With seven kids and a Supreme Court nomination before age 50, she could teach a master class in having it all. But should she?
The October 3 broadcast of Saturday Night Live opened with a debate spoof featuring Alec Baldwin as President Donald Trump and Jim Carrey as his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. The mostly unfunny sketch took an even unfunnier turn when Maya Rudolph emerged playing Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris. The conceit was that the boys were refusing to play nicely, and so it took “Momala” (that’s Harris’ stepkids’ nickname for her) to intervene and bring order to the house.
“Why don’t the two of you finish this debate or whatever the hell this is with some dignity, and when you’re done, I’ve got you boys some PB&J and apple slices waiting for you,” she said.
It was a strange turn, not least of all because the usual pigeonhole for Harris is that she was a criminal justice hardliner during her days as a San Francisco district attorney and then California’s attorney general (“top cop” was the nickname Harris gave herself). That premise would have worked better for the sketch, though you can see why SNL’s writers and producers, presumably Biden/Harris supporters, would have been reluctant to use any trope that might place Harris in a negative light. Framing her as a mother figure, on the other hand, could be seen as image-boosting flattery. Look no further than Harris’ introductory video at the Democratic National Convention, which made a huge show of emphasizing what a great stepmother and aunt she was despite not having had kids of her own.
The assumption is that female leaders can’t really be trusted unless they’re mothers. Or, at the very least, they can’t be trusted by campaign strategists to be relatable to the public at large.
Male candidates don’t get a totally free pass here either. Voters tend to trust the family man more than the childless bachelor. (I’d argue they’d trust a childless single woman — or possibly an orangutan — more than a childless bachelor.) When male candidates (or Supreme Court nominees) lay themselves at our feet, summoning whatever relatability they can muster, they parade their children before us, the more the better. But crucial to this package is a wife whose primary role is to care for these children. Sure, Nancy Pelosi has five kids, but they were mostly grown before she began her political career. Late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was the father of nine and proudly admitted that his wife, Maureen, raised the children “with very little assistance from me.” U.S. Sen. and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had 11 kids when he was killed in 1968; the oldest was then 16, and the youngest was in utero. Even with the family’s deep well of resources, it’s safe to say his wife, Ethel, wasn’t in a position to start her own political career. Jackie Kennedy, on the other hand, became an icon — perhaps the icon — of her era. There were lots of reasons for that, of course, but it’s hard to imagine her on such a path if she’d had 11 (or even five or six) kids rather than two.
Crudely speaking, that is the rule. High-achieving men can have any number of children of any age. High-achieving women can either have a few young children or, if they want more, can wait until the kids are older before going gangbuster on their careers.
A very rare exception to the rule is the extraordinarily high-achieving woman who also has an extraordinarily large number of young kids.
Enter the curious, fascinating, maddening case of Amy Coney Barrett, who is all but certain to be confirmed to the Supreme Court very soon, filling late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. Barrett, who in her twenties worked as a judicial clerk for Scalia, is a federal appellate judge and a law professor. She also is the mother of seven children between the ages of 20 and eight, the youngest of whom has Down syndrome.
There are some things about Barrett that make having this number of children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti, not necessarily all that unusual. She is a staunch conservative and a devout Catholic. She grew up in a religious family and has connections to a small Christian covenant group called People of Praise. Though its inner workings remain mysterious, the group is known to have a history of referring to women as “handmaids of Jesus” and decreeing that wives should cede all authority to their husbands (though evidently not so much that they can’t become nominated for the United States Supreme Court).
Then there are things about Barrett that make her family size highly exceptional given her overall demographic. For starters, she’s a Gen Xer, born in 1972. Like many women of her generation, particularly educated white women, she delayed marriage and family until she had begun to establish her career. According to available biographical information, by the time Barrett married at 27, she’d finished law school, clerked for both the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and for Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, and taken a job in litigation at a Washington, D.C., law firm. By the time her first child was born, she had shifted her career to teaching law, which she continued to do as her family grew in size. In 2017, Barrett was appointed by Trump to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. For that, Barrett commuted between the Federal Building in Chicago and her home in South Bend, Indiana. At that time, her youngest child was five.
How does she do it? For at least the last four decades, ever since “having it all” became the calling card of female happiness and success, this has been the defining question of millions of women’s lives. The answers depend on an infinite list of factors: financial resources, an involved partner, mental and physical stamina, community support, and on and on. Barrett is clearly a beneficiary of all this and more. In her remarks at her nomination ceremony, she thanked her husband, Jesse, for “doing far more than his share of the work” and quipped that the kids preferred his cooking to hers.
“For 21 years, Jesse has asked me every single morning what he can do for me that day,” Barrett went on to say. “And though I almost always say ‘Nothing,’ he still finds ways to take things off my plate. And that’s not because he has a lot of free time — he has a busy law practice. It’s because he is a superb and generous husband, and I am very fortunate.”
