Guerrilla tenured professor-blogger Historiann has a cool post busting the myth that anyone working the pressures and responsibilities of a tenure track job in academia will also have time in the day to find “balance” in his or, especially, her life.

A few years ago at a conference, I fell into a conversation with a senior scholar who is at the top of her field, with three very well-received books out plus three edited collections.  (I just checked–she’s published two more edited collections since then!)  At the time, she was in her mid-40s with two very young children and the Chair of her department, and she was just about to take over the editorship of a major journal.  I asked her how she did it all, and she said that 1) her husband’s career was part-time, and that he followed her career and did the majority of the kid stuff; 2) even then her kids ate a lot of McDonald’s food; and 3) she probably has a higher tolerance for chaos than most people.  She wasn’t pretending to be Martha Stewart or Groovy Earth Mother, on top of all of her professional accomplishments, and I appreciated that a lot.  Most people will be honest with you about the price they and their family members pay or have paid for their professional successes.  It only looks like glossy perfection from the outside.

She said it here.

Good for her not trying to emulate Martha Stewart of Groovy Earth Mother. Trying to emulate the first is like trying to emulate a superstar athlete: not only is Stewart extraordinarily smart, organized, fast, and capable she also spends many millions of dollars on nearly-as-capable support staff and infrastructure. Trying to emulate Groovy Earth Mother is like trying to emulate any other mythical embodiment of gender ideals.

On the other hand I’m not convinced by her disclaimer that it’s invalid to “only look[in] like glossy perfection from the outside,” nor that it’s a sign of imperfection to have a high tolerance for chaos. Nor is it imperfection, very obviously, to have a partner (male or female) who’s willing… as opposed to, say, culturally obliged… to back you up. Particularly if you’re then willing to turn around (say, once you’ve got tenure or are otherwise established) and give them their turn at establishing themselves. You ask me, glossy or not a willingness to handle chaos and help each other succeed would be… a pretty good definition of perfection.

One small fly in the ointment: I’d like to know a little more about what she meant by “tolerance for chaos.” Speaking as a stay-at-home dad I have to say I’m very aware of the pressure once put on women to manage, supervise, direct, and execute domestic perfection (speaking of Martha Stewart!) When I worked for a progressive Fortune-500 high-tech company it always struck me as a little unnerving how some of the seriously high-powered professional women in management and tech still spent their time fretting over how to allocate their spare time to get the decorating done, the house clean, the meals cooked, and so on. Actually it wasn’t so much that as how it seemed that despite their business success based sometimes on standard 80-hour weeks they still seemed defensive about what they couldn’t accomplish domestically. To the extent this still occurs I’m left wishing there could be some kind of happy medium in gender construction where women who aren’t the primary domestic managers weren’t so subject to scrutiny (self or otherwise.) And similarly I really really wish men who do it weren’t treated to that variation on “the amazing thing about a dancing pig isn’t how well it dances but that it dances at all.” The standards set by someone who isn’t haunted by past generations of domesticity-as-performance are going to be different than for someone who was. But they’re still standards. And just because Martha Stewart wouldn’t do it that way doesn’t make it chaotic. (Which reminds me, by the way, how very much I enjoyed how wonderfully chaos-tolerant Julia Child was in last year’s Julie and Julia.)