So says a new generation of female attorneys.
(Erica) Leatham...started her own firm after nearly eight years in the Bethesda, Md., office of Holland & Knight. She was miserable there, she says, because of the way big law firms are set up. She felt she was being forced to buy into a set of rules about succeeding that had been created by a generation that had no other choice.
The older women's thinking, she says, is that you pay some heavy dues first, and they buy you the leverage to do other things, to have a life. But Leatham -- with some prodding from her husband, who saw how unhappy she was -- realized she didn't want to follow that path. "I thought we need to be shifting the paradigm. You don't need to work, work, work and then have a family."
So Leatham, a zoning and land use attorney, left Holland & Knight and, with some colleagues and friends, formed her own firm, Stark, Meyers, Eisler & Leatham, based in Rockville, Md. Ironically, she says, she puts in more hours now than she did at Holland & Knight. "But I can control it in a way I didn't before. It's just empowering," she says.
And, most importantly, says Leatham, she's infinitely happier now. She has a 2-year-old and a 3-month-old, and if she wants to take the afternoon off to run errands, nobody blinks. "The beauty of it is, I'm in control of my own schedule," she says.
The twentysomethings of today don't look at jobs and career the way baby boomers did and do. The complaint of baby boomers is that their younger counterparts want all the perks without the hard work.
I don't know if that's entirely true. They certainly don't look at work as fulfillment the way earlier generations have, but perhaps that's because they grew up as latch key kids with parents who didn't come home until after dark and then worked through the night. Maybe watching their parents work 16 hours a day did something to them.
Feminists seem to take particular offense that younger women aren't interested in doing things the way previous generations did it, or that, somehow, young women don't "appreciate" the suffering of older feminists.
Perhaps the difference is that the older women felt they still needed to prove themselves not just as lawyers but as women lawyers. To get accommodation for family demands, they had to make it impossible to suggest they weren't pulling their weight. And they take pride in having proved the naysayers wrong.
Many of the younger women don't buy into that struggle. If big firms don't support their needs, they're less likely to plunge into the fray and more likely to leave. They don't believe this is a battle that anybody has to fight.
I was an anomaly when I was in school, and the professors didn't like it. It wasn't that I was the only woman who had children in law school; I know at least one other woman who did. It was the fact that I refused to deny there was life outside school. So, even as I studied for exams, I planned birthday parties for my children, cooked dinner nearly every evening, did housework, helped with homework and school projects, and even took weekend getaways with my husband. The school, naturally, saw this behavior not as a healthy balance of school and home but as a symbol of how I wasn't "serious" about law school.
Perhaps they were right. But it seems like there are far more women who aren't as "serious" about the law and are unwilling to devote 24/7 to the profession. In my opinion, that's the healthy life.
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