WASHINGTON, May 3 (UPI) -- Karen Hughes' departure from her White House post caused some commentators to remark upon the differences between successful women and successful men. Question: Is Karen Hughes' abrupt departure from high position for family reasons illustrative of the extra problems that successful career women face? United Press International National Political Analysts Peter Roff, a conservative, and Jim Chapin, a liberal, face off on this timely question.
Chapin: Karen Hughes Becomes a Rorschach Test
Karen Hughes, the 45-year-old woman who served officially as Counselor to the President and unofficially as George W. Bush's alter ego, has announced that she is leaving her post to return with her family to Austin, Texas.
The sudden departure of Hughes, who some media outlets went over-the-top in calling "the most powerful woman in America," happened to coincide with several other new items in such a fashion that it caused an outpouring of columns about the difficulties of being a high-powered career woman.
In that sense, just as the old Rorschach test of showing inkblots to psychiatric patients and asking "what do you see?" brought responses from patients which showed what was on their minds rather than anything that was actually "in the picture," it seemed that most of the people who responded to the Hughes retirement were bringing their own agendas to the event, rather than looking at the event itself.
It happened that the news of Hughes' retirement coincided with medical news that female fertility declines sharply after age 27, and that the chances of having a baby in one's forties is really quite small, and with Sylvia Ann Hewlett's new book, "Creating a Life," which talked of the career women who had ended up with no children because of what the author called a "creeping nonchoice."
Hewlett argues that a really successful woman should be able to have a successful marriage, have children, and have a job that pays more than $100,000 a year. Passing over the fact that the vast majority of American men never achieve this trifecta, she argues that it is unfair that so many women fail at getting "it all."
None of this prevented several career women from announcing that it was the male failure to appreciate "strong women" that had led to their own failure to reproduce.
In fact, of course, the problem of the "Brahmin Woman," the fact that upper-status women want to marry men who are higher status than they are, is the cause of this female "failure." Studies over human history have shown that loser men and winner women both find it hard to reproduce. And in a society in which women hold more of the top positions, it's hardly surprising that women who insist on marrying "up" find it harder to find men "above them."
At times, the nature of the debate occasioned by this confluence of events reminded one of The Onion's recent satirical piece: "Study Finds Sexism Rampant in Nature."
Reality, however, has a tendency to ignore those who issue demands upon it. The great majority of human beings have never had the choices or rewards that await top-status people, of either sex, in modern America. In a world packed with men working the line at nightmarish jobs, and women struggling to raise single children and to support themselves at the same time, it's hard to get too excited about the plight of the most successful women in the society, angry that nature doesn't give them time to reproduce according to a self-imposed career timetable and enough marriageable successful men to satisfy their fantasies.
In one way, the oddest thing about the flap occasioned by Karen Hughes stepping down is that she has in fact had it all and still will, by the Hewlett definition -- she has a strong marriage, she has a child, and she earned more than $100,000 last year, and will, if anything, earn more money this year. Weeping for the difficulties of Karen Hughes seems a bit misplaced. Most American women would be happy to change places with her.
Roff: Broad brush, narrowly defined
Unfortunately for Karen Hughes, her resignation was announced on a slow news day. It led the news, a tribute to her influence and a glaring example of Washington's downside.
The Enron Corp. scandal has gone bust, so Hughes' departure from the White House was pregnant with a new chance for intrigue.
Had she lost a power struggle to Karl Rove? Was she about to be exposed as hip deep in Enron, giving the scandal new life? Senior presidential advisers don't just leave -- except, sometimes they do, and for reasons as simple as Hughes stated.
Life in the political arena is hard. It takes long hours with little or no pay just to get to a point where you can be taken seriously. Then it gets worse.
For Bush, Hughes was there at the beginning. As he said, their political relationship goes back to when a parade was one car. Hughes is smart, disciplined and a little bit lucky, a necessity in politics. Hughes, Bush, Rove and others reached the top of "the greasy poll" together, as Disraeli might say. Then she walked away.
Given the hierarchy of Washington priorities, Hughes' decision disrupted the natural order. She put family, ranked low on the scale, over power, which is the great prize, the Holy Grail of American politics. This is why so much of what Washington is and does doesn't make sense to most people.
Hughes gets what so many elite opinion-shapers miss: family is important.
Many women on the career track -- along with increasing numbers of men -- attend colleges and graduate schools that teach bad social values, one of which is that family is oppressive, with "self" important above all else. While the textbooks may not lay it out that way, the modern academy teaches it nonetheless.
Part of this teaching is the lie taught to millions of women for the last 30 years -- they could have it all: the fulfilling career, a devoted family, smart children and great sex -- if the oppressors who keep women down did not interfere.
Families are hard things to manage. They take work. The traditional construct -- the woman as the primary caregiver and overseer of the home and the man bringing in an income from outside -- worked well in the pre-post-industrial age.
This division of labor was not, as some suggest, enslavement of the wife; it was a partnership where each spouse was responsible for that which they had been best suited by nature.
Women nurture, men break things -- important considerations where things like the raising of children are concerned.
As brainpower became increasingly important in the American workplace and manufacturing declined, increasingly numbers of high-paying, highly skilled jobs for which women were equally if not better-suited than men became available. Women were then drawn out of the home for many reasons, many of them valid; but even more of them were driven by the "you can have it all" lie.
Men too have bought into it, to the detriment of themselves and their families.
It is probably a reach to try to draw a broad sociological point about life in America because one presidential adviser resigns -- Though it is nice to see that Karen Hughes has her priorities straight even if lots of people now talking about her don't.
