Back in the mythic 50s and 60s, housewives like Betty Friedan and Betty Draper were very bored. The Feminine Mystique opens with this description of an average housewife’s day: “Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children or attend a social engagement with their husbands.”

Contrast this to the average day of 2009’s Janice Ramos, featured in Joan Williams and Heather Boushey’s new study, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict.” 

Janice Ramos is a married, 30-year-old registered nurse who lives in a home she owns with her husband, a technician, and two children, an eight-year-old son and a 14-month- old baby. She works the night shift so she can be home with her kids during the day. Her husband, whose shift starts at 9:00 a.m., gets the children up and fed and takes 

the baby to a neighbor’s and the older child to school. Janice arrives home at 8:30 a.m. after they have already left. She sleeps for five hours, then picks up the baby and meets her son at the bus stop around 3:00 p.m. She spends a few hours helping with homework and playing with the baby, and then goes to sleep when her husband returns from work around 5:00 p.m. She sleeps until 9:00 p.m., when she leaves to arrive at the hospital at 10:00 p.m. 

Ramos is part of what Williams and Boushey call the “missing middle.” These parents, writes Lisa Belkin, are working “highly supervised jobs that often leave them one sick child away from being fired”; these are “Americans who are neither rich nor poor,” and “have a median annual income of $64,000, earning between $35,000 and about $110,000 a year. Their median income has fallen 13 percent since 1979 (in inflation-adjusted dollars).” 

The middle is 53 percent of Americans, but the authors say because they are not as vocal and visible as professionals, the infamous “opt-out” group, or as desperate as the poor, they receive the least attention and even less help.

Time is a finite resource. Think of our lives are pies: pieces are divided between work time, home and family time and personal time. Cali Yost explains that conflict arises when our work and home time demands become so great that we simply run out of time. This is the state of many Americans.

Reading the “Three Faces” report is eye-opening and extremely sad because work-life conflict among all income levels is so pronounced. I was most struck by the phenomenon of “tag-team” parents like Janice Ramos in our new two-worker norm. In the study, exhaustion is a common theme of life in the middle. One parent says, “My daughter always wants to do things with me, but I’m too exhausted.”

Are you a tag-team couple? What effects does it have on your relationship and sense of well-being?

Lisa Belkin wrote, “Is work-life balance a luxury? In many ways, yes. Only those with both financial security and some control over their work lives have the freedom to recalibrate it.” Williams and Boushey’s report makes it clear that for married couples, time together as a family is a luxury, much less time for oneself. They also note that tag-team couples are between three to six times more likely to divorce.

Which leads me to the political hypocrisy of our legislators (almost everything I read these days leads me there). The U.S. is hostile to creating federal legislation that supports family-friendly workplaces — and it is this legislation that would help the tag-team parents, those caught in the middle. 

Legislation that does exist helps poor women with childcare subsidies. Wealthier women can make more choices about their work and family lives. In either instance, as Williams and Boushey note, “The problem is viewed as not the lack of adequate public policies but rather the personal choices of a small set of mothers who are in families that do not look like most U.S. families. Politicians have actively used these narratives to reject moving forward on a work-family agenda.” Meanwhile, the majority of U.S. families soldier on, with little money, time or breathing room to spare.

Even more ironic? 

“Nearly 60 percent of mothers in the middle work full-time or more, but only 42 percent of low-income mothers do. Both parents work full-time or more in more than half — or 51 percent — of all middle-income families as compared with only 15 percent of poor ones. The percentage of full-time work is slightly higher in professional-managerial families —- 57 percent -— but they can do all kinds of things to make life more workable.”

I’m a lucky professional example: The more money I make, the more money I willingly spend to outsource as much as I possibly can.

Families in the middle also pay more, percentage-wise, for childcare than do poor families or those at the top: 

In March 2009 dollars, low-income families pay around $2,300 a year per child for childcare for children under age six —- about 14 percent of their income. Families in the middle average $3,500 a year —- six percent to nine percent of their income. Professional families pay about $4,800 a year —- three percent to seven percent of their income.

(Personally, I would be thrilled to only have to pay $4,800 a year for childcare -— I don’t know where that figure is from!)

The report concludes, “If one had to choose a single word to describe life in the middle, it might well be exhaustion.”

Exhaustion is no way to make America great again. The solution, says Williams, “is flexibility without retaliation” from employers. Carolyn Maloney has a bill before Congress: support her. Another key is culture change and recognition: Some hourly based companies with hourly workers DO use flexible work schedules. Working Mother Magazine, for the first time this year, is honoring them, as it has done for years with its “100 Best Companies” to work for.

PS: Listen to BlogHer’s Elisa Camahort Page interview Heather Boushey and Joan Williams.

Morra Aarons-Mele
www.womenandwork.org

You can learn more about what I’m doing by listening to a podcast of a session I just did with the inestimable Lisa Witter. The Daily Gumboot did a nice write-up of our “She Spot” session.

“life is a community.” For women, everything on the web leads back to these words.”

Pretty much…

You can listen to Lisa, Ellen Galinsky and Dr. Joshua Coleman discuss here.

There’s no manual…though Dr. Joshua Coleman’s work is close.

The MamaBee is putting her money where her mouth is. Unlike me, she’s climbing the corporate ladder. She’s a tempered radical, and for that I deeply respect her.

