Wonder Women

Personally, though, as a creature of compromise, I find myself constantly attracted to the murky path of muddling through. I believe that women are entitled to be whatever they want, but that they can’t ever expect, any more than men, that they can have it all.

We can rue these events, or the gods who apparently predestined them, or we can come to terms with our differences and focus on ways of making them work.

It argues that women of my generation got feminism wrong, seeing it as a route to personal perfection and a promise of all that we were now expected to be. Instead of seizing upon the liberation that had been handed to us, we twisted it somehow into a charge: because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything. And by following unwi

Despite what feminism promised, therefore, and what my generation believed, women in the United States still face distinctive challenges that cannot be explained solely by reference to class or race or socioeconomic status. Instead, women live their lives differently simply on account of their sex.

They are problems that come from the nearly impossible standards of perfection that women have somehow rushed to embrace, problems that come—inherently and inevitably—simply from being female. Yet they are falling on generations of women who grew up believing that none of these things were supposed to matter anymore.