WASHINGTON — Harriet E. Miers is a trailblazer among women -- the first to break the gender barrier at her Texas law firm, the first female president of the Dallas Bar Assn., the first woman elected to lead the State Bar of Texas.
But in the tradition of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's latest Supreme Court nominee has climbed the ladders of power without the added responsibilities many career women face: a husband and children.
An administration that set out to be family-friendly installed mothers with young children in positions of great influence, such as confidant, speechwriter, press secretary and domestic policy specialist.
The results were mixed. One rose to become secretary of Education. Some left for more forgiving jobs. Another took a break until her son was in college, then came back to assume a powerful post at the State Department.
"It can work for everyone for a period of time," said Juleanna Glover Weiss, who resigned as press secretary to Vice President Dick Cheney for a lobbying job that allows her to put her three children to bed at night. "But it's human nature, male and female, to want to step out of the pressure cooker for a pause, to see what the private sector is like or just to stop working, period."
If confirmed, the 60-year-old Miers would be only the third woman to sit on the high court. But the path she took as a proud workaholic would be difficult for most working mothers to emulate, no matter how bright or ambitious: starting the day before dawn and staying until nearly midnight, never complaining of fatigue, at the ready for last-minute cross-country trips.
The round-the-clock dedication demanded by most high-level Washington jobs makes the challenge of balancing work and home all the more difficult. Even if the president himself were to call for family-friendly policies -- as did Bush early on when he asked his chief of staff, "Are you running off these mothers?" -- it is difficult to duck out for a homework session when everyone else is working 80-hour weeks.
"Leaving early is an impossibility at the White House," Weiss said. "People rely on you to be instantaneously reachable, to have completed a letter or memo that needs to be finalized and ready for the president's 7:30 a.m. briefing the next day."
She said Bush and Cheney "wouldn't bat an eye" if a family obligation called a staffer away, but that the feeling of shirking one's duty was powerful nevertheless.
