The thesis of this book is simple: women can have it all, but not necessarily at the same time. That is, a woman can choose to excel at motherhood, or she can choose to excel at a career, but she cannot do both simultaneously.
As such, this book attempts to burst the bubble of the super-mom myth, the idea that one can juggle both tasks, and succeed at both. Indeed, according to Venker, a working mother comes close to being a contradiction in terms.
Of course a mom can work part time, and some moms, especially single moms, may have no choice about full-time employment, but for the average woman, to think that one can excel in a fantastic career path, and produce great, well-developed kids at the same time is simply wishful thinking.
The first myth, "Men can have it all, so why can't we" is just that: a myth. Most men who work full time do not spend an equal amount of time with their children. In any set of relationships there are always trade-offs. Men in full time jobs trade off the privilege of having the lengthy, intimate moments with their children that a stay-at-home mother has. And it is the same if it is the mother who is working full time.
Indeed, the term "working mother" in this regard is misleading. If a mother chooses a full-time paid career, she is basically leaving the job of mothering to someone else. She is paying someone else to mother her children.
Another myth is that the roles of dads and moms are fully interchangeable. They are not, because men and women are not the same. There are inherent, biological differences. As Venker demonstrates, "fathers will never be parents in the same way mothers are". Thus the androgyny ideal is a furphy.
To speak about completely equal roles in marriage therefore is nonsense. There is never complete equality in marriage. Instead there is give and take. There are concessions and there is bargaining. Any good partnership requires a division of labor, and women seem hard-wired by nature to have more of a nurturing, caring and, well, maternal, disposition. It is not just breast-feeding that is the mother's distinctive.
Another myth is that day care is good for children. Quite the opposite is the case. The longer a child is in day care, and from an earlier age, the worse it is for the child. As one child expert has put it, "A home must be very bad before it can be bettered by a good institution". Yet we have abandoned our children in droves to strangers. Feminists have convinced many women that they can only be fulfilled and liberated if in the paid workplace. Totally absent from the debate is the needs of the child.
Then there is the myth that we can give our children quality time in place of quantity time. This is just plain false. Children need our undivided attention, and they need lots of it. They do not need a committee drifting in and out of their lives. They need a mother and a father, and especially a mother during the early years of life. "What children need - what children have always needed - is time and attention, and the undivided loyalty of one adult, preferably their mothers". Says Venker, "Anything less just isn't good enough."
Motherhood is the most noble and most important of occupations. We have allowed feminist ideology to rob us of this truth. We have allowed a market-driven economy to convince us that we are by nature working, not relational, beings. We have allowed the lure of materialism and consumerism to cause us to put wealth ahead of family.
This may all smack of chauvinistic doubletalk. But recall that our author is a woman. And as she rightly concludes, "the traditional family structure is not something that holds women down. The traditional family structure simply keeps women from having to worry about producing an income while they work on the most important job of their lives."
