Government Executive - Authors - Anne-Marie Slaughter

How Men Can Help Women Succeed in the Military

Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:36:00 -0500

The Pentagon's decision to open up combat roles to women was such great news in a number of ways. There's the basic justice of allowing women to get credit for something they are already doing. Lifting the combat ban also means that women now can serve in positions that are generally essential for promotion to the top of the military (who wants a general or admiral who hasn't actually served in combat?). And we got treated to a spate of articles and interviews featuring amazing women soldiers, sailors, and pilots.

The only thing we didn't hear about, or at least I didn't, was the need for army husbands. (I'm not leaving out the other services, but "army wives" is the term often used to describe military wives generally.) Army wives have their own TV show and reality TV show, their own lore, books, and blogs; even their own radio network—all of which are filled with pictures of groups of women. As a society, we understand that our military men could not do what they do without their wives, who must handle the stresses of long deployments, single parenthood, changing plans and locations at the drop of a hat, and the omnipresent fear that their husbands will never come home. Holly Petraeus, daughter of a four-star general and wife of another, moved 23 times over 30 years.

How are women going to be able to make it to the top of the military without an entire new generation of army husbands? Obviously men married to military women are not new, but they are in the decided minority. Consider the following plaintive post from an army husband writing in to a portion of an army website titled "Experiences of Army Wives":

What Obama Doesn't Get About Gender Inequality

Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:24:00 -0500

President Obama's second Inaugural had a lot to say about relations between the sexes. To begin with, this was the rainbow inauguration. From the selection of speakers to the speeches themselves, the full diversity of America was on display. Michael Cohen of the Century Foundation tweeted: "A Puerto Rican Sup Ct Justice, a black invocation speaker, a Jewish emcee, a Southern senator, a black president, a Brooklyn choir #America." And President Obama described the tides of U.S. history as waves of one social movement after another seeking the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: Seneca Falls (women), Selma (African-Americans), and Stonewall (gay and lesbian Americans). He was setting the stage for finishing unfinished business for women and for the LGBT community, as well as for immigrants and for social justice overall.

Obama's speech and the ceremony as a whole made me proud and happy. The poetry and power of his language, his vision of what this country has been and can be again, his knitting together of the tapestry that is America brought a lump to my throat, one more time. But after the passion of the moment, I am left with the sober realization that Obama still hasn't taken to heart the full extent of discrimination against women. The reason women's rights and gay rights are unfinished business is that both women and non-heterosexual men and women still deviate from the unspoken norm, the unconscious, reflexive view of what a breadwinner, a citizen, or a bridegroom looks like: a straight (white) man. Indeed, it's precisely this "deviation," or difference, that makes diversity so valuable; people who look different are treated differently by others, have different life experiences, and bring different perspectives to the table. But until we change the norm itself, learn to reshape our workplaces and our expectations around a different image of what normal is, those differences will still be penalized.

Obama seems to miss this deeper connection. One of his most rousing lines was his claim that "if we are created equal then surely the love we bear to one another must be equal as well." That was his reference to the struggle for gay rights. For women he said, "For our journey is not complete until our wives, mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts." Equal pay for equal work certainly remains an issue for women, but women who do not have children earn the same or more than men. It is children who make the difference for the women who take care of them either as primary or even as equal caregivers. We do not have enough men in this position to have reliable data, but anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that men who are primary or equal caregivers pay an equal penalty.

Read more at The Atlantic.

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For a Leader, Which Matters More: Marriage Vows or the Oath of Office?

Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:34:00 -0500

I have been musing lately about public versus private responsibility. After David Petraeus resigned from the CIA last month, many people questioned whether he should have stepped down, arguing that his value to the country should outweigh whatever was happening in his private life. I am in the camp of those who think that he absolutely had to resign because his ability to lead an agency of people who are trained from Day One to avoid any behavior that could expose them to blackmail and thus compromise national security was irrevocably compromised.

But I was struck that no commentary that I saw ever suggested that he had to resign because of his responsibility to his wife and children. He betrayed his marriage vows to his wife and jeopardized the very foundation of his family; as he himself said, he now has a great deal of work to do to repair the damage. I do not sit in judgment on his behavior. Many marriages have encountered and survived similar troubles, and affairs can happen even when the parties involved do not want or intend them. And I recognize the importance of some divide between the public and private spheres. But I still wonder why an individual's private responsibilities—responsibilities to spouse and family that married people pledge to honor before a community of family and friends on their wedding day just as public officials pledge to uphold the constitution when they took public office—do not seem to be part of the public calculus of value.

This question is raised even more sharply by a new film that I strongly recommend entitled The Man Nobody Knew, an account of the life of another CIA director, William Colby, by his son and documentary film-maker Carl Colby. We screened it at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton last week and then had a question-and-answer session with Carl Colby. The most compelling character in the film is Barbara Colby, who never fully knew what her husband was doing but who supported him fully and loyally over decades in the belief that he, and thus she, were working for a higher public cause. She stood by him through years of separation when he was heading up the infamous Phoenix program in Vietnam, a program that killed thousands of Vietcong often simply on the word of fellow villagers, and then through an intense and humiliating Congressional grilling over the exposure of CIA global activities after Watergate. Yet after he was fired by Gerald Ford in favor of political "loyalist" George H.W. Bush, he asked for a divorce, to her evident surprise, and married a younger woman. Carl Colby ends the film by revealing that when his father committed suicide (as he believes), he had on him a picture of Carl's sister Catherine, who died of epilepsy and anorexia at age 24. Carl reports that he only saw his father cry twice, once when his sister died and once at the fall of Saigon.

Can women have it all? Former federal official says answer is 'no'

Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 09:26:00 -0400

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”

She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.

In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter discusses why work-life balance is difficult for high-ranking women in government, and in many types of jobs. Click here to read the full story, and let us know if you agree, using the comments section below.

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