Elena Kagan Is Childfree. Get Over It.

If one more person laments Elena Kagan's lack of motherhood, I'm going to scream.

First, a personal anecdote: My best friend is a successful lawyer at one of her city's top law firms. She works incredible hours, including whole weekends, and regularly frets over how to balance it all. Recently she told, "I wish someone would have told me it would be like this. I might not get to have everything I want."

And you know what? That truth is inconveniently left out of law school brochures, isn't written into work contracts or even whispered at company dinners. Who wants to be the bearer of such news? My friend did extraordinarily well in law school and was immediately drafted into a coveted, lucrative job. But she's realizing (and privately railing against the idea) that the fast track doesn't include time off for maternity leave — certainly not in a way that allows her to return to full-time work as she once knew it.

This is part of the discussion that people seem to be missing when they lament — as they increasingly do — that Elena Kagan is single (not "unmarried") and childfree. You know what? Women don't have it "all," though the presumption that we want to be married and have children is limited at best. Who says those two elements equate happiness? Are we really still so stuck on these quaint, outdated ideas of fulfillment that we feel pity for women who don't live up to our expectations?

At best, it's insulting and paternalistic when people assume Kagan is lacking life experience because she didn't get married, give birth, or raise her own children. Several have come right out and said Diane Wood should have been nominated simply because she's a mother. I call bullshit. We never say the same of men — that without fatherhood on their personal resume, their skills are deficient — so why do we make the sexist assumption that women must be mothers to fulfill some set of emotional standards, to feel complete, to have lived a range of experiences we deem necessary for a job based on skill, intellect, and analytical prowess? And why are deeply personal choices related to fertility anyone's business but our own?

At the same time, we're ignoring an inconvenient truth. Being a woman with an illustrious career can be a challenge at best. I was raised believing I could have a career or children. Right or wrong, I internalized that message, and somewhere between having no maternal instincts towards human children (animals are another matter) and deriving immense gratification from devoting myself to work I enjoy instead of subsistence employment just to get by, I figured out that I'm not a woman suited to parenthood. (Hell, I wasn't even sure I was suited for lifelong partnership until I fell in love with someone without a green card.)

Conversely, my best pal has always wanted to be a mother, but she also wanted to be successful and do meaningful work. She was never told what I was: that doing both would be enormously problematic and difficult. She thought we were past that sort of gendered trade-off. She was unfortunately wrong. And, if she had known, would anyone have dared to suggest she forgo law school or her own career?

"I wish she were a mother. This sends the wrong message," said a feminist friend of Kagan's, regarding her nomination. Forgive me for saying so, but it doesn't send the wrong message about Kagan. It sends the wrong message about our society, about our natalist ideals, about our gendered expectations. Kagan is a wildly successful woman who is also childfree, and as someone else who proudly embraces such a label, I think she sends a difficult if honest message. Sometimes, we can't have everything we want. And sometimes, we don't want the "everything" other people prescribe.

Photo Credit: Harvard Law Record