new set of stereotypesand assumptions, not only for women, but also for men. It means challenging a much wider range ofconventional wisdom about what we value and why, about measures of success, about thewellsprings of human nature and what equality really means. It means rethinking everything fromworkplace design to life stages to leadership styles (xx).While Unfinished Business is a valuable contribution to current debates, both within the social sciences and at policylevel, the book also makes for a compelling and accessible read for anyone interested in gender, work or familypolitics in the twenty-first century.Hannah Walters is an ESRC-funded PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her current research focuses onworking-class girls, precarious youth transitions and imagined futures, with an emphasis upon the mechanics ofsocial class and gender in hair and beauty vocational education. More broadly, her research interests include socialclass, gender, value and sexual and reproductive rights, as well as Bourdieusian and feminist theory.Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of theLondon School of Economics. Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books4/4

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