Women can have families and successful careers. Millions do. What we can’t do is keep adding competing demands to our lives without eventually having to decide which ones matter most.
A year ago, Karoline Leavitt was being held up as proof that women really could have it all.
The then 27-year-old White House press secretary had returned to work four days after giving birth to her first child during Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Asked about combining motherhood with an extraordinarily demanding career, she rejected the suggestion that the two were incompatible.
“I would reject that you can’t be a good mum and be good at your job,” she told a podcast. “It’s not for everybody. And it takes a lot of work and will and faith and prayer, and it’s hard. But it can be done.”
Now Leavitt is leaving the White House.
Recently returned from maternity leave after having her second child, Leavitt has acknowledged that the demands of being White House press secretary were becoming difficult to reconcile with being the mother she wanted to be to two very young children.
It would be easy to seize on this as evidence that women can’t “have it all” after all. But I don’t think that’s what her decision tells us.
Women can have families and successful careers. Millions do. What we can’t do – and what men can’t do either – is keep adding competing demands to our lives without eventually having to decide which ones matter most.
“The promise to women should never have been that liberation meant escaping trade-offs. Nobody gets to escape them.”
Last year, The Wall Street Journal profiled Leavitt alongside a group of high-powered conservative women combining motherhood with demanding careers. They rejected the idea that conservative women had to choose domesticity over ambition. They wanted children, they wanted meaningful careers, and they were determined to make both work.
But read their stories closely and something else becomes obvious. They weren’t actually having everything. They were making choices about what they were willing to give up.
Some missed bedtimes and children’s sporting events. One worked in Washington during the week while her husband and nanny cared for her young children in Houston, flying home on Friday nights. Almost all talked about the importance of husbands, grandparents, extended family or paid help.
That doesn’t diminish their achievements. It simply makes their lives recognisable.
I think this is where the conversation about women and work has become confused.
One of feminism’s great achievements was giving women choices that previous generations simply didn’t have. Women could pursue serious careers, become financially independent and have ambitions beyond the home without accepting that motherhood marked the end of their professional lives.
But giving women choices was never going to remove the consequences of those choices.
At times, we have behaved as though it should.
We talk about the difficulties of combining work and motherhood as problems that can eventually be solved if we get the settings right: more flexible workplaces, better childcare, more involved fathers, a fairer division of the mental load. All of those things matter enormously.
But they can’t eliminate the basic problem that our time and attention are finite.
You can be deeply committed to your work and deeply committed to your children and still find that, at certain points, those commitments clash.
Children also have an irritating habit of needing us at precisely the wrong time. They get sick when the diary is full. They need to talk when you’re trying to finish something. They have problems that can’t always wait until after the meeting.
And childhood moves quickly. Workplaces have a remarkable capacity to convince us that everything is urgent, when much of it really isn’t. There will usually be another meeting, another project and another professional opportunity. There won’t be another year in which your child is four.
In trying to free women from the expectation that motherhood should consume their identity, I wonder whether we have occasionally gone too far in the other direction.
We increasingly describe motherhood in the language of what it costs women: the motherhood penalty, the mental load, lost identity, invisible labour, burnout and maternal rage. These are real experiences. But if that becomes our dominant description of motherhood, we risk making ordinary sacrifice sound inherently oppressive. Cue our drastically declining birth rate.
The conservative women interviewed by The Wall Street Journal tended to talk about this differently. They weren’t pretending motherhood was easy. But they were more comfortable describing family as a source of meaning and accepting that something valuable might legitimately require them to give something else up.
There are sacrifices we make because we have no choice. There are others we make precisely because we do have a choice, and have decided that one thing matters more.
Leavitt’s decision is also interesting because of her age.
Generation Z has acquired a fairly poor reputation when it comes to work. Younger employees are accused of quiet quitting, demanding flexibility, resisting long hours and lacking the work ethic of generations before them.
Some of that criticism is probably fair. There is nothing particularly admirable about avoiding hard things simply because they are hard.
But younger workers may also be less impressed by the idea that sacrificing yourself to an employer is evidence of character.
For previous generations, professional seriousness was often demonstrated by how much you were prepared to give your job. Long hours signalled commitment. Missing family events was unfortunate, but accepted as the price of success.
Gen Z seems more inclined to ask whether that price is worth paying.
And Leavitt is an unusual person to accuse of lacking ambition. Before turning 30 she became the youngest White House press secretary in American history, worked through a presidential campaign, occupied one of the most relentless communications jobs imaginable and had two children.
Leaving that job because she wants to spend more time with those children doesn’t erase any of it.
Perhaps what needs reconsidering is the idea of “having it all” itself.
It suggests that a successful life is one in which everything is flourishing at the same time: career, marriage, children, friendships and health. Most people’s lives don’t look like that.
There are periods when work takes up more space and family accommodates it. There are periods when children need more from us. At other times relationships, ageing parents or our own health move to the front of the queue. Priorities change, and then they change again.
The promise to women should never have been that liberation meant escaping trade-offs. Nobody gets to escape them.
A year ago, Leavitt said women could be good mothers and good at their jobs. She was right.
What her decision now demonstrates is something feminism should be confident enough to acknowledge: giving women more choices doesn’t mean women will never have to choose.
