It took a decade or two, and a bagload of battles, but the women got out by the millions. They picked up their fancy degrees and learned to walk the walk, but after 15 or 20 years out of those homes, a lot are hearing voices again:
“I like the bigger paycheck, but at what damn cost?” (50-year-old lobbyist Maggie Boepple)
“What’s your definition of success? Mine’s personal happiness.” (43-year-old novelist Anna Quindlen)
“Corporate life is a sham. It pretends to espouse all these values: partnership, teamwork . . . And all the while you’re being lied to by the smiling guys in pin-striped suits. And you begin to feel disconnected from yourself compromised.” (40-year-old specialist in a Wall Street firm)
It’s a tremor in the Zeitgeist; nothing that can be measured on any Richter scale or tracked by the census. And the rumbling tends to be loudest in a rarefied sector-among women economically successful enough to question “success.” The ones who, like one 40-year-old, can say, “In my 20s I was proud to be a workaholic. I wasn’t just devoted to my job, I was Messianic about it.” They are the ones who now find themselves trapped in their whirling-dervish routines, sick of being strung out, boxed in, overlooked and underrecognized.
Women executives are “Fed Up,” Fortune declared in a recent cover story. An astounding 87 percent of the women they polled with Yankelovich Partners said they had or were considering making a significant change in their lives. Women have had it with “the rat-race mentality; we want to reorder our priorities . . . " says Working Woman in an issue devoted to downshifting (a bit) and thriving (or at least surviving). Women lawyers are bailing, says New York Magazine. “[Of] 719 associates who started working at five of the top-grossing firms in 1987, almost all of the women–94 percent- have left their jobs, compared with 72 percent of the men.”
Having resigned from The New York Times a year ago, Anna Quindlen is practically the poster child for the There Must Be a Better Life movement. She argues there’s a common flaw to these reports. “They’re casting the issue wrong,” she says. “They’re always about women ‘stepping off the fast track.’ What the point should be is that corporate culture disdains personal satisfaction. Corporate life stinks.”
Which is not to say, she adds quickly, that her corporate life stunk. She had a “wonderful and lucrative career as a columnist.” But when she announced her resignation, “I explained until I was blue in the face that it was for a wonderful, lucrative career as a novelist. Still, virtually every article wound up saying I was leaving to spend more time with my children. At the Times, I had power, and people couldn’t understand me giving that power up. So they defined what I was doing as ‘stepping off the fast track’ to belittle the decision.”
Somehow women thought that as they proved themselves and moved up in large numbers, the old value systems would crumble. That the desire to balance a personal life and a work life (one seemingly shared by both sexes) would no longer seem a big deal. Or that one’s worth could no longer be divined from a business card. To be sure, some of the old ways have withered, but an awful lot thrive. “It still all happens at the golf tournaments,” says Maggie Boepple. “I suppose if I turned up for one, I’d be accepted, but just barely.”
There are those who will argue that the glass ceiling is an illusion. That the reason only 3 percent of top management of Fortune 1000 firms are women is that the top dogs are in their 50s. Up-and-comers are mostly forty something; the women will have their day. But for those clustered in that second tier, the glass is feeling mighty cool on the skin.
As a result, many are striking out on their own. Three years ago, Catherine J. Douglass, a partner at big-league Willkie Farr & Gallagher, left to start up the Network for Women’s Services, a nonprofit group providing legal services to poor women. She stresses her gratitude to Willkie Farr, yet admits that “a kind of light goes off in your head: in 10 years, I’ll still be considered a junior partner. That was one of the reasons I left.”
Women-owned businesses are growing at twice the rate of men’s. Sixteen years ago, Laura Henderson, VP of a health-care con-suiting firm, realized she was in trouble. “My management style was criticized. I was told I wasn’t tough enough to battle out issues even though I eventually worked them out.” So she launched Prospect Associates, a biomedical consulting firm, which now employs 150 people and generates nearly $12 million in revenue. And that untraditional management style of hers has landed her more than two dozen excellence-in-management awards.
Women tend to see their lives as a series of chapters; men, as an arc with a clear trajectory. Strom Thurmond, now 93, will run for the Senate until he keels. Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, 55, feels life “ticking by.” It’s time to “break out of here,” she’s said, before it’s too late to try something new. For Quindlen, the difference between men and women is that “most of us weren’t to the corporate manor born so it’s easier for us to reject it.” Which is good, she says, because “in order for the culture to change, it requires enough really good people to leave it. That will be the wake-up call.” These women know they are good people. And if their discontented rumblings keep building and new chapters prove tempting, that wake-up call will be stingingly clear.
