Having It All–A Generational Saga
With the death of screenwriter Nora Ephron at 71 and the appointment of Marissa Mayer the CEO of Yahoo at 37 the conversation about Having It All by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a 53 year old Princeton University professor and former State Department official took an interesting twist.
Eighteen years separated Ephron’s graduation from Wellesley College in 1962 from Slaughter’s graduation from Princeton University in 1980. Ephron headed first to the Kennedy White House and then to New York City to the Newsweek mailroom. (Newsweek didn’t hire women writers then. The Ivy League didn’t accept female student either.) While Slaughter headed to Oxford University after graduation for further study and then a degree at Harvard Law School, Mayer graduated with honors from Stanford University and then took an M.S. in Computer Science. She became the 20th employee at Google.
To what extent is each woman a product of her times? And is it possible the question of having “Having It All” is defined and interpreted anew each generation?
Tags: Anne-Marie Slaughter, career choice, female executives, gender parity, Google, Marissa Mayer, Nora Ephron, work-life balance
