Ideal Worker or Perfect Mom?
I ’m a working mom. Often, that feels like the whole of my identity. I work—as an editor at HBR. And I mother—two children, now aged 9 and 10. Yes, I have a husband and friends and outside interests. But the vast majority of my time, energy, and focus is spent on two things: job, kids. And if I’m honest, trying to excel in both realms is a constant, draining, exasperating struggle. Can I be a star employee and a sterling parent at the same time? Should I balance or integrate? Lie low or lean in? Aim to “have it all” or settle for “good enough”?
Millions of women ask themselves similar questions daily, and there are no easy answers. Yet analyses of and advice on working motherhood (or, rather, of moms who work outside the home, since mothering is, of course, its own job) continue to pour in.
The latest books on the subject piqued my interest, however, because my peers and I aren’t their only target audience. They’re not telling us how to better manage our mornings or be more mindful at bedtime. They offer no tips on chore charts or carpool schedules, e-mail triage or task delegation to make both home and office run more smoothly.
No, these new releases take a wider view, more in the vein of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business than Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. They consider how cultural norms and government policy have shaped the lives of working mothers over time and across geographies. They offer deep insights into the challenges we face and, in some cases, recommendations on how we, collectively, can improve the situation.
Making Motherhood Work, by the sociologist Caitlyn Collins, surveys the state of affairs in Sweden (long heralded as a bastion of gender equality and a paradise for working moms); the former East Germany (where you see vestiges of a communist system that encouraged mothers to work); western Germany (where culture hasn’t caught up with pro-mom policies); Italy (where women seem supported by family and the state but don’t feel that way) and the United States (where because we get the least organizational and governmental help, we are “drowning in stress”).
Collins interviewed 135 women—most of them white and middle class, a limitation she acknowledges—and her tone is decidedly academic. But she captures poignant moments. For example, Samantha, a Washington, DC, lawyer, says: “Before I had children, the message…was… ‘You can do everything….You can be at the top.’…Load of crap….I can’t do everything. If I keep all the balls in the air, I’m broken.”
Donnetta, a professor in Rome, recalls how her PhD adviser told her not to get pregnant, or her career would be through. So “at work,” she explains, “you don’t even mention your family….You are pretending you don’t have anything to do at home.” From Munich, Stuttgart, and Heilbronn interviewees, Collins learns the terms “career whore” and rabenmutter, or “raven mother,” which refers to a woman who abandons her young in the nest. Even a Stockholm engineer who benefits from ample parental leave, part-time work options, and a culture that promotes work-family balance admits to “internal pressure,” noting: “I think [I’ll] do…well enough for everyone around me. But, to convince myself of it, that’s going to be the tricky part.”
Collins’s theme is that, while progressive policies can improve the lives of working mothers, cultural beliefs and narratives must move in tandem. And lawmakers and organizations must beware of unintended consequences; for example, long maternity leaves are nice but also reinforce the idea that women should be primary caregivers.
Shani Orgad, a professor at the London School of Economics, echoes this view in her new book, Heading Home, an in-depth study of 35 women in the United Kingdom who left promising careers to become stay-at-home moms and now quietly regret it. Orgad thinks they represent “broader crises of gender, work, and family in contemporary capitalism.” While that’s a lot to hang on a few ladies, her argument—which juxtaposes media representations of working and nonworking mothers against their real lives—is persuasive. “Rather than seeing their situation as…determined by the sheer incompatibility of family life and…work cultures,” Orgad concludes, “the women I spoke to experienced it as personal failure.” They simply couldn’t figure out how to do it all and—worse—felt it was entirely their fault.
Two more U.S.-focused additions to this feminist chorus are Forget “Having It All,” by the journalist Amy Westervelt, and Maid, by Stephanie Land, who turned her experience as a low-paid house cleaner raising a young daughter into a heartfelt memoir. In some ways the books could not be more different. Westervelt presents the full (and sometimes dry) history of American female employment to show how we arrived at today’s problems and usefully broadens her scope to include minority and LGBT parents and mothers from various income levels. Land’s story is an intimate account of “working jobs no one else wanted to do” and still needing “seven different kinds of government assistance to survive.” Yet the two authors have the same message: Working mothers (especially poor ones) simply can’t manage without a lot of help. Like Collins and Orgad, Westervelt calls for policy and cultural change and then gets into serious, helpful specifics—from government-subsidized, gender-agnostic family leave and corporate day care to encouraging boys to babysit and men to assume more household tasks.
Together, these books paint a bleak picture but also offer a weird kind of comfort. They assure me that the tension and guilt I feel as a working mother isn’t something I can relieve on my own or even with support from my family-focused husband, fabulous nanny, dear circle of sister-moms, and deeply empathetic boss and colleagues. It will take an entire society (perhaps one a little more like Sweden’s) to truly ease the burden.
While I and most other working moms I know would love to give 100% to both our jobs and our kids, we can’t accomplish the impossible.
Alison Beard is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.
Ideal Worker or Perfect Mom?
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