Being Shut Out From a distance, it may seem that the professional women in this study are opting to trade out their high powered corporate jobs for the role of motherhood. Many of them even professed that leaving their workplace to return home was their own choice. However, what Pamela Stone discovered in her research, which is presented as Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, was that women lacked the options to truly choose the life of a homemaker. Rather, they faced what Stone referred to as a choice gap (Stone 19). The choice gap refers to the lack of options that women had when they were making big decisions about whether to stick with their career or transition to a stay-at-home mother (Stone 6). Either way, they were going to be mothers. While several of the women that Stone talked to felt that it was important …show more content…
Both motherhood and the workplace have evolved to place extensive demands on women. Employers and workplace organizations very much prefer that their human resources be just as available to them as their material resources, requiring long hours and travel that would keep them away from their families. And, as middle and upper class mothers, women are expected to raise their children by the principle of concerted cultivation, in which children are nourished and grown through participation in a broad spectrum of activities (Stone 43). Not only were women expected to see the value of this intensive mothering, they also faced the majority of housework according to the traditional paradigm of the household division of labor (Stone 64). With women putting in a full day at the workplace before coming on to their home and family, their after work hours are also referred to as a second shift (Stone
Women were also led on to believe that housewifery and motherhood were the only two occupations available to them. In most girls’ lives, ...
She describes this supermom as a strong, liberated, put together, balanced woman, managing her image, work load, and motherly duties with no hassle. But, when the image is presented to real life working mothers the reality was far from the depiction. The reality was that most households struggle with the after work care of their own homes and families. There is an imbalance of shared duties and the reality of time devoted to work in the home for cleaning, laundry, cooking, and childcare calculated into countless hours that deemed the tasks to equate to working a second shift. The more important task of tending to the children seemed to receive the least amount of dedication and yet it is the most important that should be recognized. Hoschchild notes a study conducted by Alexendar Szalai between 1965-1966 that reflects, “…a random sample of 1,243 working parent showed that working women averaged three hours a day on housework while men averaged seventeen minutes: women spent fifty five minutes a day …exclusively with their children; men spent twelve minutes”
Today, many women choose their own lifestyle and have more freedom. They can choose if they want to get married and have kids or not. Coontz said “what’s new is not that women make half their families living, but that for the first time they have substantial control over their own income, along with the social freedom to remain single or to leave an unsatisfactory marriage” (98). When women couldn’t work, they had no options but to stay with their husband for financial support. Working is a new way of freedom because they can choose to stay or leave their husband and make their own decisions.
Women have always been stereotyped as being the mother who stays home and has the responsibility of the household and maintaining the children. Presently mothers work outside the home, but they still have the responsibility of taking care of the household. “One study of 20 industrialized countries ...
...’s view also explains the division of labour, as girls are modelling by mothers creating psychological link to mothering, whereas men do not as result of being mothered by women. Nevertheless, such pattern could be eradicated by changing social arrangements; mothers working outside home and fathers doing house tasks.
Stone (2007) conducted “extensive, in depth interviews with 54 women in a variety of professions-law, medicine, business, publishing, management consulting, nonprofit administration, and the like- living in major metropolitan areas across the country, half of them in their 30’s, half in their 40’s” (p. 15). Keep in mind these women Stone (2007) focuses on are “highly educated, affluent, mostly white, married women with children who had previously worked as professionals or managers whose husbands could support their being at home” (p. 14). Her findings revealed women are strongly influenced by two factors: workplace push and motherhood pull. “Many workplaces claimed to be “family friendly” and offered a variety of supports. But for women who could take advantage of them, flexible work schedules (which usually meant working part time) carried significant penalties” (Stone, 2007, p. 16). This quote represents the workplace push, where women are feeling encouraged to continue their rigorous careers with little to no family flexibility being offered from workplaces. The motherhood pull is a term used to describe the way mothers feel when they face the pressure of staying home to raise their children while still expected to maintain a steady job. “Motherhood influenced women 's decision to quit as they came to see the rhythms and
Women seem to have more of a family-work conflict than men, so bosses don’t seem to have as much desire, to promote females compared to men (Hoobler, Wayne, & Lemmon 939-940). Men still view women as having a social role, examples are cooking, childcare, and household chores. Men feel threatened, and scared when females are able to handle both work and their personal lives. Excuses are created by men, where they believe females should focus on one role, because they won’t be able to accomplish family roles and work roles efficiently. Women can help themselves with this issue of family-work conflict, by, improving communication with their employers.
