Alice Rivlin, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, shops at her local Safeway, where she often runs into people who seem surprised to see her there.
She’s just as surprised at their reaction. “How else do they think I’m going to get food?” she said as she sat in her office in the Old Executive Office Building. “Do they think I have a staff? I don’t know what they think. All of us run households.”
In a year when more women than ever before took seats in Congress and were appointed to important government posts, and when the First Lady was given the responsibility for health-care reform, little has changed at home for women who work, even at the highest levels.
For eight of these women, there are 12-hour workdays but little relief from all the traditional responsibilities at home: making macaroni and cheese, scrubbing floors and wiping runny noses. So much for the Year of the Woman.
These officials are perhaps the most visible examples of the struggles that many working women continue to face. Women who are competing with men at most levels in the professional world often say they still feel guilty about how they perform their traditional responsibilities, particularly the care of their children.
They are careful about asking for time off to pick up children at school or to stay home with them when they are sick. They scramble to be as productive as their male colleagues, sacrificing office camaraderie to get their work done and get home earlier.
At best, younger women, like Carol M. Browner, 37, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Ann Stock, 46, White House social secretary, have forged partnerships with their husbands to share household and child-care duties instead of merely helping with them. But not one of the eight has ever been able to do what men have done forever, leave the responsibility for their families and their homes to their spouses.
Some younger women in Washington are trying to make their private lives more public to show that changing diapers and ironing are not impediments to professional success.
“Let’s face it,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “Women are good organizers. That means we can do really well at a lot of jobs.” But Murray’s celebration of her family life is the exception.
“The tendency is to think if you are a professional woman, it’s because you’ve turned your back on the traditional side,” said Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), one of 23 new women in Congress this year, for a total to 54. People show surprise that I have interests outside my political career. There is subtle surprise, for example, that I would be interested in a recipe.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) seemed surprised that anyone would even ask whether she keeps house. “Of course,” she said in an interview in her Capitol Hill office. “I think women always keep house. It comes with the gender. Every career woman with a family does the wash, the laundry, scrubs floors, cleans the bathrooms, changes the beds. The man generally does not.”
Feinstein, 59, a former mayor of San Francisco, has been married to her third husband, Richard C. Blum, an investment banker, for 14 years. “I haven’t taught him to hang up his bath towel yet,” she said. “Rather than nag, I don’t bother anymore. I pick it up.”
Rep. Eva Clayton (D-N.C.), 58, had to quit law school when she had her fourth child.
“I wasn’t super enough to be a supermom,” Clayton said. “I left to be a mom. My husband was supportive, but I felt enormously guilty. I think I would do it differently now. I think I would know how to demand more of my husband.”
Today with their children grown and gone from home, her husband, Theaoseus, a lawyer, helps her more than ever before. “It’s amazing,” she said. “I think he is aware of my demands. I don’t think he was as sensitive then.”
Asked who was responsible for household duties in her family, Murray, 42, laughed. “I would say, like most women, I carried the lion’s share,” she said. “But my husband is helpful. I probably did a lot more when the kids were little; he probably does a lot more now.” Murray and her husband, Rob, have two children, Randy, 16, and Sara, 13.
“My husband has really come around,” she said. “When the kids were younger, guess who packed all four suitcases. But he quit his job of 16 years to come to Washington.”
Perhaps it is easier for a senator to miss a vote or cancel an appointment because of a family crisis than it is for a secretary in a large company to leave work early to pick up a sick child. Perhaps the times make it easier.
Rivlin remembers how hard it was for her to muster the courage in the early 1960s to say she had to leave a meeting early to get home to a small child. “I was a consultant to a House committee in the beginning of my career,” she said. “The meetings started at 6 or 7 at night. I said very timidly: `Is there any possibility we could do this in the morning? I have to get home and get dinner.”‘
“Sen. Al Quie had a bunch of kids. He said: `Oh, what a wonderful idea. My wife would love it if I came home for dinner.’ It was a big triumph for me.”
When Feinstein was a single mother, she could never bring herself to say she had to leave work because of her child. “I was sure what the response would be,” she said. “I still think women have to be very careful. One of the reasons they are denied promotions is because they are looked at at the office as the ones responsible for the family.”
In her previous career as a registered nurse, first-term Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), 57, said she never had a qualm about leaving work because of family responsibilities. “I was very skilled in my work, and there was a demand for me in the marketplace,” she said.
For the modern version of the professional woman’s dilemma, Browner and Stock are the role models.
For five years Stock, who was special-events director for Bloomingdale’s in New York, traveled every weekend to Washington, where her son, Chase, now 13, and her husband, Stuart, lived. During the week, her husband was the primary parent.
“He bore the brunt of it,” Stock said. “I was always juggling a lot of balls. My husband had to make it fit too. More so than me because I don’t think he expected it.”
When Browner moved to Tallahassee to head the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation, someone was prompted to ask her husband, “Isn’t it amazing you are willing to move to Tallahassee with Carol?”
Her husband, Michael Podhorzer, she said, cut that conversation short, saying, “You wouldn’t be asking me the question if I were a woman.”
Browner and Podhorzer have joint responsibility for duties at home. “My husband doesn’t help me,” she said. “We try to figure out how to share. I did dinner Sunday night. He did dinner Monday night.”
As ideal as their arrangement is, the guilt about her son, Zachary, 5, is still there. “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t worry whether he is getting enough of me,” she said. “It’s important that he understands what I do. At some level, I think he does. He tells people that his mother saves trees, animals, rivers, lakes. And bananas.”
How to combine career and marriage is a fundamental question that remains unanswered for many young women. “When I talk to teen-age girls,” Browner said, “they want to know if they can have children and a career and will someone still want to marry them. For an awful lot of women it’s still very, very difficult. I guess it’s progress when the husband says, `I’m going to babysit the kids.”‘
“We’ve come this far,” Feinstein said. “My daughter could run for district attorney and win, but she’d still have to go home and clean.”
