144 Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Catherine Rottenberg Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balanced A new trend is on the rise: suddenly high-powered women are publically espousing feminism and urging renewed public discussion about how to ensure that women can cultivate a better work-family balance. In an era often described as postfeminist, it seems that a feminist debate is currently being revived in the United States.1 One formative moment in this changing atmosphere was the publication of an article by AnneMarie Slaughter in the July/August 2012 edition of the Atlantic. In “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Slaughter describes the reasons behind her decision to leave the State Department at the end of her two-year term as the first female director of policy planning. She returned home to Princeton—where she still held a tenured position in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs—because she simply wanted to spend more time with her husband and two adolescent boys who had not accompanied her to Washington. Slaughter’s personal story prompts an extended articulation of what she argues is a much larger cultural problem in the United States: the fact that high-powered, professional women are still finding it exceedingly difficult to balance 1. See, for example, Christina Scharff, “Disarticulating Feminism: Individualization , Neoliberalism and the Othering of ‘Muslim Women,’” European Journal of Women’s Studies 18, no. 2 (2011): 119–34; and Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage Publications, 2009). Catherine Rottenberg 145 career demands with their desire to also have an active home life. This is not due to any failure on women’s part, Slaughter repeatedly insists, but rather due to social norms surrounding notions of success and the inflexibility of US workplace culture, which (still) values professional advancement over family. Slaughter’s essay struck a deep cultural chord. It immediately went viral and within a week of its publication, over one million people had accessed the online version. It has since become the most widely read essay in the history of the Atlantic.2 What emerges from an examination of the many and varied responses on different blog sites and comments is a relatively broad consensus that the essay’s power stems from its cogent and succinct articulation of what “having it all” has come to signify for middle -class women in the United States, as well as from its simple explanation of why many professional women continue to feel divided between career and family.3 As many in the X and Y generations seem intuitively to know, “having it all” for upwardly mobile women has meant—quite mundanely—pursuing a meaningful career and cultivating an intimate family life. Yet, even when women have managed, somehow, to juggle a demanding career with being a “present” mother, Slaughter argues, “having it all” has not translated into Zen-like well-being; it has not brought happiness. Finding a way to “have it all” is difficult enough for most professional women—unless they are “superhuman, rich or selfemployed ”—but finding a way to “have it all” happily is virtually impossible for the vast majority of women.4 2. Introductory comments to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s lecture on “Beyond Work/Life: Changing the Debate and Making Change” at Princeton University , December 3, 2012, http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/archives/ videos/item/beyond-worklife-changing-debate-and-making-change. 3. For a sample of the hundreds of responses, see Carolyn Anderson, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All (at the Same Time),” The Blog, June 26, 2002, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carolyn-anderson/why-women-still-canthave_b_1628352 .html; “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Feminist Daily (blog), Dec. 10, 2012, http://feministdaily.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/whywomen -still-cant-have-it-all; and Avantika Krishna, “Anne-Marie Slaughter Is Right: Women Still Cannot Have It All,” PolicyMic (blog), 25 June 2012, http://www.policymic.com/articles/10165/anne-marie-slaughter-is-rightwomen -still-cannot-have-it-all. 4. Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” The Atlantic, July...