A generation of women told they can 'have it all' were duped

Our great expectations are leaving many feeling overburdened, resentful and guilty. Is it time to reset the bar?

I was a teenager in the ‘90s. An era where ‘girl power’ ruled in the form of the Spice Girls and Sex and the City. The message was not just ‘you can do whatever you want’, but, ‘you deserve more than being a housewife’. I believed that feminism had done its job. My friends and I went off to Uni on a par with all the boys. When we left I watched them move cities, become lawyers and doctors, or take jobs in finance and marketing. We used our new salaries to rent flats, socialise, and go on holidays. The path had been laid for us and we walked it in our platform boots.

But that pervasive media messaging we internalised was only one side of a much more complex picture. In her book 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality, Allison Yarrow explores how the ‘90s duped women and girls into believing they had gained gender equality.

By the end of the decade, however, the promise of equality for women was revealed to be something between a false hope and a cruel hoax. Parity, it turned out, was paradox: The more women assumed power, the more power was taken from them through a noxious popular culture that celebrated outright hostility toward women and commercialized their sexuality and insecurity.

Perhaps less consciously, my generation internalised those noxious messages too. Positions of power are not a safe or acceptable place for you to be. Put yourself there and you will be ridiculed, shamed and cut back down to size, because those women do not meet our expectations of the feminine ideal. We like our women to be softer.

Very Great Expectations

These mixed messages have created a generation of women with extraordinary and dichotomous expectations of themselves. We must be independent, fierce, and ambitious, and at the same time sweet, gentle, and dependable. We should have a selfish determination to succeed in the workplace, but also selflessly give our love and energy to support everyone around us. We should keep pace with men in the workplace (because ‘girl power’) and also be present and nurturing mothers (because feminine ideal).

Layer on top of this the messages received from our family of origin. The values held by our parents will have shaped what we expect for, and of, ourselves. Consider, what was expected about the way you behaved as a child? What did you feel you were expected to achieve? What sort of life were you expected to live? What responsibilities do you feel are expected of you now? To what extent are you still motivated to meet all these expectations?

Finally, we add to our expectations based on the people we see around us. If they have got that, I should be able to have that too. If they are achieving that, why can’t I? Social media can be extremely detrimental on this front. How easy it is to find someone who is ‘smashing life’ on a particular dimension and very ready to tell you what you need to do to get what they have got. It’s all there for the taking if you just put in the effort.

Working 9 to 5….and then some

In trying to meet these expectations, today’s mothers are working themselves to exhaustion. And they are working more than fathers. The UK Office for National Statistics released a report in 2022¹ which showed that;

1. 75% of mothers with dependent children are in work, and 92% of fathers with dependent children are in work.

2. In families where both parents work, it has become more common for both to work full-time.

3. Employed women with dependent children spend 84 minutes a day on unpaid childcare; employed men with dependent children spend 55 minutes a day.

4. Employed women with dependent children spend 169 minutes a day on household work; employed men with dependent children spend 106 minutes a day.

To save you the maths, that’s an extra 10 hours and 44 minutes a week in total. Some imbalance will be reasonable if the woman is working part-time and the man full-time (and it’s virtually always this way round), but this survey also found that women are working more than men even when paid work is taken into account.

A different study reported by Oxford University² looked at the amount and quality of leisure time enjoyed by men and women across several Western European countries, including the UK. They found that working, being married, and having children all had negative impacts on leisure time, but much more so for women than men;

We find that full-time working mothers have the lowest levels of leisure time and leisure satisfaction. In particular, a full-time working mother with two children has 9 hours less leisure per week than a working father.

I find it interesting that both partners in a couple will accept a disparity of that magnitude. It asks us to also consider what the men of our generation were taught to expect of, and for, themselves. I am sure the messages were quite different, but I’d like to better understand in what ways³.

Time for a reality check?

We all have an ‘expectation bar’. We didn’t consciously set that bar. It was created as the result of a million small things that we have internalised. For a lot of women that bar is set high, and we strive to reach it.

Holding high expectations can provide motivation and drive achievement. But it comes with challenges. If our expectations are very high, even with the greatest of efforts we are going to fall short of them. In that gap between our reality and our expectations, negative emotions can flourish.

