No, women can't have it all

You can’t accuse the redoubtable Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America Foundation think tank, of giving up easily: she has arrived in London fresh from the World Economic Forum at Davos, where she slipped on the ice and broke her wrist, spending two days in a Swiss hospital. One arm is therefore out of action, and her voice is hoarse, but she is soldiering on through a dense thicket of meetings and interviews to talk about her new book Unfinished Business, on how the work-life balance is broken and how to fix it.

The trigger for the book was a rare, traumatic moment when Slaughter was stopped in her tracks, back in 2011. She was at her professional peak, in her dream role as the first female director of policy planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton. The job required her to be in Washington during the week while her husband Andrew, a professor of politics at Princeton, gamely held the fort back in New Jersey with their two sons. Her boys weren’t so stoic: her ten-year-old used to cry on Sunday nights before she went away. Later, when her eldest was 14, he began disrupting classes, skipping school, and becoming known to the local police.

It became painfully clear that her weekday presence was required at home. She left the State Department, returned to teaching at Princeton, and in 2012 wrote an impassioned article entitled: ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have It All’, one of the most-read pieces in the history of the Atlantic magazine. Her book, on similar territory, represents the evolution of Slaughter’s thinking.