Thirty years ago, the women’s movement was relishing a cultural shift that began with the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and culminated with the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. A generation of women that grew up preparing for adult lives inside of the home gave birth to the first generation of girls groomed for self-sufficient futures in the workforce.

Hard-won legislation like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from gender and racial discrimination, and Title IX of the 1972 Education Act, which gives equal opportunity to girls in schools receiving federal aid effectively created generation “You can do anything.” The expectations were high. The polarization of work and family had exploded. These girls could choose to have either or both. It was up to them to prove true the heart of every boycott, sit-in, and rally held by their feminist predecessors: that if given the chance to thrive without gender and racial discrimination, women could, in fact, do anything.

We didn’t disappoint. Women now earn the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. We still earn fewer doctorate and professional degrees than men, but are catching up fast. We’ve got Annika Sorenstam, Venus and Serena Williams, the WNBA and the LPGA. Working women over the age of 25 have narrowed the gender gap in the male-to-female earnings ratio to 85 percent in 2002 from 67 percent in 1979, giving us unprecedented purchasing power. Millions of young women are climbing executive ranks, saving their marriage vows for soul mates and ignoring their biological clocks.

Yet amid a lifelong sprint to the next promotion, many young women are realizing what working class, poor, and minority women have always been aware of: the implausibility of doing everything and the unhappiness that coincides with trying.

Reports of overstressed working moms trading in long hours at the office for quality time at home abound. Presidential Adviser Karen Hughes and Brenda Barnes, former president and CEO of PepsiCola North America, made headlines when they left their prestigious positions to spend more time with her family. And those are just the women who found the time to nurture meaningful relationships while building their resumes — or who are able to afford scaling back their hours or quitting their jobs. Many working class and minority women, who are disproportionately affected by poverty, do not have the privilege of gorging on the array of choices fed to the middle and upper classes. There’s a large part of generation “You can do anything” for whom a working mother was not a novelty.  

That women who have access to quality education should pursue — and perfect — a career path before taking on any other role — namely wife and mother —  was made clear from the start. This implicit message was infused into my generation’s television shows, magazines, and toys from the day we were born. Even our food said, “Get a job.” Lunchables debuted in 1988, sending a clear message that moms work — and so will you.

As aspiring career women, we responded by dedicating the fervor of our childhood heroine, She-ra, to securing our financial futures. A job is our “Sword of Protection.”

We’ve been less adamant about securing our emotional futures. We plan to pursue them more fully after years of slogging through grunt-work propel us to the top. But as we move up the ladder, there’s no guarantee that personal fulfillment is waiting patiently for when we have more time.

The work/family dichotomy that inspired Betty Friedan to identify “the problem that has no name” in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is spawning parallel testimonials. The young women who have feasted on a lifelong diet of “girl power” are wrestling with their own unnamed problem. Friedan articulated the unhappiness some women felt about their role as wives and mothers defining their identities. Many of today’s young women are beginning to express frustration that our role as successful professionals is eclipsing our domestic aspirations. We feel like we never really had a choice.

A March Time magazine cover story featured the headline, “The Case for Staying Home: Caught between the pressure of the workplace and the demands of being a mom, more women are sticking with the kids.” The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article last fall about Ivy League professionals forsaking coveted jobs to be stay at home moms. Authors Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin make the case that young women have been fooled by the myth of “having it all.” Their book, Midlife Crisis at 30, explores the fantasy of “long careers, egalitarian marriages and children” versus the reality: “While old-school rules of corporate hierarchy have loosened up, they haven’t gone away.”

The work of earlier feminists has percolated. Many of the first girls to benefit are now women for whom raising a family and maintaining a challenging career are important, and who are learning that it is not feasible to do both within the pace of the modern workforce. Additionally, they fear that downsizing their careers in order to nurture a family will spur backlash from their peers and superiors and eventually will be spun as a thundering “I told you so” from a culture that a mere 30 years ago didn’t think women belonged in the office.

Women’s careers are hindered by the demands of family largely because women still do most of the work at home, and because many employers don’t have policies in place that help women to balance their dedication to work and family. Even the school-nurse reflex still speed-dials mom when a child is sick at school — though nowadays both parents typically work.

The problem has been named. It obviously resonates. Organizations and mom groups have formed in response. But it has yet to galvanize a revolution like The Feminine Mystique did. The recent March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C. might instill the passion exhibited by Ms. Friedan and her cohorts into a new generation of women. If so, let’s hope we can learn from their successes, as well as their mistakes.

It’s disheartening that the first murmurings of our “problem” are coming from the same privileged perspective and demonstrating the same exclusion of working class, poor and minority women that the The Feminine Mystique did.

Fortunately, it’s still early enough to articulate that the stress of trying to nurture a family while working fulltime is every woman’s problem — if not even more so for working class and minority women. Squeezing in, let alone paying for, a doctor’s appointment for their children or themselves is tricky for women clocking 12-hour shifts at the supermarket. Having struggled without sufficient childcare, job flexibility, livable wages, health insurance, and education, these women know better than anyone what it’s like to feel caught in the work/family dichotomy. This time they belong in the forefront of any effort to change those things. It would be a disservice to all women to proceed otherwise.

A first front in demonstrating that it’s no longer radical for a woman to work like a man, but to change the way work gets done could be the persistence of the woman’s double-shift. Flexible hours would keep more talented women in the workforce and allow them to continue contributing to a benefits plan that they can rely on in old age. Stop-and-start careers, as well as divorce and longer life spans, put women at risk for impoverished retirement.

Women could encourage businesses to devise ways for their employees to slow down, stop and start their climb up the career ladder. They could demand that companies institute part-time workweeks, while still providing health benefits, and give women the option of working at home or provide on-site company daycare. We need better wages and universal healthcare for all working women, particularly those doing manual labor whose bodies physically give out earlier than office employees. Perhaps by revisiting some of that landmark legislation our predecessors won and tidying up the fine print, generation “You can do anything” might eventually be a realistic tagline.

In The Fray Contributor