Bound to Succeed: The Role of Ambition Among Twenty-First-Century Women

I once asked my mother, a well-educated, exceedingly competent woman, why she served as someone's assistant for the majority of her professional life, yet always took a leadership role in volunteer organizations (president of the PTA and director of nearly every church committee on which she's ever served, for example). Her response was unequivocal: "Your grandmother always told me that I would never be anything other than a secretary." Mothers—"They fuck you up," Philip Larkin wrote. "They may not mean to, but they do."

Mothers loom large in Double Bind: Women on Ambition, Robin Romm's new anthology of women's writing about the complications of gender and aspiration. More than 20 percent of the essays in the collection begin with some variation of "my mother"; the last begins, "Dear Mom." Nearly all the others include anecdotes about mothers or mothering. The book is, in fact, dedicated to the editor's "grandmothers, mother, and daughter." In this collection, at least, ambition is rarely divorced from the matrilineal narrative.

For novelist and short-story writer Pam Houston's mother, ambition ended with marriage and, not long after, Houston's birth, a fact the poor girl was never allowed to forget. "'I gave up everything I loved for you,' my mother would say to me almost daily, to get me to clean my room or part my hair on the side or wear my retainer. And I would want only to find a way to give it all back, to restore her satisfying working life before being saddled with the burden of me." Internalizing this guilt, Houston becomes a workaholic, barely sleeping, never turning down work: "I work hard, therefore, I am."

Romm's own mother had an illegal abortion at the age of eighteen. A civil-rights lawyer who was "passionate about a woman's right to choose, about a woman having a real career and making an impact on the world," she impressed these values upon her daughter, who delayed motherhood only to spend five years trying to get pregnant before succeeding, at forty. For Romm, achievement meant "the perpetual double bind of the gender, success paired eternally with scrutiny and retreat."

In what is perhaps the most conservative essay of the bunch, political-science professor Elizabeth Corey speaks to the concerns of her female students at Baylor University when she says, "Flexible hours, parental leave, working from home, and other policy changes are necessary for women to flourish as professionals and mothers. But the core of the problem is more spiritual and psychological than political or social." Corey acknowledges Sheryl Sandberg and her kind—Anne-Marie Slaughter, Debora Spar, those who "confront the difficulties of having children and careers without simply saying: 'work harder' or 'stop working'"—but ultimately finds the motherhood/career conundrum unresolvable. "There seems to be something in the nature of most women," she writes, "that wants not only to be sure that children are cared for but also to do the caring themselves." And so, "Shouldn't women, and especially those who are financially stable enough to do so, focus predominantly on family and children?" This is a crisis of the soul, according to Corey, and it is only through "the setting aside of goals" that women will approach happiness.

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In compiling Double Bind, Romm sought to acquire "tales from the trenches." But the thing about trenches is that they aren't particularly clean. They're narrow and, by definition, associated with being on the defensive. This is not always a bad thing. Having gathered these essays in direct opposition to such business tomes as Sandberg's Lean In, Romm offers space for writers like Ayana Mathis, who grew up black in the eighties, "raised on a steady diet of images that showed us as unworthy, ugly, peripheral":

I and mine are...