Henry, William. In Defense of Elitism. New York: Anchor, 1994: 111-13

There will need to be more flexibility in our expectations for how one performs in high-powered jobs at different stages of one's life, and also in the support systems for working parents. More flexible timetables for coming up for tenure, or the chance to attain tenure as a part-time professor, as well as more generous child-care and leave provisions and other policies that recognize the actual circumstances of people's lives, could make a big difference in opening those blockages in the pipeline. Changes will occur only if people press for them, if desirable young working couples insist on such arrangements before they will accept employment [Does she mean a husband should use himself as a bargaining chip to sweeten his wife's career, another easy way to breed workplace resentment?] and if citizens press for changes in our laws and tax structures.... I spoke earlier of the "admitting" mind-set that dominated our thinking from 1892 until quite recently. The "incorporation" mind-set, by comparison, acknowledges and celebrates the fact that including women as full partners makes a difference in the tone and temper of any human community or enterprise.
This airy claim to competitive advantages, special bargaining rights, and unspecified tax benefits for those who make the private decision to have children is a blatant form of special pleading. The last two sentences of the speech, moreover, underscore the inherent illogic and inconsistency of Keohane's position, and by extension that of the countless feminists who side with her on this issue (or, as they see it, non issue already beyond debate). To claim the right to admission, or rather "incorporation," women are purporting to be equivalent to men. But they do not want to play by the same rules as men; instead, they demand that the rules be rewritten solely to benefit working mothers (and, ostensibly, their husbands). Further, these women claim to be different from men in tone or temperament-and, by implication, better. While Keohane is prudent enough not to articulate the words directly, this smacks of the "communal" and "nurturing" claims made for women, black "sun people," and other minorities seeking an instantaneous moral basis on which to redistribute power and remake the very dynamics of public life.

In fairness to Keohane, there is a solid elitist argument to be made for reintegrating mothers into the work force as soon as possible. Educated women are an asset to society-"human capital," in the phrase Bill Clinton likes to toss around-and they ought, all things being equal, to be utilized as thoroughly as possible. This is the rationale for the "mommy track," the alternative career path (with admittedly lower expectations) that was widely being urged a few years ago until zealots renewed the call for having it all. It is also the rationale for the family leave bill, vetoed by President Bush but signed by Clinton, that compels employers to rehire staff who take extended leaves to fulfill emergency family responsibilities. While there is a more airtight case to be made for the optional mommy track than for the obligatory preservation of jobs during family leave, both are premised on the real world in which we live-a world in which women voluntarily take on a disproportionate share of domestic worries. Feminists object to such arrangements on three grounds. First, they do not wish to validate what they see as an unequal sharing of the household burden, based on what they reject as stereotypical views of the roles of the sexes. Second, they see compromise as a betrayal of feminism's promise of unlimited options. Third, they see it as both possible and preferable to compel the public world to make compromises rather than expect individual families (meaning, in practice, just the women) to do so.

The choice between career and family is so painful that women would rather not make it-and feminist activists are offering the illusory promise that they will not have to. The truth is, however, that in our culture most of the jobs truly worth having, those that are stimulating and demanding and full of intellectual peril, cannot be confined to forty hours a week or anything remotely like it. Working mothers of young children can hardly accommodate themselves to the minimum demands, let alone the maximum and erratically scheduled demands of the best jobs. The ancillary mommy track is not a dismissal; it merely describes reality.

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu