Monday, November 30, 2009
Social Policy: European Perspectives
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Social Policy in the United States
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Emotion Work and Sex Work
‘Stepford wives’ and ‘hollow men’?
By Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden
In “‘Stepford wives’ and ‘hollow men’?” Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden address the different kinds of emotion work men and women do in marital and couple relationships, exploring the question of how this work effects the authenticity of an individual. The authors begin by quoting Hochschild definition of emotional work as “emotional effort made by individuals—both men and women—to ‘manage’ their feelings to bring them into line with the societal ‘feeling rules’ which prescribe how they ‘ought’ to feel in particular social situations.” (212) They then address how various sociologists have described the emotion work of each gender.
It is said that women work to tray to make men open up emotionally and that they are expected to nurture men and take care of their emotional needs. They do so by perfeoming physical displays of happiness and intimacy such as smiling, laughing, hugging, kissing, and even faking orgasms. Further, they seem to magnify their husbands importance and minimize their failures in order to build up their husbands image. They also tend to take complete responsibility for maintaining relations with a wider network of kin and relationships. Men, on the other hand, seem to direct their emotion work towards coping with the stresses of “being a breadwinner and in order to conform to their own ideology of masculinity.
Duncombe and Marsden present Hochschild theory regarding the danger of behaving ‘inauthentically’ while doing emotion work. They term her belief that there results an over-identification with the required role, “‘self-loss’ as a result of ‘deep acting’”(216). The other result that Hochschild believes can arise is a becoming estranged and cynical, which the authors call “‘self-withdrawal’ and a refusal to do any acting at all”(216). Next, the authors refer to the psychodynamic theory, which questions the validity of the concept of ‘authenticity’ that implies a certain ‘real’ feelings that arise from a ‘real’ self. This theory asks whether the ‘self’ that develops from childhood and adolescent experiences is particularly authentic. However, the authors do not believe that this theory provides a reliable structure of authentic feeling and behavior. The, therefore, regard it as “elaborate metaphor which usefully stress that gender-stereotyped emotional differences may be ‘deeply rooted’ in childhood and adolescence, so that it is difficult for individuals to recognize consciously what they are doing and to change their behaviour by rational reflection.” (217)
The authors then refer to various attempts sociologists have made to combine the psychodynamic models and “new sociological theories of the cultural and historical variability of gender and personality,” in order to avoid gender stereotyping. To begin with, there is the idea that the ease with which an individual is able to assume gender ideology depends on “how well it fits to the ‘self’ and ‘identity’ that have developed through the processes of socialization, development and attachment during early childhood and adolescence.” (218) Next, there is the belief that gender is not static, rather an ongoing development that changes according to how certain actions and rationales conform to particular gender identity. They call this latter theory “doing gender.” According to “doing gender,” emotion work involves performing emotional skills and abilities to do emotion work in a way that conforms to the respective gender ideology. The authors say that feelings of inauthentic behavior may arise from the inability to unite the “feeling rules of the gender ideology” with the “core self” or “core identity
In their own research, Duncombe and Marsden found that when men encountered problems in their marriage, they became aware of the pressures to change their emotional behavior. While many of the men they interviewed found that shallow emotion work helped their relationships with their wives, most of these men few felt inauthentic in doing this work. Many women the authors interviewed had come to resent “what they had come to perceive as the unfairness and inequality of relationships where they did all the emotion work and seemed to get no direct emotional benefits in return.” (222) Other women said that they had felt authentic about doing emotion work in the beginning, but more and more felt withdrawn from it.
I found this reading to be an almost philosophical account of the human person. I found Hochschild’s account of authenticity to be very simplistic and general. I do not believe that one can define “authenticity” universally. Rather, I think authenticity is particular to each individual. For this reason, I appreciated Duncombe and Marsden concluding remarks that in “lacking any independent guide to truly ‘authentic emotional behaviour—we have to accept that some individuals may derive their sense of authenticity from ‘core selves’ and ‘core identities’ which various other commentators might want to criticize as deeply inauthentic.” (225)
Whose Orgasm is this Anyway?
By Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden
In “Whose Orgasm is this Anyway?” Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden. explore how heterosexual couples in long-term relationships deal with the disparity between media heightened sexual expectations and their actual sex lives. They address the concept of “sex work” in a similar way to how they addressed “emotion work. They begin by presenting the argument of some feminists that marital sex is a form of aliented work. While the authors approve of this perspective in so far is it successfully addresses address “the hierarchical and exploitive institutionalisation of the ‘male/female’ relationship,” they criticize it for often ignoring “the relevance of individual subjective experience of sex.”
Before presenting their own empirical findings, Duncombe and Marsden present that of others. They begin by discussing Rubin’s large US survey and Mansfield and Collard’s study of 60 UK newly-weds, both of whiched found that while people tended to use media ideals as a measure of the state of their relationship and emotions, there is an inconsistency between that ideal and couples’ actual behavior. Mansfield and Collard found that women in marriage encountered greater difficulty in refusing sex out of fear causing their husbands to feel rejected. At the same time, husbands were less likely to express the emotional intimacy women required in order to experience fulfilling sex. It seems that in the long-term, sexual activity tends to decline among married couples.
Next Duncombe and Marsden use their own research to study the change in longer-term relationships. According to much of the respondents, it seems that many couples are unable to recapture earlier passion and romance, but they do not know why. Many women confessed that the had always, at some level, found their sexual relationships unfulfilling. While in the beginning, many of these women blamed themselves, later in the relationship they often began to identify the problems as the fault of their husbands. Men, on the other hand, who realized early problems usually blamed them on what they believed to be their wives’ low sex-drive. The authors partly attribute the decline in sexual activity among married couples to the disruptions of work, childbirth, and family.
Next, Duncombe and Marsden discuss the use of pornography among long-term couples. They found that in most cases this use was intiated by men. Many women accepted it in the early stages of their relationship, but later on many of these women rejected it as they felt a loss of intimacy or they felt less capable of allowing themselves to be sexually aroused. Other ways couples attempted to improve their sexual activity was through experimentation. Some men urged their wives to give them oral sex. Some women flat out refused while others fulfilled their husbands’ request and some women even experienced a sense of power in doing so. Many of these husbands turned to more frequent masturbation in order to avoid coercing their wives and thus a sense of guilt. Women also turned to masturbation, but usually preferred to do so alone out of shyness and fear that their husbands would be insulted. Rather than continuing to practice unfulfilling sex, some couples negotiated arranged period of celibacy, but their was usually resentment that followed this negotiation as it was most often initiated by one person. However, Duncombe and Marsden point out that “in all these instances where couples had come to some kind of negotiated stand-off arrangements about sex, there was the ever-present danger that the marriage would be destabilized by one partmer becoming involved in a passion that would highlight the inadequacies of the marriage.” (233)
I do not know what to think after reading this. I don’t know if there is such thing as “authentic” sex. The optimist in me does believe in a romantic and passionate ideal of spontaneous sex. But then even if this does exist for how long can it exist with the same partner? Duncombe and Marsden conclude with similar uncertainties; while this makes me value and respect their article more, it also leaves me a bit disappointed.
Sex Work for the Middle Classes
By Elizabeth Bernstein
In “Sex Work for the Middle Classes,” Elizabeth Bernstein examines the phenomenon of the growing number of middle-class women participating in sex work. She begins by addressing the economic considerations of such work, which she asserts are still significant today in middle-class sex workers’ erotic and professional decision-making. This is true because of gendered inequality within the high technology sector, well-paid, part-time work was difficult for many women to find even during the zenith of the internet economy. The relatively high pay of the sex industry as compared to other service sector jobs was enough to attract some women from middle-class backgrounds. While this basic economic account is valid, Bernstein says that there are nonmaterial reasons too based on acknowledging the middle class as petit bourgeoisie who “seeks its occupational and personal salvation (and thus its sense of distinction) via an ethic of ‘fun.’”(477) Bernstein, therefore, argues that we cannot only study the middle-class sex workers’ pursuit of an ethic of sexual experimentation and freedom in ideological terms, but we must also study it as a means to obtaining class distinction.
