Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan, teased out this term in 1982 to describe regular women who didn’t believe they could have the things that attractive, go-getter women did. Brown told them they really could have it all if they applied themselves, a revolutionary message that has resonated for decades.,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the former executive editor of Teen Vogue, rips apart this view as old-fashioned.
I started to talk to other women about the same experience, and I realized that almost all of us had been told that if we work hard, we will get where we want to go. We will get everything we want in life. But many women were not feeling satisfied with their job. They didn't feel like they had the stability and the kind of career success that they should have considering how much work they'd put in and how much they had sacrificed.
I don't think the problem is that women aren't working hard enough. I don't know a single lazy girl. I know a lot of women who would love a little bit more free time.We know it's not true, but somehow it still determines the conversation. We still say, you can have it all….but maybe not at the same time. I am fascinated by how we sold to women this idea that they could have it all, and then when they couldn't successfully do it all, made them feel like failures.
Many successful women look like they have it all, but they felt like they were failures because they weren't doing everything perfectly that they were tasked with doing, according to Mukhopadhyay. In today’s workplace, the more ambitious you are, the more you're expected to work, the higher you go in your company. Now you're checking emails at 6 a.m.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist, and the author of 14 books, including "Click here for the latest personal finance news to help you with investing, paying off debt, buying a home, retirement, and more