The Power of Empty Nesters

These women are, quite simply, past the point where they need to worry about being taken seriously. Jarrett and Rogers, for instance, have held a series of high-powered corporate jobs since they left Stanford and Wellesley, respectively, while they raised their daughters on their own. Rogers, originally from New Orleans, has been a major player in Chicago for decades, first at People’s Gas and North Shore Gas and then for Allstate Financial. (“For Desiree, this was sort of a step down,” says one major-league Democrat of her duties in the administration.) As a fundraiser for Obama, Rogers had few peers, except perhaps for Jarrett, an attorney who was previously president and CEO of Chicago’s powerful Habitat Company and who cut her teeth in the rough and tumble world of Chicago politics.

“It’s so grim here for women,” says a Washington journalist. The White House empty nesters “are setting an example of fabulousness.”

Still, their children always came first: Jarrett recalls a day when both she and Susan Rice were being held too long in a meeting with Chicago Mayor Daley, and he caught both women looking at their watches. He finally asked what was going on, and they confessed that the Halloween parade at their kids’ school started in 20 minutes and they were 30 minutes away. “Then what are you doing here?” he demanded.

Now that their children have left home—Jarrett’s daughter is in law school, Rogers’ in college, both at Ivy League schools—they can concentrate their energies on just one thing: work. “For professional women who’ve had a career and more time than their husbands in childrearing—empty nesting provides a rearrangement,” says Dr. Janice L. Krupnick, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University.

Or as Jarrett puts it, “The pressure is off.” There’s no longer a parallel track of domestic duties to be tended to during the day, no second shift at night. “It frees you up emotionally.” Jarrett points to Hillary Clinton’s expansiveness and ease in her new role: “Here she is traveling all over the world. It would be an enormous pressure if she knew she was leaving a young child. Being secretary of State without young children is a lot easier.”

On the other hand, two or more decades of juggling have made these women very effective leaders, more focused and strategic with their time, according to Jarrett. “When you are forced to balance competing interests, you are forced to be vigilant about your day. Those habits stay with you,” she says. Her years of child rearing, she believes, have also made her more patient, a more tolerant listener and much better at reading body language. (Sometimes, after all, a pouting subordinate isn’t so different from a pouting 3-year-old.) She says she’s also more likely to let a staff member out of a meeting for a child’s soccer game, because she’s been there.

The empty nesters “tend to have skills that men their age don’t have,” says Ann Stock, former chief of protocol during the Clinton administration, and herself an empty nester. Above all, these women are grateful that they sacrificed neither home nor careers to get where they are today.

“When I was younger, I never could have appreciated this stage of life,” says Jarrett, referring to the power and freedom she’s enjoying in middle age. She likes to paraphrase the old feminist saw about how Ginger Rogers could do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards in high heels. “We were used to dancing backwards and now we can dance forward,” she says. “Imagine how productive we can be.”

Mimi Swartz is executive editor of Texas Monthly, and the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron. She has been a staff writer at Talk and the New Yorker.