Future gazing
When Allison Pearson wrote I Don’t Know How She Does It in 2002, she shone a light on mothers juggling work and family. Two decades on, she looks at what still needs to change
It’s been 20 years since an exhausted working mother put her kids to bed every night and sat down to write a novel about an exhausted working mother who was having a hard time juggling work and family. Reader, that frazzled female was me. I called the book I Don’t Know How She Does It because I really didn’t know how my friends, all in their 30s and 40s back then, managed crazy lives that invariably featured a to-do list of 27 items that never seemed to get any shorter. They called us the ‘Having It All’ generation. Apparently, we were lucky. The first women in history who were told we could combine a full-time career with raising a family. So why did it feel like we were the ‘Doing It All’ generation?
As my protagonist Kate Reddy, juggling her job as a fund manager with motherhood, observed: ‘We got to do our fathers’ jobs, but we retained our mothers’ responsibilities.’ The result was often a brutal double shift in which women felt they had to ‘fake it’ both as a mum and an employee. Some of you will be familiar with the opening scene of the novel in which Kate is up at midnight bashing shop-bought mince pies with a rolling pin in order to make them look home-made for her daughter’s Christmas concert. Caught between two worlds, Kate still thinks that a ‘real mother’ (like her own devoted mum) shouldn’t cheat by not baking from scratch.
In the 2011 film of the novel, Sarah Jessica Parker, blowing icing sugar over the ‘fake’ pies with a Dustbuster, made that iconic scene laugh-out-loud hilarious. But, for me, there was something incredibly poignant about the huge stress that millions of us Kate Reddys were under. After the book was published, I received thousands of emails and letters from readers all confessing how guilty they felt – and how alone. ‘Allison, it was like you’d been spying through my kitchen window,’ wrote Jennifer, typical of many I received.
The novel struck a universal chord, selling 4m copies in 32 different languages. It’s incredible to think that it all began, right here, in the pages of Good Housekeeping. When my daughter and son were five and two, I spotted a survey in this magazine that had asked working women what they wanted for Mothering Sunday. Gosh, how the answers resonated with me! The respondents felt they were failing to meet their own high standards, both at work and at home. The most shocking thing, though, was that GH readers overwhelmingly believed they had ‘tougher lives than our own mothers’. Wow. Was that what ‘equality’, the condition women had fought so long and so hard for, really felt like in practice?
I’m delighted to say that I Don’t Know How Sh
