See What Having a Life Gets You?

What does Ed Rendell's alleged gaffe say about gender double standards?

by Amy Z. Quinn

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Published: Dec 10, 2008

I remember the exact moment I decided to quit my job and stay home with my son. My husband and I were working for the Asbury Park Press in central Jersey, and there was news breaking. Both of us had to work, and our baby-sitters were inaccessible. So I stayed in the newsroom writing about the unfolding chaos of Sept. 11, 2001, with my baby in his stroller next to my desk.

To be honest, what really made me know The Moment had come wasn't that my work-life routine had failed that day; parents accept pretty early on that their best-laid child care routines will go off the rails every now and again. What really burned my ass was not being able to spring up from the desk, notebook in hand, and get out to cover the story. Taking feeds over the phone and writing blurbs for the Web site, while necessary in the overall news coverage, just wasn't cutting it. Something had to give, and in that instant, it did.

My last day at work was a few months later, on Good Friday, 2002. See what having a life gets you?

Last week, Gov. Rendell was caught on a hot mic suggesting that Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano was a perfect Homeland Security secretary because she has "no life," meaning no husband, no kids and none of the accompanying domestic complications. Because she's single, his logic went, Napolitano can work basically around the clock — a not-unreasonable expectation for the Homeland Security chief. Still, under attack from Campbell Brown-type feminists, Rendell clarified, telling every cable news outlet that would give him a lapel mic that what he meant was that "Janet is a person who works 24/7, just like I do. She has no life. Neither do I."

The rhetoric that followed seemed to focus on two questions: One, would Rendell have made the same comment were Napolitano a man? And two, had he made the comment about a man, would it have been newsworthy?

We can't get inside Rendell's head, but I suspect he wouldn't have made the comment about a man. Certainly nobody asked Mike Chertoff (the outgoing Homeland Security chief) how he'd balance work and family when he took the job. It just doesn't occur to us: We assume a successful man doesn't spend enough time with his family, and proceed from there. (Imagine how many hours away from his family Rendell's workaholic lifestyle has cost him.)

As for the second question, on newsworthiness: Both Mayor Nutter and our president-elect have been quoted as saying that their career paths have, absolutely, meant less time with their families. But neither case was big news. Not only do we assume ambitious men give up time with their families, we're totally OK with it.

So yes, there's a double-standard here. But that doesn't mean the premise — that having a family means less time for work, particularly for women — is wrong. Napolitano has maintained a classy silence on the whole matter. But I'd guess that's because she finds herself in agreement with the spirit of Rendell's remark, if not the delivery.

Plenty of studies have shown that women who have children see their careers either suffer outright, or advance at a slower rate than both men who have kids and other women who don't. But we don't need academia to tell us what's in front of our faces. Coming up in journalism, my female heroes, both the women who hired and mentored me and the "stars" I looked up to, were all either childless, single or had waited until well into their 30s or 40s to have a family.

I especially can't find a reason to get mad at Rendell when my own experience proves his point. When the time came for something to give, when it was a choice between my "life" and my career, it was no contest. In my case, it was simple practicality, not society's expectations, that made the difference: My husband's income was far higher than mine, and I'm several years younger than him, so it made sense for me to take the career time-out. But a time-out it was.

I was right there with Campbell Brown when she called out the McCain campaign for sequestering Sarah Palin. But on this one, she's got it wrong. Maybe it shouldn't be the case that we think about work/life balance only for women, but the fact is that thinking about work/life balance is totally fair. If we can't acknowledge freely the challenges that having a family presents, then we prevent ourselves from ever actually dealing with them.

Citizen Mom blogs at quinnchannel.typepad.com.

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