In her research, Bernstein found that the goal of most middle-class sex workers is eventually obtain professional autonomy. She found that women working with third-party management tended to remove themselves from situations that promoted a purely instrumentalist relationship to the labor. The internet, in reconfiguring the structure of sexual commerce, has benefited many middle-class sex workers, assisting them in realizing their goals. To begin with, the internet has broadened their clientele. It has also made it ever more possible for women able to combine technical expertise with sex work to operate without third-party assistance.
Bernstein says that this new paradigm of middle-class sex work that has evolved in this modern, technological age, involves, within the commercial context, a greater amount of emotional and physical labor of what is bought and sold. Within this context, an important emotional boundary for both the worker and the client is established through successful commercial transactions. This boundary, however, is one that can be lessened in order to establish the clients’ desired authentic interpersonal connection. Additionally, it is important to many sex workers that their labor be meaningful to themselves, not just to their clients.
I thought it was very interesting how Bernstein discussed the emotions and authenticity of sex work. I wondered if this is the same sort of passions that arise in other, non-sex related jobs. Though her article did seem to be very biased towards middle-class sex work. All the women she interviewed were ones whom were in favor of and having positive experiences with sex work. I believe that Bernstein successfully painted a economic and professional picture of sex work, which I cannot decide is good or bad.
By Elizabeth Bernstein
In “Whats Wrong with Prostitution?” Elizabeth Bernstein attempts to construct an adequate theory of prostitution, which accounts for culture, context, history, race, and class. She bases her own input on eighteen months of fieldwork and interviews she did among San Francisco Prostitutes. She reviews recent feminist literature, classifying them into three main categories: (1) radical feminist critique; (2) pro-sex feminist defenses of prostitution; and (3) contextualized feminist approaches to various aspects of the sex-work industry.
In the radical feminist critique, prostitution is usually deeply criticized. This critique says that the sexual objectification of women within this occupation makes it uncomporable with other, traditional wage labor. Furthermore, women gain now empowerment from sex work. Rather they become subordinate objects to men, paying for the service, who gain power in such transactions. However, pro-sex feminist argue that women, in fact, gain power through sex work since it allows them to freely express their sexuality and in doing this work, they deny traditional gender expecations. Contextualized feminist approaches focus on prostitution as a last resort, pursued by women who are left with no other option.
Next Bernstein addresses the different classes of women sex workers, which establishes a hierarchical structure in this sphere. She explains that class, which is determined according to race and appearance, assigns the type of work a sex worker finds, who a sex worker work for, and how much she gets paid. High-class sex workers are unique in that they get paid more than they would in any other profession they could pursue. These women generally encounter little legal trouble for work and express greater feelings of security than sex workers of other classes. The lower the class a sex worker belongs to, the more dangerous becomes her job as the worse the area in which they work become and the lower the pay becomes. Low-class sex workers are more likely to be as young as teenagers.
Bernstein spends sometime focusing on COYOTE, which stands for Call Off Your Tired Ethics. Founded in San Francisco, COYOTE is a national prostitutes’ rights organization which works towards legitimizing the profession of sex work. The group consists does not claim to represent streetwalkers and in fact disregard it as appropriate. The group is more made up of college graduates or highly educated women who willfully chose this occupation and lifestyle. Those involved in the group deny the term “prostitution,” replacing it with “sex work,” as they maintain that the former term carries negative connotations, with which they are trying to do away
Monday, November 9, 2009
Paid Carework
Monday, November 2, 2009
Extended Kin Ties
Using Kin for Child Care: Embedment in the Socioeconomic Networks of Extended Families
By Lynet Uttal
This article examines the differences among the childcare employed by Mexican American, African Americans, and whites. It focuses heavily on each racial group’s uses and views of childcare by relatives. The author begins by discussing the declining use of relative childcare by employed mothers. This type of childcare has declined by about fifty percent since 1958. On the other side, use of daycare homes and childcare centers as a means of childcare for young children has more than tripled. Still, the author explains that relative childcare is more widely employed among minority families than it is among White families.
