Anne-Marie Slaughter: 'I think we need a men's movement'
Her article, Why Women Still Can't Have It All, caused a huge furore last year. But, she insists, we still need to fight for real equality – for both sexes
Anne-Marie Slaughter … 'I didn't anticipate the whole thing would go viral' Photograph: Denise Applewhite
Monday 22 July 2013
Anne-Marie Slaughter strides backstage after her latest TED talk, fast-talking and hungry – she hasn't had time for breakfast yet, and it's well past midday. A little over a year ago, Slaughter was a highly respected but relatively anonymous academic. Her life changed last June, when herarticle for The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can't Have It All, became the most read in the magazine's history. Almost 220,000 people shared it on Facebook.
The speech she has just given, entitled Real Equality, considers what it would take for those twin pillars of human life – caregiving and breadwinning, as she terms them – to be given equal value, and for men and women to reach proper parity, at work and at home. The article and subsequent talk followed her decision to leave her job as the first female director of policy planning at the US state department, after a two-year stint working under Hillary Clinton. She left after concluding that "juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible".
