‘Having it all’ was always a poor measure of success

The writer is chief executive of the New America think-tank and an FT contributing editor

It is time to retire the idea of “having it all”. The phrase, popularised by Cosmopolitan’s Helen Gurley Brown, captured the goal to which many women like me aspired in the 1970s and 1980s. We wanted to have the same careers as our fathers without giving up the family lives many of our mothers had, with an extra dash of superwoman-hood thrown in. But this version of feminism was far too narrow.