To Cook, or Not to Cook
Slate's
Jack Shafer blasts yesterday's Times story on college women's changing ambitions. He faults reporter Louise Story for not having any hard data on the alleged trend among Ivy League women to downplay careers in favor of motherhood, and relying upon the word "many" instead.
So how did this story make it onto the front page of the
Times?
According to Shafer, "I suspect a
Times editor glommed onto the idea while overhearing some cocktail party chatter—"Say, did you hear that Sam blew hundreds of thousands of dollars sending his daughter to Yale and now she and her friends say all they want in the future is to get married and stay at home?"—and passed the concept to the writer or her editors and asked them to develop it."
Shafer may be right about this, but I still suspect that Story was onto something. After spending a year and a half at Harvard as a reporter, I found the attitudes she reported on pretty commonplace among women.
My question remains, so what? Is it really such a bad thing to want to balance work and family? Certainly the story has public policy questions, and educational policy ones as well. But the young women interviewed in the piece came across as perfectly healthy and normal to me...certainly more so than women who think they "can have it all." No one can have it all.
And again, to me the more interesting question is why men
don't seek out that balance.
