Can ‘she’ ever have it all?
Twenty-three years ago, Ronke Adeoye, a journalist, went in search of a mythical beast: the woman who has it all. “What makes a marriage endure?” “How can you pursue a proper career and raise happy children?” were some of the questions on her mind. Armed with her knowledge of feminist literature, she interviewed several women on how successful they had been at balancing work and family life.
In the feminist literature of the 1960s and 1970s, she discovered a few clues regarding how successful working mothers might manage their lives. So she set out to conjure up some role models in her fascinating report.
To qualify for entry, each woman had to have been married for 25 years or more, have at least three children and a professional career that equalled that of her husband. Early adventures in having it all, you might call it.
Among the 20 powerhouse women Adeola interviewed were individuals who had headed various ministries and parastatals and owned companies, including banks. She was less concerned with the machinations of the boardroom than the day-to-day compromises of married life, and how they might sit alongside such impressive levels of professional success.
“What can a young woman starting out today learn from these trailblazers about how to wield power and prestige in the workplace while upholding a contented home life? Still bandied around is the notion that the former must come at the expense of the latter, but is that true?” were some of the mind-boggling questions I asked,” she says.
Today, many women like Adeola have gone on to even greater heights. They have not relented in their efforts to reach the top, yet have been able to raise successful families.
“You just had to grit your teeth and get on,’ says Abisoye Adigun, a lawyer, recalling when clients would be surprised to find a woman defending them or jurors shocked to encounter a female judge. “There’s this awful phrase that you’ve got to be better than a man. I don’t think that’s right, but in a world where there aren’t any women you obtrude.”
Adigun says he met her husband, Tolani, at Oxford University where she once studied. She was 21 when she got married and had four children by the age of 31. “It never crossed our minds not to have a family when I was young,” she says. “You didn’t do what women do now, which is often to not have their babies until their late 30s. Partnerships don’t seem to form, or stick, at such an early age now. None of my daughters was married before they were in their 30s.”
She says that settling down young meant she missed letting off steam in her 20s but on the other hand, she became a grandmother before she was 50, and now has eight grandchildren.
Adigun often had to think on her feet. Another time, one of her daughters had a minor operation and Adigun’s only option was to squeeze hospital visits into her lunch-break. “I went to see her and she wasn’t at all well. I remember walking back into court and someone came up to me and said, ‘How’s the little girl?’ and you know, it was just too much because it was a confusion of the two lives, which was very difficult.
“Men do actually feel that they’re part of family life, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty – who employs the nanny or the au pair, who buys the birthday presents, who buys school uniform, who arranges for cover at half-term or the holidays? – that almost always still falls to the woman,” she says.
“I think it’s very hard for mothers today,” agrees Toluwani Adelagun, a medical doctor. “One thing I deplore is the kind of taken-for-granted denigrating of middle-class mothers. There’s much more censoriousness about the way you bring up children now than there used to be. What you give them to eat, what you get them to wear and what time you spend with them.”
For Seun Onasanya, a career mother, organisation is key: “You’ve got to know what you’re letting yourself in for and you’ve got to be realistic about it. I think you need to have a partner who really supports you and understands if you have a bad day.”
“It’s a tremendous endeavour to try to have it all, says Shalewa Tolani, who wonders if we should all live together in extended families, as is common in India which is also the norm in Nigeria. “Then you’ve got a permanent babysitter in the form of some old granny.”
ANNE AGBAJE