(Page 2 of 25) - I DO Know How She Does It: Kate Reddy and Feminism`s Unfinished Business authored by Ford, Lynne.

I DO Know How She Does it: Kate Reddy and Feminism’s Unfinished Business

Kate Reddy is not real, but fictional characters have the power to capture the

imagination, especially when they symbolize an important social issue.

If you or any American has to choose between being a good parent and being successful

in your careers, you have paid a terrible price, and so has your country.

--President Bill Clinton, May 23, 1999

You can’t solve an institutional problem with an individual accommodation.

Introduction

Allison Pearson’s book, I Don’t Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working
Mother, made its US debut in July of 2002, precisely as I gave birth to our second child
and faced the prospect of immediately returning to work as a faculty member and
department chair on a campus without childcare or a well-articulated policy on family
leave. The novel profiles the life of Kate Reddy, a London-based hedge fund manager
with two small children ages five and one, a full-time nanny, and a husband employed as
an architect. In nearly every respect, Kate is atypical of mothers in the workforce today.
She earns a six-figure salary and has a working spouse; she is the highest-ranking and
youngest woman in her firm but without any sense of professional agency; and she
employs full-time, in-home childcare. What propelled this book to the top of several
bestseller lists, however, is the instant familiarity women feel in the daily challenges Kate
faces in combining family life and work. She is perpetually sleep starved (“five years of
walking around in a lead suit of sleeplessness”); an abundance of guilt is manifested in
her gender cover stories to her children and to her boss (“double agents lie for a living”);
she perceives that she lives on the razor’s edge of disaster (“everything goes perfectly as
long as everything goes perfectly”); and she cannot envision a way to resolve the work-
life tensions (“Stress. Success. They even rhyme”) beyond lengthening her endless “must
remember” lists. When the pressure gets too great (after her husband Richard walks out
and the raw sexism in her workplace becomes too grotesque for even her to ignore), she
quits. The end of the novel finds the Reddy-Shattock family living near Kate’s mother and
her sister Julie in Devonshire--Richard is the sole breadwinner and Kate (“bored to the
point of manslaughter”) is hanging out at coffee mornings with other mums with small
kids. When the factory where Julie and forty other women have been doing piecework
goes bankrupt, Kate investigates pursuing ethical venture capital funds for women-owned
companies as a revenue source to reopen the factory herself.

My introduction to the book came by way of Washington Post writer Marjorie Williams,
“Here, at last, is the definitive social comedy of working motherhood.” But why did it
take a British writer to bring it to American bookshelves? Williams’ conclusion is what
compels me to explore in this essay what I have termed “feminism’s unfinished business”:

Roxanne Rogers, The Washington Post, 11/12/02, p. C01.

Anne Weisberg, quoted in Williams and Segal, p. 82.