Author: Anne-Marie Slaughter

After two years directing policy planning at the US State Department, the first woman to hold that job, Anne-Marie Slaughter returned to her Princeton professorship in 2011 rather than pursue a larger appointment, because the commute to Washington was costing her time with a teenage son. She wrote the decision up for The Atlantic in 2012 and the piece drew a readership the magazine had never had. Unfinished Business, published by Random House in 2015, is the longer argument that grew out of it: that raising children and looking after ageing parents is real work, that it falls unevenly, and that no amount of individual effort repairs a system designed for people with someone at home. Slaughter was born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1958, holds degrees from Princeton, Oxford and Harvard Law, served as dean of Princeton's school of public and international affairs from 2002 to 2009, and led the think tank New America from 2013 until she stepped down as chief executive in 2026.