Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (review) (original) (raw)
Related papers
1999
Joan Williams' Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Oxford, 1999) is a "theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly accessible treatise" that offers a new vision of work, family, and gender. (Publisher's Weekly, Nov. 1, 1999) It examines our system of providing for children's care by placing their caregivers at the margins of economic life. This system that stems from the way we define our work ideals, notably from our definition of the ideal worker as one who takes no time off for childbearing or childrearing and who works full-time and is available for overtime. The ideal-worker norm clashes with our sense that children should be cared for by parents. The result is a system that is bad for men, worse for women, and disastrous for children. Williams documents that mothers remain economically marginalized, and points out that when mothers first marginalize and then divorce, their children often accompany them into poverty. Will...
Mothering into the new millennium: how mothering affects women's lives
2000
Focusing dircctl>' on information gained from mothers" perspectives, this study examines how mothering affects women's lives. Twent>'-seven mothers participated in four focus groups and of these women nine participated in individual interviews. The women were all Caucasian, married, middle-class, and had at least one child under age 5. The following nine themes emerged from the data; I) "maternal" sacrifice, 2) bearing the emotional labor of caring for children, 3) pressures/expectations of mothering, 4) mothers" connections to their children, 5) mother/father differences in parenting and the influence of the marital relationship, 6) issues of loss surrounding motherhood, 7) use of strong language, 8) value of mothering, and 9) ways this research will benefit others. This research makes an important contribution to our understanding of women's lives by allowing mothers" voices to be heard: from this research we can begin to understand what t>pes of resources and support will best assist women in their mothering roles. In order to increase the transfcrabilit\' of the findings, future research needs to focus on exploring similar issues with diverse groups of mothers. ' In qualitative research, the researcher plays an active role in the data collection process, thus becoming part of the research. For this reason, first person dialogue will be used throughout this dissenation. asked of any human being in any other role in life, yet it is expected of women in their relationships with young children" (p. 160). Other studies illuminate women's experiences as mothers, such as Kaplan's (1992) study of a homogeneous group of 12 upper-class mothers of toddlers. In her study, all of the women were Caucasian, married, college-educated, and living in New York. All of the women were first time mothers, not pregnant with a second child. Six were mothers of boys and six were mothers of girls. Kaplan was interested in "how to make meaning of motherhood" (p. 3). She used a case study approach v\ith a mix of structured interviews followed by a second meeting with participants using standardized measures and a semi-structured interview format. Her findings suggested that the women in the study "did not present themselves in terms of the kind of close connection to their mothers and other women that theory would expect" (p. 203). Kaplan concluded that because of these mothers' social positions, they did not identify vsith the groups of parents who are focused on the lack of social supports for families; rather they reinforced maternal isolation, believing that a mother is "to take care of herself as well as her child with no help from spouses, friends, or social institutions" (p. 205). While Kaplan acknowledges the difficulties in generalizing her findings, she suggests that ftirther research would build on her study; she writes, "It is also hoped that questions of mothers" own images of motherhood will be considered worthy of further attention" (p. 205). Bergum (1989) who followed six women, all first-time mothers comparable on age, background, and financial status, from mid-pregnancy to a number of months following the child's birth suggests that in order to "come to a deeper understanding of women's transformative experiences of being mothers" (p. 15) her study should be extended by using an approach similar to hers, but conducted with other types of mothers. Bergum focused on various st^es of the experience of motherhood. These areas included the decision to have a baby, the period of pregnanc>', the childbirth experience, becoming responsible for a dependent being, and then "living with a child on one s mind. ' Her primary research question was ""How does a woman come to understand herself as a 13 mother?" and overall. "What is the nature of the transformation of woman to mother?" (p. 7). She considered not only the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of becoming and being a mother but also the spiritual aspects of this experience. Through the dialogue of several mothers' stories, she highlights various themes that emerged and explores the broader issues these themes seem to signify-. She offers several examples, which show how outsiders such as doctors and other childbirth experts undermine the mother's control and responsibilit\' tied with the birth experience. She wTites The responsibility of becoming a mother belongs to women. All procedures, techniques, and interventions, to the woman or child, need