The History of “Having It All”: Black and White Women in US Popular Culture, 1890 to Today

This poster will trace the history of that at once vaunted and contested aspirational image, “the woman who has it all,” from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, displaying images from popular culture. Despite the intensified attention resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic to the disproportionate amount of care work done by women, the conflict between the demands of motherhood and pursuing work outside the home is not a new development, nor is the “woman who has it all” a recent addition to public dialogue brought to us by the white feminist movement of the 1970s. Showcasing a selection of visually captivating images over the course of 130 years, the poster will establish both notable consistency and critical change in the image over the twentieth century through linking and contextualizing multiple iterations of this ideal. The images engage scholarship on the mutual construction of race and gender by showing the eugenic origins of the white ideal, which emerged concurrently with the complementary ideal of the “New Negro Woman,” as the poster ultimately will track as well both the practical and conceptual innovations Black women pioneered and the ideological policing of racialized notions of proper motherhood that ensued. As iterations of these cultural ideals continued over the twentieth century including the “Homemaker and Careerist” at midcentury and the “Supermom” of the 1970s and 1980s, these proffered images paradoxically continued to tie women to work in the home at the same time that they opened up possibilities beyond it. Examples include an image from Red Book Magazine in October 1929 of a white woman riding a bike with Earth as wheels, captioned “And now she has undertaken more than she bargained for” and an image from Essence in March 1993 of a Black woman balancing a stick carrying computer, baby, and dishes while walking on a tight rope. The poster will track the transformation of the “New Woman” and “New Negro Woman” at the turn of the twentieth century to the “woman who has it all” of the twenty-first century represented by a multitude of figures in the media, including Michelle Obama and Amy Coney Barrett, as it will delineate what it means to “have it all” and/or “do it all” over the time period. Interrogating the cultural power of the idea that women can “do it all” sheds light on how this ideal undergirds policy decisions on a variety of issues from paid parental leave, free childcare, alternate workplace structures, increased wages and protections for care workers, and reproductive justice.