Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

Written by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Narrated by Anne-Marie Slaughter and Karen White

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, AND THE ECONOMIST • “Slaughter’s gift for illuminating large issues through everyday human stories is what makes this book so necessary for anyone who wants to be both a leader at work and a fully engaged parent at home.”—Arianna Huffington

When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and she had been moving up on a high-profile career track since law school. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family.

The reactions to her choice to leave Washington because of her kids led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent article for The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine’s history.

Since that time, Anne-Marie Slaughter has pushed forward, breaking free of her long-standing assumptions about work, life, and family. Though many solutions have been proposed for how women can continue to break the glass ceiling or rise above the “motherhood penalty,” women at the top and the bottom of the income scale are further and further apart.

Now, in her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means, and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women’s movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive.

With moving personal stories, individual action plans, and a broad outline for change, Anne-Marie Slaughter reveals a future in which all of us can finally finish the business of equality for women and men, work and family.

“I’m confident that you will be left with Anne-Marie’s hope and optimism that we can change our points of view and policies so that both men and women can fully participate in their families and use their full talents on the job.”—Hillary Rodham Clinton

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9780385367912

Anne-Marie Slaughter

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER is the CEO of the New America Foundation, one of America’s largest international affairs think tanks. She is the past dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and served as director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department from 2009–2011. She has been named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” and is the author and editor of six books, including A New World Order and The Idea That Is America.

Reviews for Unfinished Business

[raschneid_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5, but I'm rounding up because I did enjoy this book. It is a title I would recommend to friends struggling with career planning and work-life balance, and it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to planning my career on my own terms. Slaughter's policy recommendations were excellent, and I appreciated her inclusion of men in the conversation; permitting and encouraging male participation in caregiving is absolutely a feminist issue (I think she could have been clearer about this in her discussion, in fact - we probably don't need a "men's movement"; third-wave feminism is for men too).

Unfinished Business is a discussion of how to adapt the U.S. workplace to the modern family and modern realities of caregiving. As our population ages, it's a conversation that feels urgent. Slaughter's thesis - that we need to value caregiving as a society - is a response both to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and to criticisms of Slaughter's own article "Why Women Still Can't Have it All." Both works got a lot of flack for putting the burden of career success on women and not on the institutions that deny them equal opportunity.

Now, I have followed a lot of feminist criticism, and it is pretty rare that the writer of a "women's issues" article turns around and says, "Hey, you're right, I was downplaying the role of institutional sexism." I really admire Slaughter's willingness to evaluate her beliefs. She debunks a lot of sloppy thinking about gender, caregiving, and the workplace and advocates for a society where people who engage in caregiving aren't penalized for having families and lives.

However, the book is weak when it tries to address the experiences of people outside of Slaughter's small and privileged upper-middle class world. Slaughter knows she's privileged and part of her motivation in writing this book is to include workers who can't "lean in" in her narrative. However, she still relies on anecdotes and ideas from the white-collar corporate world. I am an educated white woman myself, but I've spent my working life for small businesses and local government, so I had a hard time relating to the workplaces she describes. Maternity leave? Flexible schedules? As a part-time worker, I currently don't even have paid sick leave, and even when I was unionized, there was no way in heck I could work from home. I worry that the changes Slaughter imagines will remain perks for the elite and in demand. We are already seeing this in tech companies that woo their developers with great benefits and offer almost nothing to hourly employees.

The focus on childcare also made for a strange read. I don't have children and wanted to see my experiences acknowledged in this book, but all I got was a page acknowledging that, yep, the single and/or childfree might want lives outside work too. I feel pretty strongly that I am part of a growing demographic, and the system is broken for us too, if not as profoundly.

Not everything I hoped for, but still a good book about an important topic.

[rrkreads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Loved this book for calling out real life problems and the probable solutions in the most candid manner. My initial thought was this is just another book on feminism , was pleasantly surprised to see that it was much more than that.
It is a book on what our notions on equality are and what it should really be. The author has managed to give a fresh perspective of feminism that includes men as opposed to doing it all on our own. A workplace that values work and family equally sounds utopian but doesn’t seem that impractical. Much to learn from this book and definitely worth a read by everybody who has ever had to ponder on the big question of work-life balance (or fit, as this book suggests)!