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The American Mother: Balancing Career and Family
| Article
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17561 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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7 / 1990 |
2,432 Words |
| Author
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Nancy Pearcey
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Karen Jensen of Woodenville, Washington, is a brilliant mathematician who left a management job with a phone company to raise her three children.
Elizabeth Fitch of McLean, Virginia, was an attorney working in corporate law who gradually phased out of work after giving birth to twin boys.
Jeannine Binnington of St. Louis, Missouri, worked ten years as an operating-room nurse before she and her husband decided to adopt children. She was happy to leave the nursing profession to embrace a new one - mothering.
In the age of feminism, women continue to want close, consistent contact with their children, and they are creating new ways to meet this need. To their own surprise, even women with professional training who did not expect to interrupt their careers to raise a family are finding that they still feel the age-old tug to hold and nurture their children. These women are challenging the superwoman career norm in favor of a new concept that has been called "sequencing" - the idea that adult life proceeds in stages, each with a unique balance between personal life and career. For mother, raising children is one such stage.
Modern women have felt pressured to live up to the superwoman ideal, with its "You can have it all" slogan. And many have found it isn't true - you can't have it all. As Arlene Cardozo explains in her popular book Sequencing, the very notion of superwoman was predicated on the life-style of a woman who had never been up all night with a sick infant, had never got a wiggly toddler into a snowsuit and to the day-care center before fighting traffic to reach the office, had never had to leave work to take her child to the dentist.
If that life-style sounds familiar, it is: This is the way a man typically works, far removed from the wiggly toddlers and the dentist appointments because his wife takes care of all those things. Superwoman was, in fact, modeled after the male career norm: Center your life on your job and let someone else raise your children.
Today, many women are resisting the male work model. They are replacing it with the sequencing model and its more realistic ideal: "You can have it all, but not all at once." The sequencing mother conceives of her life in four stages: getting educated and established (Starting Out); caring for small children (Coming Home); balancing family with part-time paid or community work (The Best of Both Worlds); and, finally, using one's talents in the world (Reaching Out).
Starting Out
The superwoman myth had its roots in the fifties, when older women who had raised their families began to move into the workplace. Typically, these women had little job training or experience. The workplace intimidated them. The message they picked up there was, "Anyone can raise children - to prove yourself in the work world you have to act like a man." Women had to accept outside employment on a man's terms, even if it meant leaving their children with hired caregivers ten to twelve hours a day.
But things didn't go the way the slogans promised. Many women found themselves
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