Virginia Haussegger
Wonder Woman
The myth of 'having it all'
Allen & Unwin, 2005
A book for women about how the conscious and unconscious choices we make in our ambitious and focused 20s and 30s around the big issues of career, love and sex ultimately shape and define us.
It's your choice, right? Whether or not you have a career and children?
Can today's women really have it all', or have we all been duped? When did the superwomen of the 80s become the wondering women of the new millennium? And where have all our achievements left us?
When leading journalist Virginia Haussegger, frustrated and angry about her own childlessness, wrote an opinion piece for a major metropolitan newspaper she could never have anticipated the Pandora's Box she was opening. By outing' her own personal pain and confusion Virginia unwittingly set off a heated public debate about a raft of issues including whether and/or how feminism had failed women, where it had left us when it came to having children, and whether indeed career women' should simply quit their whingeing and shut up about the whole damn business. After all it was their choice wasn't it?
Virginia pulls no punches as she explores just how the big choices we make in our twenties, thirties and forties about career, love, sex, fertility and motherhood ultimately shape and define us whether we like it or not. In this passionate, compelling, thoroughly researched and at times confronting exploration Virginia reflects on her own life and those of the many women who have let her into their hearts and minds, as she examines the impact these major, life-altering decisions is having on individuals and on society as a whole.
Wonder Woman is about real choices - or the lack thereof; the women being forced to make them and how these choices will shape our future.
About the Author
Virginia Haussegger has been a television journalist for over sixteen years, reporting from the Middle East, Europe, Washington and New York. She has worked in both commercial television (A Current Affair, Channel Nine; Witness, Seven Network) and public broadcasting (The 7.30 Report, ABC TV News). In 1996, Virginia was awarded a United Nations Media Peace Prize. She is currently presenting the national broadcaster's television news in Canberra.
