Contestations of 'Having It All': The Career, Family and Money

'You can have it all!’ women are told! You can be a supermum! You can be a successful career woman! You can run a happy and clean household and have a loving relationship! You can get dressed up and sip cocktails with your similarly glamorous and successful gal pals! You don’t have to pick and choose – you can have it ALL! 

Isn’t that great? What a world we live in, where women get the luxury of having LITERALLY EVERYTHING.

Fairy tales taught us that there was a prince charming who would suddenly sweep us off our feet, giving us our very own “happily ever after.” Our education system groomed us to believe that good grades equalled success in the “real world” as only those who attended the “hallowed halls” of sandstones universities had a chance of becoming somebody someday.  Hollywood movies and the advent of social media encouraged us to think we could have a killer body and a wardrobe to match. We thought we could have it all, and society told us what “having it all” meant. 

So … can we? And what does that even look like? 

When it’s comes to Prince (or Princess) Charmings, they don’t necessarily swoop into your life at the age of eighteen to be your “happily ever after” and they usually come with a lot more baggage than in fairy tales or Disney stories. 

The narrative of “good grades that lead to good university degrees that lead to killer jobs and ultimately riches” is equally as problematic as the “high school sweetheart”. In fact, the narrative is so flawed that it is frequently described as “The Big Lie”. That isn’t to say that good high school and college grades don’t have any benefit, they are linked to a very small boost in income, but the notion that good grades guarantee high income and good jobs is flawed. Perhaps this is because success is dependent on so many more things other than the ability to memorise information. Networking, emotional intelligence, resilience, and the prevailing economic conditions in a society all play a huge part in predicting success at work and, more generally, financial success.  

When it comes to societally imposed beliefs, the idea that we should be eternally youthful and have a “killer body” (think of size 0 Victoria’s Secret models) is perhaps the strongest of all.  We are bombarded from all angles with anti-wrinkle commercials, billboards with picture perfect sixteen-year-olds advertising clothing for thirty-year-olds, and Instagram influencers using filters and photoshop to remove any and all “imperfections”. 

So, is this in any way attainable? Do you have it all? 

Except, actually, you’re not ‘having’ it all – you are ‘doing’ it all. Having something implies that, while getting it may have required substantial effort, it is at least yours now, and you get to enjoy it.

But having it all is a constant process of work and effort and you never have time to enjoy it. It’s not ‘having’, it’s ‘doing’. The closest you get to enjoying it is when you collapse exhausted into your (stylish) sofa and glug a (pricey) glass of wine at the end of the day.

If you ask me, ever since women have joined the workforce, they have been hassled by stereotypes such as: she must not be a good mother, she doesn’t know how to cook, she doesn’t take care of her husband, etc. So, as a reaction to these stereotypes, women have insisted on showing society that they can do it all. Dedicated employee, devoted mother, amazing cook, nit-picky cleaner, thoughtful wife, those are all the roles that a woman is supposed to assume to prove to society that yes, her having a job does not negate her worth as a woman and a mother. 

But can women really do it all?

The truth is, countless women have proven it. My own mother is constantly referred to as Wonderwoman, being the mother and caretaker of four children and holding a high position at her job. 

Women can do it all. But they shouldn’t. 

Women should not have to stretch themselves thin in order to meet every outdated societal expectation dumped on them. A man would never be expected to work 8 hours a day, get home, cook, clean, help with homework, and do childcare all by himself. And yet women somehow are expected to.

This Wonderwoman stereotype not only does not empower women, but actively perpetuates the harmful stereotype that motherhood and homemaking are more valuable than a career in a woman’s life. Yes, Wonderwoman does exist, but she is exhausted, overworked, emotionally neglected, and underpaid in some cases.

We are not telling women to ‘have it all’ – we’re telling them to work themselves down to the bone in order to feel like they have succeeded in life.

So... having it all. Who wants to have it all anyway? Having it all is exhausting.

Pick what you want the most and do your best to have that.