What if working women don't want to have it all?

Calling all “mouseburgers” — it’s time for a massive mindset change. Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor of Cosmopolitan, teased out this term in 1982 to describe regular women who didn’t believe they could have the things that attractive, go-getter women did. Brown told them they really could have it all if they applied themselves, a revolutionary message that has resonated for decades.

But that message doesn’t work in today’s demanding workplace culture. In her new book, “ ,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, the former executive editor of Teen Vogue, rips apart this view as old-fashioned. She canvasses the state of women in the workplace from the 1960s to today, sharing her own experiences along the way.



“What if we finally said, ‘Enough is enough,’” she writes. “I have what I need — I do not need it ‘all.’ I refuse to do it all; stop trying to make me!” Wanting it all has driven women to the brink — struggling with mental and physical health issues because they “have been sold a false bill of goods about what makes a happy, prosperous life,” according to Mukhopadhyay.

“‘Making it’ is a myth to me, not because I didn’t make it,” she told Yahoo Finance. “I did make it, and I’m still making it.” The problem is that she still works too much.

She has a hard time doing all the things that need to get done instead of thinking about the bigger picture of what makes for a successful life. Here's what Mukhopadhyay had to say about .