There are many explanations for these differences, but Uttal discusses the three major ones: (1) the cultural explanation, (2) the structural explanation, and (3) integrative explanation. The second explanation, which says that the type of childcare used is decided for economic reasons, criticizes the first one, arguing that it fails to recognize that cultural practices may be responses to structural conditions rather than differences in cultural values. The last of the three explanations is a combination of the former two. It criticizes both explanations for being overly simplistic, arguing that the differences arise from an intersection of both cultural and structural situations.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Division of Unpaid Labor
Joey’s Problem: Nancy and Evan Holt
By Arlie Russell Hochschild
In “Joey’s Problem: Nancy and Evan Holt,” Arlie Hochschild discusses the marital dynamic between the Holt couple. Throughout the whole account, Nancy describes herself as a feminist. As the marriage progresses, the author witnesses growing conflict that she realizes is the result of “a conflict between their two gender ideologies.” (39). Hochschild then sees how they come to resolve their conflict.
Upon entering her marriage, Nancy’s goal was always to maintain equality between her and her husband, both in the house and at work. However, she experiences mounting passive resistance from Evan, her husband, to sharing in the household tasks. Hochschild explains how their respective gender ideologies are a result of their respective early experiences. Nancy had a mother who Nancy perceived as a depressed housewife and Nancy’s life goal was to avoid becoming that. So Nancy developed a career about which she was very passionate. Evan respected his wife’s passion for her career, but he did not understand how her own decision meant that he had to change his own life. As conflict between the couple continued to mount, separation arose as a possibility. While this idea frightened both husband and wife, it scared Nancy more. And so it was Nancy who took initiative to change.
Nancy explains to the author that they have developed an “upstairs-downstairs agreement,” in which Nancy takes care of the house, the child, and the cooking and Evan takes responsibility for the garage and the dog. Hochschild explains the process Nancy underwent in order to “bring herself to believe the myth that the upstairs-downstairs division of housework was fair.” (46). One way in which she did this was to stop comparing herself to her husband and rather, and instead she began comparing women to women and men to men. Also, she focused on the advantages of what giving in to her husband provided. She spoke of the house as hers and Joey as her child. Further, she began to attribute the division of housework responsibility as a result of Evan’s and her differing personalities. He was lazy both Evan and Nancy explained, while Nancy was organized and energetic.
I found this reading to be very frustrating. It made me feel a certain hopelessness, like it is not possible to change our situation, but rather we can only change ourselves. Further, it upset me to think about the delusions of which we convince ourselves in order to reconcile our beliefs with our actions or way of life.
Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families
By Christopher Carrington
In “Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families,” Christopher Carrington investigates the lives of 52 lesbian and gay families. From his investigation, he provides an account of the egalitarian myths many of these couples believe and the ways these couples actually divide work. In his work with these couples, Carrington found that perceptions of egalitarianism continue among most of these couples, despite evidence that often points to the contrary. One reason these couples maintain these perceptions are to portray a positive image of lesbigay families to the public. Another reason is that domesticity is often invisible, thus the division of it is invisible.
Most lesbigay families do exhibit a division of domesticity that heavily favors one individual. However, according to Carrington, “a minority of lesbigay families do achieve a rough equivalence in the distribution of domestic work.” Among wealthier lesbigay families, this equal division is achieved through the purchase of domesticity on the market place. Thus these families rely on the labors of mostly working-poor people. Other than the wealthiest of couples that Carrington followed, he found the egalitarian system to be stronger among couples in which, regardless of gender, both partners work in traditionally female-identified professional occupations. Carrington believes that this is because these jobs have more family-friendly policies which allow the workers to devote more time to family work. However, the downsides to these jobs are that they provide lower wages, less room for promotion, and less control over the matters of one’s work. Finally, Carrington found this egalitarian pattern to be prevalent among families that he describes as a part of the “the downsized family.” These families are usually composed of male couples, often living in urban environments. They are mostly in their late twenties and early thirties and in their first committed relationship. They achieve the system by living cheaply, doing little consumption work and sharing their living space with other people.
