What was the lesson in Baby Boom?

Diane Keaton as JC Wiatt in a quest to "have it all"

Baby Boom, starring Diane Keaton, was released in 1987. The opening montage is a series of women rushing to work on the streets of Manhattan. I can vividly remember watching as a child, dreaming of the day I would hurry to important meetings, dressed in a suit, knowing my way around a big city. The power and importance it implied was intensely appealing.

A voice over tells us that times have changed:

“53% of the American workforce is female…As little girls they were told to grow up and marry doctors and lawyers. Instead they grew up and became doctors and lawyers…Sociologists say the new working woman is the phenomenon of our time. Take JC Wiatt for example. Graduated first in her class at Yale, got her MBA at Harvard, has a corner office at the corner of 58th and Park. She works 5-9, she makes six figures a year and they call her the Tiger Lady. Married to her job, she lives with an investment banker married to his. They collect African art, co-own their co-op, and have separate but equal IRA accounts. One would take it for granted that a woman like this has it all. One must never take anything for granted.

(I won’t remark on Tiger Lady, or else this will turn into a lengthy rant.)

So right from the start, we are questioning the eternal quest to “have it all.” When JC’s boss tells her she’s up for partner, he warns her that only “a man can be a success and still have a full personal life…I can have it all.” JC answers: I don’t want it all. I don’t.”

It seems what she means is she doesn’t want a family. She is happy and content with her work and her boyfriend, Stephen. Maybe that is “all of it” for her. But there are little seeds of doubt, like her quirky obsession with tracking Vermont farm real estate she’d never have time for, and four-minute sex with Stephen (after he asks her if she wants to “make love” [gag]). Still, there are no signs that doubt extends to wanting a baby.

And then Elizabeth enters her life, the orphaned toddler to JC’s distant cousins. As their only living relative, JC unknowingly accepts custody and is forced to bring the baby to a very important business lunch — one of many hilarious scenes that only the inimitable Diane Keaton could pull off.

At home that night, JC reassures Stephen she is giving Elizabeth up for adoption, even after he remarks, “I thought I heard your biological clock ticking.”

The film is riddled with these careless remarks from men, even when the entire premise of the film is ostensibly that women can now have careers equal to them (like when James Spader, who plays a smarmy co-worker, tells her she “looks great,” as if that is the best compliment he can give). When she asks Stephen to hold the baby for a moment, he says he’s never held a baby before. “What, and I have?” she retorts.

JC has no biological clock, has no maternal instinct. She has no idea what to do with a baby, and knows well enough that Elizabeth is a square peg in a life she has filled with only round holes. She explains to the adoption official that she’s just “not natural with kids.” But then Elizabeth gets a cold, JC spends an evening taking care of her…and that’s that. JC leaves her with the adoptive parents for about two minutes, but goes back for her.

(The look on her face here; she knows she’s just blown up her entire life.)

It follows that Stephen moves out and work becomes nearly impossible — so impossible that she decides to leave when she’s demoted. And it seems that JC the Tiger Lady really can’t have it all. Was her boss correct? Are women with children doomed to a life of boredom and loneliness?

It seems that way for a while. JC buys that Vermont dream house and soon after has a nervous breakdown (again, delivered as only Diane Keaton can). She tells her clueless plumber, “I need to work, I need people, I need a social life, I need sex!”

But of course, in the movies, it all works out. She does get to have it all, because she builds a baby food empire that makes her wildly successful, all while being at home with her daughter and having sex with the town’s hot veterinarian.

Before watching this classic again, I tried to remember what I thought about it as a kid. What was the lasting lesson? I worried that it was this: you think you don’t want a baby, but if you have one you’ll be happy. Watching it now, I can see that it might be interpreted that way by a minority of people. But what we need to factor in is that JC did not want a baby, even when one was already here — just look at her face in that scene when she leaves the adoption agency! Child-free women are often told they just need to get used to the idea, that they’ll be happy when the baby comes. Well, not according to that face (or reality).

Also, JC has seemingly endless resources. A baby falling into her lap was not a problem from a financial perspective. It doesn’t matter that Stephen leaves her; she doesn’t need his money or support. She spends thousands of dollars on their second day together, buying Elizabeth a new wardrobe and a trunk-load of toys at FAO Schwarz. When Elizabeth has a cold, JC orders half a drugstore, delivered to her door (and this was decades before DoorDash existed!). She hires a full-time nanny, takes Elizabeth to a week-long intensive baby education class, and then buys a new car and house and moves to the country.

This is not the reality of most people who have a baby they didn’t plan to have. If JC was not a wealthy, educated woman, would she have gone through with the adoption? Probably. And, if JC, in her lavish Manhattan apartment with a high-powered job she loves, had found out she was pregnant, would she have hesitated for a moment to have an abortion? I doubt it. Circumstances vary, which is why prescriptive policies about people’s personal life choices simply don’t work.

That’s why the scene in which JC (briefly) leaves Elizabeth with the adoptive parents is so moving. She has bonded with the baby, yes. But that is not why JC takes her back. “I just couldn’t hand her over to a woman who calls her husband ‘sir,’” she tells Stephen. “It gave me the chills. Her whole life flashed before me and suddenly I saw her in frosted lipstick wearing a Dairy Queen uniform.” She knows she can give Elizabeth a better life. She decides to make the sacrifice; it is her decision. As blah as Stephen is, he is respectful and kind, acknowledging it as her decision. He doesn’t argue or try to persuade her; he leaves her to it.

Near the end of the film, when JC has conquered both her dilapidated house, her love life, and her career, she tells Elizabeth a new version of a fairy tale, where the princess wakes up and says:

“Thank you for waking me, Prince…I have medical school today, and I’m going to be a very important doctor one day, like all women can be.”

In that moment at the adoption agency, she decided to save Elizabeth from a mediocre life, and she did what she had to do to accomplish that. That is the lesson that has stayed with me: JC’s perseverance. She is a high-powered lawyer, then she’s dealt a curveball. Her boyfriend leaves her, her career dive-bombs, her farm house falls apart. Even when stores refuse to stock her Country Baby food, she does not give up.

And she finds a way to “have it all.” Still, I don’t think having it all necessarily had to include Elizabeth. At the law firm, JC’s success was still under the management of men. And when she’s offered millions for Country Baby by those same men, she turns them down. She’d love to be back in the business and prove to her former colleagues they were wrong about her — but she isn’t ruled by her ego, and she knows selling means giving up control of her life. She tells them she has a baby mobile over her desk and she likes it that way.

“I don’t want to make those sacrifices…nobody should have to.”

For me, the lasting lesson is not about whether she has a baby. Having it all means achieving independence and success on your own terms.