I’ve heard women talk of feeling frustrated that having kids had such an impact on their career. I've heard resentment that they are doing more housework than their partner. I've heard guilt that they didn’t make it to Sport’s Day. I've heard anger and a sense of injustice that, however hard they work, they never ‘get there’.

But working more and trying harder is likely to just leave you more exhausted and resentful. So if that’s not the solution, what’s a girl to do?

An objective assessment of both reality and expectations may be needed. If you are living in a partnership where you are working more and relaxing less than your partner, resentment is a very reasonable emotion. You may start to feel you deserve better and look to find a fairer balance. A conversation about expectations could be a good place to start.

It is also likely that the world has helped you create very high expectations of yourself, and you are holding that bar in an unhelpful, unrealistic place.

Finding ways to lower the bar

This is a process of striking balance between ambition and self-care. Of evaluating whether your expectations are reasonable and aligned with your values and priorities. If you’ve been working on your life purpose statements they may feed in to this. You might just start catching yourself when you say, ‘I should have done…’, or ‘I need to…’. Is what you are expecting of yourself necessary, kind and realistic?

If you want to get a bit deeper into re-evaluating your expectations, I’d suggest a 3-step process;

1. Make your current expectations conscious

   Because our expectation bar is set in a pernicious way from an early age, many of our expectations aren’t held within our conscious mind. Go through a process of unearthing them and writing them down. Use thought-starters such as ‘I believe I should…’, ‘I believe I deserve…’, ‘In relationships I expect…’. A useful (if uncomfortable) one is, ‘I judge others badly who…’. What you expect of others is a clue to what you expect from yourself. Once on paper, you will be able to examine each expectation more thoroughly. How do you feel about it now the cold light of day is shining on it?

2. Label and acknowledge the emotions in the gap

   If your expectation-reality gap contains negative emotions, you can’t just decide to pull the expectation bar down. The emotions are in the way. They are valid and they deserve to be acknowledged. Label them and give voice to them. This might mean talking openly to your partner or a good friend, or it might mean writing freely to get it all out. Accept that there may be grief involved in letting go of the ‘have it all’ ideal that you have been sold.

3. Let go of what doesn’t serve you

   The use of ceremony can be a powerful way to let go of what doesn’t serve us. It can allow you to acknowledge the past, release attachments, and make space for personal growth and positive change. Cut up all the expectations you wrote down in stage 1, so each sits on its own piece of paper. Sort them into two piles: expectations that are valid and serve you, and expectations that you wish to unburden yourself of. Consider a symbolic way to let go of the expectations you no longer want. Maybe you burn them, or (if you have biodegradable paper) release them onto water or into nature.

What you have left should feel good. Expectations that you have chosen for yourself. Expectations that are realistic and positive. Imagine how great it’s going to feel when your reality exceeds your expectations. Maybe that’s girl power.

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A fuck you fire circle

I’ve got a vision. Me and a small group of women. It’s dusk and the sun is setting on a clear sky. There’s a fire pit burning. There’s probably wine. The atmosphere is relaxed but purposeful. We have a job to do. We each take a pile of small pieces of paper from our pockets. Our personal expectations that we wish to let go. In turn we speak an expectation out loud and throw it into the fire pit. Everyone watches it smoulder and turn to ash. Some raise their hands in silent support. Round and round the circle we go until every last unwanted expectation has been destroyed. A beautiful, supportive, ‘fuck you’ to the world that told us all the things we should be and do.

1. Families and the labour market, UK: 2021. View at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/familiesandthelabourmarketengland/2021

2. Sevilla-Sanz, A., and J. Gimenez-Nadal. The Time-Crunch Paradox. Department of Economics (University of Oxford), 2010.

3. I’m really pleased that my subscriber list includes men - I’d love to hear from you on this. I’m wondering if my generation of women internalised the idea of achieving career success more than the men internalised the idea of embracing homemaking and parenting, so we have women with expections of doing both while men have a more singular expectation to be the ‘breadwinner’? Despite this, many men feel like they are stepping up on the home front and thus are also living a reality that doesn’t align with the deep expectations they hold (namely that they shouldn’t really have to ‘help’ at home). I’m really intrigued by these dynamics on a societal level, but also how they play out in a given couple. This all makes for a slightly uncomfortable conversation today, but we should remember that deeper expectations will have been embedded 25+ years ago in family systems that were probably quite different.