to consider and support the acceptance of responsibilitN' on the part of the mother, (p. 156) Related to mothers' knowledge and responsibility, Sara Ruddick (1989) emphasizes the discourse that develops through mothers' thinking. She contends that mothers develop a ''maternal" way of thinking through their daily experiences in caring for their children. She writes Dail>'. mothers think out strategies of protection, nurturance, and training. Frequently conflicts between strategies or between fundamental demands provoke mothers to think about the meaning and relative weight of preservation, growth, and acceptability. In quieter moments, mothers reflect on their practice as a whole...maternal thinking is no rarity. Maternal work itself demands that mothers think; out of this need for thoughtfiilness, a distinctive discipline emerges, (p. 24) Ruddick defines a practice as a specific form of reasoning with concepts defined by shared aims and rules, having shared language and actions, and writes, "[It is] wnthin a practice that thinkers judge which questions are sensible, which answers are appropriate to them, and which criteria distinguish beuvecn better and worse answers" (p. 16). She also writes, "To be a 'mother' is to take upon oneself the responsibilitN' of childcare, making its work a regular and substantial part of one's working life" (p. 17). Being a mother, or maternal work, she contends constitutes a specialized discipline characterized by a specialized way of thinking. According to Ruddick, three primary demands constitute maternal work-the preservation of children's lives through meeting their basic needs, fostering their growth and development, and following socially acceptable guidelines defined by
Motherhood and Work: Women Combining Work and Childcare as a Patriarchal Response
Issues in Race & Society, 2023
Employers have begun to strategize ways to accommodate families as they navigate work-family balance, and scholars have found that various policies contribute to how employees perceive and manage work-family balance. However, research in this area largely centers on White workspaces and experiences for policy recommendations, leaving out those experiences specific to people of color and their workspaces. The practices and experiences of people of color in managing work-family balance are mostly absent from policy development for the institutions of work. I argue that Black women, who are the largest group of growing entrepreneurs in the US, have valuable experiences that contribute to a better understanding of how families of color navigate and understand their parenting and work responsibilities. In this paper, I describe racialized child-rearing techniques used by Black mothers to maintain work-family balance. Drawing on two years of participant observation, ethnography, and unstructured interviews in a Black, women-owned and operated business, I find that Black women adopt collective racialized conceptualizations of motherhood and responsibilities, that center competing ideological frames of motherhood. Mothers value their Black children’s success in education, yet understand institutions of education as hostile sites for their children. Women aspire to work outside of the home to secure self-actualization, yet understand their roles as mothers through a patriarchal lens that places more responsibilities of parenting and childcare on mothers than fathers. This patriarchal Issues in Race & Society | Spring 2023 180 Jenkins understanding of parenting responsibilities adopted by mothers is used to negotiate their responsibilities between work and family, and it shapes their strategies for managing parenting and work. In practice, women adopt queer parenting strategies to achieve the combination of work and family by relying on communal networks, not including their male partners, for support in child-friendly work spaces. Women develop collective conceptualizations of motherhood and its responsibilities while maintaining facets of self-identity in Black spaces.
WORKING MOTHERS, THEIR CONTRIBUTION & IMPACT ON THE DECLINE OF TRADITIONAL FAMILY
Since the early part of the 1960's, the American family has undergone drastic changes in the ensuing four decades. In a little more than a decade, the divorce rate doubled, as did the number of working mothers. The number of single-parent households tripled. Non-married couples, cohabitation, virtually quadrupled in number in this time frame and birth rates showed a huge decline by one half. On key force driving change has been the exponential growth of women in the workplace, many as working mothers. Causes are many: the rapidly rising cost of living; greater control of family planning which allows women flexibility in coordinating motherhood with career; overall societal emphasis on self-fulfillment; and of course, just the economic necessity of gaining survival income for the burgeoning number of divorced mothers who must work. Reduction of the negative connotation imputed to divorce and the rise of feminism challenges the previously held notions of women's place in the home, motherhood, and fulfillment for today's woman. In this research paper, I intend to discuss various aspects of this social phenomenon, many of which I believe to be negative, that supports the theory that full-time working mothers may be aversely affecting family structure, function, and the balanced, behavioral growth of her children. In short, it is my contention that this massive social change of working mothers is a major underlying factor contributing to the decline in the "American family structure".