As happy as we all are for her, the question remains. Literally, how does this family do it? Barrett said that despite being a judge, she was “better known back home as a room parent, carpool driver, and birthday party planner.” Moreover, in the wake of school closures, she and her husband became “co-principals” of their own at-home e-learning academy.
“And yes, the list of enrolled students was a very long one,” she continued. “Our children are my greatest joy, even though they deprive me of any reasonable amount of sleep.”
Again, we bask in her glow. But, seriously, what time does that alarm clock go off? How much homework do she and her husband help with? Who takes the kids to doctor’s appointments or gets the call from the school nurse when they’re sick? Who makes sure the teenagers aren’t making embarrassing TikTok videos and broadcasting them to the world? Is there a maiden aunt bunking in the attic? A small team of nannies scurrying about in the wings? Is an exceptionally gifted Saint Bernard keeping a watchful eye on the children, like Nana in Peter Pan?
And while we’re at it, why does it always seem to be politically conservative women who can manage to combine large numbers of young children with high-profile careers? I’m thinking of anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist Phyllis Schlafly, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to name a few. (Though Conway recently left her White House post in the wake of what looked like total family meltdown, some of it related to TikTok videos.) Are conservative women somehow better at multitasking than their liberal counterparts?
Let me be clear. It would be grossly inappropriate, not to mention illegal, for members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask Barrett about her childcare arrangements — or really anything about her family at all — during her confirmation hearings. But, let’s be honest: People want to know. Parents, especially, want to know. Hey, I’m curious, and I don’t even have kids. During the pandemic especially, the challenges of holding down a job while raising any number of kids have been thrown into high relief, with women’s economic status being threatened disproportionately. Obviously, Barrett’s techniques for running her household and managing her family shouldn’t have any bearing on whether she gets the job. No senators or other public officials should ask her about it. Still, you’d think it was the kind of thing talk show hosts, parenting experts, and social commentators would be discussing among themselves around the clock.
But there’s a problem with this discussion: As interesting as it is, it’s also fundamentally sexist. Would we wonder how a male Supreme Court nominee with a large, young family managed to balance it all? It would scarcely cross most people’s minds. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch both had small children when they were confirmed to the court in 2005 and 2006, respectively (and Roberts’ wife, Jane Sullivan, had a formidable legal career herself). I don’t recall much if any public speculation about their childcare arrangements. Those men had just two kids each, but even if they’d had seven, it probably wouldn’t have raised more than a few eyebrows. That’s because even the most egalitarian-minded among us will make a different set of assumptions about a father of seven than we’d make about a mother of seven. Among those assumptions — and it’s often an unconscious one — is that the father needs a big job. He’ll work even harder to support all those kids. The mother, meanwhile, needs not to have a big job. She’s already got one, after all.
This is unfair. It’s sexist. It sucks in a thousand ways. It’s also, unfortunately, the reality for most families. Which is exactly why it would be nice if Barrett shared at least a few of her secrets. There is, of course, the glaring irony that her stated positions on issues like health care and abortion rights will potentially make it more difficult, if not impossible, for others to choose their family size. For a lot of pro-choice women struggling to raise and feed their families, it’s galling to see Barrett glide along like a swan, her cygnets trailing effortlessly behind her, all the while knowing she has the power to strip Americans of their reproductive freedoms and access to health care. You’d also think that all the conservatives holding Barrett up as evidence that women really can do it all — and maybe even without a lot of birth control — would be eager for at least a brief tour of the backstage of this awe-inspiring show.
But we don’t ask. Liberals don’t ask because we know we’ll be accused of the same sexism charges we’re usually lobbing at our enemies. Conservatives don’t ask because, well, maybe they don’t want to ruin the fantasy. Barrett has mentioned her husband’s aunt being a major participant in childcare and has, on more than one occasion, referred to “friends and fearless babysitters” being at home with the kids. Those acknowledgments are a good start, but what we really need is a society that acknowledges that most women face professional setbacks when they become mothers. The reason we don’t see many women like Barrett is because, by and large, the only women we do see are the ones whose lives haven’t been hampered by mothering duties.
Meanwhile, it remains the conventional wisdom that for a female leader to be relatable, or even palatable, to the majority of Americans, she must be seen as maternal. Hence Harris as “Momala” even though being a senator and former state attorney general are actually better qualifications for the job she’s after. As for Barrett, I hope the Senate Judiciary Committee asks her the questions that really matter — for instance how her interpretations of the Constitution and political or religious leanings might affect her decisions on the bench. She may be an exception to the rule when it comes to balancing work and family, but no exceptions should be made when it comes to passing this job interview.
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