However, Carrington found that in among longer-term families, a pattern of specialization usually emerges, in which one member of the couple focuses on domesticity, while the other focuses on paid work. Carrington explains that “paid employment exerts the greatest influence upon the division of domesticity in most lesbigay families.” He adds that it is usually the partner with less earning potential or less occupational prestige who ends up specializing in domestic labor. Carrington believes that the families who establish this pattern do so in order to maximize both income and domesticity so that they may reap the greatest quality from the household lives.
Carrington then explains that while few individuals choose to become more involved in domesticity, some actually do make the conscious choice. Some of the reasons listed for making such a decision were a growing detachment from paid work, concern about saving troubled relationship, and simply a love for domestic life. Overall, those individuals who gravitate towards domesticity do share common socioeconomic traits. For the most part their partners earn, have greater career opportunities, and have a more demanding job than they do. Carrington concludes that not all families are able to pursue a domestic life. This is one of the many dilemmas of domesticities, dilemmas that Carrington maintains to be one of the reasons many lesbigay relationships do not survive.
Autonomy, Dependence, or Display?
The Relationship between Married Women's Earnings and Housework
By Sanjiv Gupta
In this article, Gupta discusses the relationship between women’s earnings and their time spent on household chores. He begins reviewing the two dominant theoretical models of the relationship between women’s earnings and their housework. These are the economic dependence hypothesis and the gender display hypothesis. The dependence theory responded to the latter descriptions by attributing the gender gap in housework to women’s economic dependence on their husband. This explanation relies on the fact that women’s earnings are usually lower than that of their husband’s. The display theory gives an inverse relationship than that of the previous theory. It says that women who earn more than other women contribute a greater amount to housework in order to assert “their gender identities in the face of their gender-atypical relative incomes.” (400)
Both theories, Gupta explains, arose in response to the functionalist and “new home economies” descriptions of the dynamics of heterosexual households. In these descriptions, men and women are describes as joint agents, working together in order to achieve common goals. They do so, according to these accounts, by developing specialization patterns whereby one group dedicates their efforts in the labor market and the other focuses on the domestic sphere. The division occurs in these patterns according to each partner’s “respective skills, productivity, and the actual or expected rewards for time spent on particular activities.” The accounts explained that men, who usually have higher earnings relative to women, gravitate towards paid work. Where as women, who are generally better at domestic labor, tend to focus their efforts in the domestic sphere.
Gupta, identifies several problems with these theories. To begin with, both theories rest on studies that only focused on women’s earnings relative to that of their husbands. They, therefore, ignore the possibility of a relationship between women’s housework and their absolute earnings, separate from that of their husbands. Gupta explains that it is necessary o study the latter possibility as recent studies have found that women with low earnings tend to have higher relative earnings—earnings compared to that of their husband’s—than other married women. The dependence and display theories, with their narrow range of focus, do not provide an explanation for this phenomenon.
Like the latter two theories, Gupta emphasizes the fundamentally gendered nature of housework in his studies. However, he does not confine his studies to women’s relative earnings. From his modified studies, he found that as women’s earnings increased between 1965 and 1995, their time spent of housework declined. This finding does point to a correlation between women’s earnings and their time spent on housework. However, he also found that effects of women’s absolute earnings on housework similar among married and single women, which supports his perceived need to study women’s earnings as autonomous from that of their husband’s. Gupta maintains that we cannot determine the system by which women’s earnings result in their level of housework efforts. He does, however, present “the use of their own earnings to substitute for domestic labor, bargaining over its allocation, and the practice of gender display,” (414) are three possible means for this. Gupta asserts that in order to better understand the relationship between women’s earnings and their time spent on housework, we must investigate the relationship between potential, not just actual, earnings of women and their time spent on housework.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Time Bind
Overworked Individuals or Overworked Families?: Explianing Trends in Work, Leisure, and Family Time
by Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson
In this article Jacobs and Gerson address the debate concerning the rise in working versus leisure time. They argue that the debate is incomplete, as the analyses of trends of working time have focused almost exclusively on the individual worker. This would be sufficient if the increasing anxiety over balancing work and family was entirely a result of changes in the length of the workweek. However, Jacobs and Gerson argue that it is a result of shifts in greater social trends, which can be condensed to the shift from the male-breadwinner system to dual-earner couples and single-parent households. They therefore focus on the collective work schedule of the family as a whole. They draw their findings from a survey of dual-earner couples and single parents in 1970 and in 1997.
