The Power of Empty Nesters

Paul Morigi / Getty Images Meet D.C.'s new influencers: women whose grown-up kids free them from domestic distractions. Mimi Swartz talks to Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett about the high energy of a second phase.

Plus, Read the New York Times’ Magazine profile of empty-nester Valerie Jarrett, “the ultimate Obama insider.”

Somewhere, right now, people are probably compiling a list of Obama administration milestones: The first African-American president has been the first to increase fuel standards in more than a decade, the first to nominate a Latina to the Supreme Court—and so on, right down to White House’s first-ever organic garden. To this list can be added one “first” that has gone largely unnoticed: For the first time, a critical mass of top-level White House staff are professional women with grown children—a pioneering generation of empty nesters who have managed that fabled work/life balance at the highest professional levels and emerged with a set of qualifications unparalleled even in such a credential-rich town.

Click Image Below To View Our Gallery of 9 Empty Nest Powerhouses

These empty nesters bring to the table not only executive-level experience in their chosen fields but also skills honed over years of simultaneous child-rearing: multitasking, time management, patience, unflappability—everything it takes to raise a child and hold on to a high-pressure job at the same time. “All day long, I was trying to figure out how to stay on track and get home before my daughter went to bed,” recalls presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, of her earlier years as a prominent Chicago businesswoman and single mother. (She was divorced in 1988.) “How many of us have been on the BlackBerry and soothing an unhappy child at the same time?”

These days, Jarrett and her colleagues have become the ultimate blue-chip staffers, the ones who, even in this 24/7 (but supposedly family-friendly) administration, never have to leave the office to relieve the babysitter. In fact, like their male counterparts of all ages, they don’t even have to think about the babysitter. And unlike the eager, twentysomething aides who are also available around the clock, they have a hard-won wisdom and maturity that is perfectly in tune with “no drama Obama.”

Exemplars of this new set include Jarrett, whose official title is senior adviser to the president and assistant to the president for intergovernmental relations and public liaison, as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, Michelle Obama’s new chief of staff Susan Sher, U.S. Ambassador to the Untied Nations Susan Rice, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and Dr. Jill Biden. (Nancy Pelosi tops a list of empty nesters in Congress; Madeleine Albright was the outlier from an earlier generation.)

In the great boys’ club that is our nation’s capital, most professional women used to be lumped into one of three categories: the battleaxes (Helen Thomas), the courtesans (Pamela Harriman), and the unmarried, childless martyrs (Condi Rice). When a hot mike caught Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell saying that Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano would be “perfect” to be chief of Homeland Security because “for that job you have to have no life,” there was some debate as to whether this was an endorsement or a slur. (Napolitano is single and childless.)

There has also been an unwritten rule that, to be taken seriously, women in top-level jobs had to be “frumpy,” in the words of Washington Examiner White House correspondent Julie Mason, imprisoned by the power suit. The new empty-nest posse has changed all that. “They are all kind of hot; they really cut a swath,” says Mason. Best friends Jarrett and Rogers keep a crowded schedule of parties and events. They have both appeared in Vogue and allowed themselves to be profiled in the fluffy Capitol File magazine, wearing designer clothes (“Price upon request” Max Mara and Oscar de la Renta, respectively) and displaying no small amount of leg. A profile of Rogers in The Wall Street Journal’s magazine was accompanied by a smoldering photo that would give Tyra Banks a run for her money.

Unlike the middle-age matrons of old, these women of a certain age are not afraid to look good or to suggest they might be fun to hang with after work. “It’s so grim here for women,” says Mason. “They are setting an example of fabulousness.”