On the World
I
2023
I
Talk
Women Wanting More: Career, Motherhood, & Global Changemaking
In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter asked whether women could have it all. A decade later, she put me on a stage to answer with a different word.
In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" for The Atlantic and set off a decade of argument. Her point was never that women can't; it was that the systems around us hadn't changed enough to let us. Ten years on, the Princeton Women's Network sat the two of us down together, and I came with my own answer to her question. Not all. More.
"More is riveting. Burhardt's writing is so raw and immediate that her journey through motherhood, marriage, climbing, and building a conservation organization is our journey, day by day, and indeed hour by hour. It is full of joy, fear, frustration, passion, possibility, and the intensity of love. A woman's story, but above all, an enthralling and motivating human story. Highly recommended."
—
Anne-Marie Slaughter
We covered the whole of it, because for me it does not come apart: ambition, partnership, climbing, leadership, risk, and what happens when motherhood lands on top of an already full life. The year I got pregnant on New Year's Day I was on the summit of Fitzroy. I started Legado with eleven thousand dollars and could not let go of something I'd tried that hard on. The day I gave birth to the twins, we got an offer for a huge grant, and yes, I was checking my email the day I gave birth to my kids, because neither building Legado or being a pro-climber came with maternity leave. And there is my own mother, who shaved her calluses with a straight edge, put on her nylons, and went to work, and whom I spent the whole book trying to reach back towards to understand my own journey.
I don't believe every part of a life has to run at full volume to be real. I am still a climber when I finish a day in the frozen vertical, early, to pick up my kids. I am still a mother when I leave my kids to go climbing. Parts of me expand and contract, sometimes by choice, sometimes because life makes the choice. That is the more I mean. Not having it all, not balancing it perfectly. Making room for complexity without requiring any part of myself to disappear.