“What if work and family are both first? This is what women mean, I think, when they say that they “want it all.” The difficulty in combining work and family is not merely that they compete for a woman’s time, though of course they do. It is that they require completely different attitudes. To be successful at work, a woman must have something of a man’s ability to concentrate and to set aside distractions. To be a good mother, however, a woman must always be open to distraction and actually welcome the interruptions of a child who, in the first years at least, always thinks he is entitled to 100% of her time. How can these opposed attitudes be made into a rhythm of life, relieving rather than infringing on each other?”
Dr. Harvey C. Mansfield, “A New Feminism”