I opted out- not of work. Definitely not of work, because I work more hours now than I ever did in a corporate role. But opted out of the climb. Sometimes it makes me feel like a shirker…I must admit.

Ok, more work now.

But I was inspired by this post from Amy Sample Ward. She wrote:

In her birthday wish post, Beth announces that she’s trying to send 53 Cambodian children to school by raising $530. Last week, Stacy Monk and I were chatting and thought that our community could help smash that goal by raising much more funds as well as awareness for the work the Sharing Foundation does in Cambodia.

How does it work?

We’re hoping to inspire 53 bloggers to publish a post today that shares how Beth has impacted his/her work and shares Beth’s birthday wish with his/her blog audience. (Of course, you’re invited to make a gift to make her wish come true as well!)

What’s the point?

We’re hoping to make her birthday a very happy one by:

1. making her wish come true, and
2. reminding her how much she’s contributed to the community.

I knew Beth Kanter from BlogHer and from blogging in general; I admired how she had developed a singular expertise. Back in 2007 she graciously agreed to let me interview her for a paper I was writing at Harvard on bloggers as entrepreneurs. I had a theory that the most successful and inspiring independent bloggers, such as Beth, were less citizen journalists than they were entrepreneurs, using social media to build their brands and create their own path by which to live and work. Who better embodies this than Beth? She has inspired me and many other women who want to work on their own terms, to do really good work while fighting the good fight. After I wrote my paper and finished grad school, I too started my own business, on my own, working for clients who focused on women in the workplace. In my paper, I called Beth “Betty.” I quoted her,

“Betty, who writes a blog about non-profits and social change, notes that her readers are very
demanding. I asked her why her readers like her: ‘The most important thing is consistency. I hear that a lot from readers — you’re consistent, you’re always right. And if I slack off, my subscriber numbers go down.’”

Beth is disciplined, innovative, and true. Happy Birthday!

1) Exercise three-four times a week (even it’s just 20 mins- just do it, as they say!)

2) Participate in a Relay for Life in Boston this spring

3) Smile more and laugh out loud each morning. It’s been proven to help– see laughter therapy.

4) Dance with my son everyday around the living room- honestly. He loves it, and it’s good exercise.

This is my  “more birthdays list.” What’s yours?

Click here for some ideas and to join the community.

The goal of our community journalism initiative is to foster a frank, open, and civil discussion surrounding the current health care policy debate. We all could use a little more of that right now, so please help me out by entering a question.

Visit BlogHer and submit your question- many thanks!
http://bit.ly/4DY5z1

My prep reading list:

Atul Gawande
Ezra Klein
Julie Pippert
RH Reality Check
David Sirota
The Corner

A single mom needs work; she’s literally thinking about applying for welfare. As she writes on her blog, “I had been looking for a better job, but there were none to be had in the low-income/high-unemployment area where I lived. And I couldn’t get a full-time job anyway — I was still on the waiting list for a spot in daycare.”

She starts working freelance, from home. This suits her schedule as a mom. But “I was treated like crap, too. Bossed around, degraded, condescended to, with jibes made about my having to work from home. I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table.” But she gets the hang of things, and it starts to work. She earns more money as a freelance writer, gets steady work.

And yet, “…I was still having a hard time landing jobs. I was being turned down for gigs I should’ve gotten, for reasons I couldn’t put a finger on. My pay rate had hit a plateau, too. I knew I should be earning more. Others were, and I soaked up everything they could teach me, but still, there was something strange about it . . .

“It wasn’t my skills, it wasn’t my work. So what were those others doing that I wasn’t?”

She found out when she decided to adopt a male pen name and things got so much better fast. She became James Chartrand.

This is an old story. But it’s also a story of the Internet age, of a prominent blogger who “came out” today online to tell her story. That this is a story of a digitally proficient, virtual knowledge worker somehow surprised me.

If women still need to take men’s names to earn as much as men do, then surely we need a new woman’s movement. And not one centered solely around reproduction and abortion politics, which I fear is what people think of instinctually when they hear the word “feminist,” now.

As if to provide us with new reasons to organize into a new women’s movement, in yesterday’s Washington Post historian Dorothy Sue Cobble wrote this call to arms, “Feminism today should concentrate on the economy and the workplace — and on the huge transformations that are needed there to get greater equality and security. These are issues that can unite women across class and culture and allow feminism to speak to the fears and concerns of everyone.”

Read more here.

I asked Nikki and Nick Bartlett, who run Maternity Unlimited in the UK, to comment.

To a certain extend these results hold some truth. The challenge for a working woman during the transition to becoming a working mum involves numerous changes in that individual’s identity. The longer a person has to embed the new identity of being a mum the harder it becomes to recognise and relate to the “working” identity that they once held. The trick is to insure that women have the chance to “plan” for their return before they leave to have their baby. The gap between intention and actual behaviour widens if a women goes on maternity without having a plan to return to work in place. They are unprepared for the changes in identity and therefore swept along with experience rather than having a date/goal/objective to aim for.

In April 2011 UK women will be able to share their 52 week allowance with their partner allowing them to go back to work at the 6 month stage with the partner taking over childcare responsibilities. This will mean that families will have to be even more organised and the emphasis on responsibility is firmly on the organisations to give their employees all of the tools and time they need to plan if they expect to retain their parenting employee population.

Put that way, it really makes sense, no? And if both parents can share a year, surely that would lessen the notion that employers will shy away from hiring women. It’s not as if employers can avoid hiring parents.