Unfortunately the gendered division of labor has maintained its origins in the home, while copying its structure in the workplace. This can be seen inside families through the sharp distinctions between paid work and non work, paid and unpaid productivity, and even the separation of the private and public spheres where women are perceived as attached to the private and men to the public domains. (Grant & Porter 1994: 153) This is an important issue because while home and work may be physically separate...
In a society with the muajority of mothers joining or returning to the workforce, there is a growing body of research documenting the demands placed on these women and what can be done to help their transition into this new role. According to the United States’ Department of Labor, in the year 2012, 70.5% of mothers with children under the age of 18 were a part of the workforce; of these women 73.7% were employed full-time, working over 35 hours a week, and 26.3% were employed part-time, working less than 35 hours a week (United States Department of Labor, 2012). Given this information, it is becoming more important to further research how this new role as an employee affects the role of parenting and what can be done to help this transition. The intent of this paper is to compare the experiences of a working mother to the current research on the topic of working mothers. Moreover, this paper addresses the demands placed on working mothers as well as the factors that ameliorate their transition into this new role.
Paludi, Michele A. Women at Work: Challenges and Solutions for Our Female Workforce. Vol. 3. Self, Family, and Social Affects. Westport: Praeger, 2008. 1-5. Print. 3 vols.
The rights of women have been revolutionized over the last century and have influenced their household role, which resulted in having power balanced in marriage and couple’s relationships, a favorable attribute. The stay-at-home mother is no longer the typical situation in modern families since women can now be financially independent. What used to be a conventional motivation to take on marriage has diminished because modern women are not restricted in terms of earning a salary. Women have gained rights and therefore there is “more education among women…leading to better career prospects” (Harris). Consequently, it can be concluded that these careers allow them t...
Today, in a vast majority of families, both the wife and husband have a job. Many working parents are under stress as they have to try to balance the demands of their work, children and relationship. Over the past 25 years, women's and men's roles have changed dramatically. In fact, the world of work and home are not separate, research indicates a profound impact on work and home life.
Also, employers may doubt a mother’s ability to balance their work and home lives (Nunenmacher and Schnepf 172). A study conducted by Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik found that mothers were 79% less likely to be hired, 50% less likely to be promoted, and offered $11,000 less in salary than identical women without children. In the study, the subjects revealed that they assumed the mothers to be inherently less competent and less committed (Williams and Cuddy 96). Given these statistics, discrimination against mothers is one of the strongest forms of gender bias. The wage gap between men and women is widely recognized, however there also exists a gap between mothers and women without children.
More and more women work outside and inside the home. The double demands shouldered by these women pose a threat to their physical health. Whether you are an overworked housewife or an exhausted working mother the chances are that you are always one step behind your schedule. No matter how hard women worked, they never ended up with clean homes. Housewives in these miserable circumstances often became hysterical cleaners. They wore their lives away in an endless round of scouring, scrubbing, and polishing. The increased strain in working women comes from the reality that they carry most of the child-rearing and household responsibilities. According to social trends (1996), women always or usually do the washing in 79 percent of cases and decide the menu 59 percent of the time. Picking up the children at school or doing grocery shopping are just a few of the many typical household-tasks a woman takes on every day.
Men and women are working harder than ever to survive in today's tough economy. It's a big challenge for low and middle class families to survive. To meet growing demands, it's getting difficult for families to depend on one income. To contribute to family income, mothers are coming forward and joining the workforce. Working mothers are the one who takes care of the family and work outside the home. They may be a single mothers or married mothers. Working mothers usually work to support their family financially. Some of the mothers work, just because they are more career-oriented. Working mothers may work part time or full time. Women are now the primary or only income source for 40% of US households with kids, according to a new Pew survey (Wang, Parker and Taylor, ch. 1). They play a major role in raising their family and doing household chores. There are many reasons that why mothers should work.