Review: Unfinished Business

Title: Unfinished Business : Women Men Work Family

Author: Anne-Marie Slaughter

Date Completed: 27 April 2016

I learned about this book on Get Booked, a book recommendation podcast I enjoy each week. In replying to a listeners request for recommendations, one of the co-hosts said Unfinished Business was the best books she had ever read on work-life balance. While I haven't read many books on the subject, judging by the amount of post-it note flags I stuck in it, I'd say she's probably right. I will probably be buying a copy of this book to reference again in the future.

Anne-Marie Slaughter's career was moving up, she was working for the Secretary of State on foreign policy and was in the pool of candidates for promotion, but she made the decision to go back to work as a tenured law professor in order to have more time to care for her sons. She received a lot of flack from Feminists about letting women down, blah blah blah. So she wrote a piece for the Atlantic entitled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," which had naturally had a huge response from thousands of readers. Some challenged her views, some commiserated, and all expanded her understanding of work-life balance. In response to all the debate and conversations she had after her article, she decided to write this book addressing some of the issues she mentioned in her article and moving beyond classifying it as a "women's problem" and blaming a patriarchal society as the root of all evil.

I'm not a feminist with a capital F. Am I grateful for the feminist movement of the 20th century? Absolutely, but I definitely feel the movement today has gotten carried away and seem to unproductively bash on men. So I really appreciated Slaughter's more balanced approach and a recognition that there are flaws in the modern feminist movement. She acknowledges that her generation of feminists were raised to view the competitive work their dads did was more important, led to "winning, individual achievement, and success" and than the caring work their mothers did that gives to and empowers others to succeed. In her own words: "To make them equal, we liberated women to be breadwinners too and fought for equality in the workplace. But along the way, we [feminists] left caregiving behind, valuing it less and less as a meaningful and important human endeavor."

Slaughter's primary focus in this book is that the tug of career and care is felt by both men and women, but that it's treated as a working-mothers-only problem. She wants to get to the heart of the issue in our current system -- an undervaluing of care, no matter if it is for elderly parents/grandparents, children, or other loved ones. She wants us to see that work and life balance is an "issue for anyone who works and who also loves and cares for someone else." She doesn't want to devalue competition, but to elevate care to it's proper place.

She takes a look at our society and typical work culture and sees a few issues. The first is that as a society we value people who invest in themselves more than we value people who invest in others. She wants her readers to ask themselves "...why we think people who have made more money than anyone else or risen to the top of a particular hierarchy by beating out others are automatically role models. What about their values? How do they treat other people? What was the cost to their families?"

In the workplace she sees discrimination in favor of employees who can outsource caregiving to someone else--whether that be a spouse, daycare, or nursing home. She also sees stigmatization of anyone who willingly chooses caring for and spending time with loved ones while they can over career/professional achievement even for a few years. The underlying assumption that it's impossible to be both a committed caregiver and a good employee and that if you step back for a period of time you must not be able to cut it in the workforce. Slaughter views this as a sign of deeply distorted values in American work culture.

Despite being a "feminist" book, Slaughter addresses men throughout the book and even has a chapter speaking directly to them. She wants to make providing for a family about time as much as about money. If care is truly of equal value to competition being a mere "breadwinner" means men "are missing out on something deeply satisfying and self-improving." That being a family man is not something degrading masculinity, but something to be respected for. She also reminds women to pay attention to their language that may just be thinly veiled low expectations of mankind. Are you praising the men in your life in a respectful way or is your tone implying that you clearly didn't expect them to actually do as well as they did? Are you criticizing because they didn't do it your way or thankful for their help?

In addition to the thought provoking sections about our society, biases, and expectations, Slaughter included a practical section. She included a chapter on planning your career, because you never know what caregiving responsibilities you might end up with in the future from children to parents. She recommends allowing for times of "leaning back as well as leaning in; make deliberate rather than unintended choices. If you're strategic about it, you can find ways to keep your networks fresh and your skills sharp even as you slow down, move laterally or even backward for a while."

I also appreciated the scenarios sections and questions to think through with your life partner. For example, your child has a 101 fever for 3 days in a row, your spouse has to board a plane for a work trip and you have a mandatory meeting, how do you and your spouse find a solution? Here are a few of the questions she suggests potential life partners consider: Would you defer your promotion so I can take mine? Will you believe that we can seesaw up and down over the course of our marriage and that I will support you when your turn comes? If one of our children has special needs or a stormy adolescences, or needs more parental attention, would you consider being the parent who downshifts to be at home more? Will you still think I'm a good parent to, even though I am providing more cash than care? Etc. All good questions to consider regardless of your gender.

Slaughter also spent some time discussing various methods and solutions that have been tried in different businesses and countries. What worked and what didn't, and how she sees it working best in America. I'll just quote her at length here because she summarized is well:

"We as Americans differ, as always, on ways and means. The specific disagreement around care is not as much about whether we should be devoting resources to caring as it is about who, in fact should be doing the caring...My feeling is that our problems in this arena are so severe that we need to be trying both at the same time, recognizing a role for government and business, church and state..why not encourage a little competition over care? Left and right should challenge each other to see whether market solutions or government solutions for the care crisis work better...As Americans, we should take pride in defining ourselves as citizens who care. Who care about our country and care about one another. Who remembers that our past was not just a saga of rugged individuals setting out to conquer the land of opportunity, but also of barn raisings, quilting bees, grazing commons, and one-room schoolhouses. Who understand that we can only compete as a nation if we remember to care."