‘Can’t Have It All’ story online logs record hits

Associated Press

NEW YORK

A first-person lament by a former State Department official on “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” has attracted more visitors to The Atlantic website in a 24-hour period than any magazine story the site has ever published.

The piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter described her struggles balancing a high-powered career with raising her two sons.

Clicks were “approaching 450,000 uniques,” magazine spokeswoman Natalie Raabe said Friday, citing data from Omniture.

The piece, which first appeared on TheAtlantic.com website Wednesday at 9 p.m., also had more than 75,000 Facebook recommendations, not counting links on private Facebook pages where individuals engaged in heartfelt debate about work-life balance.

Slaughter, 53, served as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in Washington from January 2009 to February 2011. She commuted home to Princeton, N.J., on weekends while her husband, Andrew Moravcsik, a professor at Princeton, served as primary caregiver for their two boys.

In the article, she recalls a glamorous reception she attended with the Obamas and other VIPs where she couldn’t stop thinking about her 14-year-old son, “who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and already was resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him.”

Eventually Slaughter left the State Department to resume her career as an academic at Princeton.