Here’s another and rather unexpected piece in the mental challenge—how to handle our debt to our pioneering feminist forebears. It’s a complicated relationship—part gratitude, part admiration, part guilt, part rejection. We know that women thirty years ago fought hard to get all of us a seat at the table. They fought so hard that they couldn’t let up. They built a model of women as equal to men, pulling sixty-hour weeks without a murmur of complaint. They’ve brought women to the forefront of fields as diverse as business, academics, politics, and journalism. We are all in their debt for taking those early difficult steps and demanding the right and opportunity to take them.
But that doesn’t mean that the way they worked, and had to work, is right for most of us now. The work pace that enabled them to break down those boardroom doors was necessary at the time, but today we have other choices. We both still think of ourselves as feminists, but it’s a new brand of feminism we adhere to. It is a feminism that finally allows us to build our own work — life model, one that permits us to be who we really want to be.
So here’s your challenge. As you attempt to make positive changes in your life, you may encounter skepticism or criticism from some of your elders, those who’ve been in the trenches.
Or you may simply feel such an immense sense of understandable loyalty to these women that you don’t want to “let them down.” Or you may feel committed to the “we must be exactly equal” school of feminist thinking, and you may struggle with what seems to be inequality.
When you find yourself in the middle of this feminist tangle, real or imagined, remember the following:
• Plenty of new research, as you saw in chapter 2, supports the conclusion that women are wired to enjoy a different version of success.
• Women are now in a position where we are able not only to participate in the working world but also to influence it and change it. What could possibly be more empowering as a woman than not just to sit at the table but also to change the way it looks, based on our own perspectives as women? Isn’t that a feminist breakthrough as well?
• Finally, it is natural to focus on the women before us—the ones who paved the way, and who are often our bosses!
But you need to think about another group just as important: the young women who come after us. Having the boldness to choose a life that you want for yourself is not a selfish move. In fact, like the feminists before us, confronting and surmounting our new challenges as women gives the next generation of women another level of choices and another layer of freedom so that they can live exactly the kind of life they want to live.