Jacobs and Gerson begin by presenting two theses. The first maintains that Americans today are working more hours than their predecessors. The second thesis claims that Americans today are actually logging more leisure hours than workers in previous times. After criticizing the quality of data and conclusions of these theses, Jacobs and Gerson argue that both theses are vaguely accurate. They agree that there is the “growing sense that family’s are squeezed for time.” However, in their investigation, Jacobs and Gerson found only a minor increase in hours worked among individuals. They found that the overall increase in hours worked was therefore insignificant. Rather, they insist that this phenomenon is a result of a “decline in support at home rather than an increase in working time.” This is a result of the evolving family structures and gender relations.
Jacobs and Gerson then go on to discuss the perceived increase in leisure time. They attribute this trend to several previously ignored social trends. Over the years more students are choosing to remain students for a longer period of time. On the other end of the age spectrum, men these days are retiring earlier. Furthermore, Jacobs and Gerson explain that “over the past 30 years, the average age of marriage has increased, the age at first birth of children has increased, and the number of children per household has declined. All these demographic trends give people more leisure time without reducing their time on the job.”
I found this article extremely informative. It reminded me how easily data can be manipulated to support a certain conclusion. Jacobs and Gerson did a really good job of taking apart such data. They introduced and supported their own findings with strong research and appropriate attention to context. Additionally, I liked how they pointed out the fallibility we encounter in only studying the individual. The individual does not exist in a its indivual framework; the individual exists in many frameworks. We, therefore, cannot debate or analyze the family—one primary frameworks in which the individual exists—by referring to the individual alone and by ignoring the family.
The Career Mystique
By Phyllis Moen
In this article, Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling address Betty Friedan’s concept of the feminine mystique in the context of their own concept of the “career mystique. The feminine mystique presents the ideal wife as one who devotes her efforts to domestic upkeep. The career mystique establishes the image of the ideal worker—usually seen as the husband—as one who devotes his “prime” adult years to his work, under the assumption that he will gain promotion and seniority. Moen and Roehling discuss how these two mystiques promote and feed each other. In their discussion, they sculpt their conclusion, which maintains the impracticality of the career mystique
Moen and Roehling explain that fulfilling the image that the career mystique paints was only ever possible for a select few as it was economically unfeasible for most. However, today it is even more unrealistic. To begin with, in todays unstable economy, there is little assurance of job security regardless of how hard one works. There is a greater risk of layoff accompanied by greater workload and fewer benefits available. Furthermore, the age of retirement has greatly decreased even though the average lifespan has greatly increased. With these phenomenons along with the rising price of college and graduate school, people are required to work harder in order to maintain the lifestyle of the their predecessors.
Previously, when there was less pressure on the worker, the feminine mystique was supported the career mystique, as it provided an environment in which husbands were able to devote all their time to work. However, today, when there is greater pressure on the worker, the feminine mystique has undergone a fast process of deterioration as more and more women, who overwhelmingly include mothers, enter the workforce. There have been no indications or burgeoning signs of a decline in the career mystique and so both women and men are struggling to conform to its ideals. This has left the domestic sphere unsupported as women struggle to meet the expectations of their bosses. Companies claim to have made efforts to aid this family struggle. However, as Moen and Roehling point out, in reality these effort do not support the family system so much as they do the work system.
One cannot deny the struggle parents are increasingly facing in trying to balance work and family. For the most part the debate on how to solve this problem focuses on how to do so in the context of our current social system. Moen and Roehling assert that such solutions are insufficient. According to them, we must not work for change with in the current system of the career mystique, but rather we should work to change that system. I think this is really insightful. It is so easy to see the problems a system creates and to focus energy on fixing those problems. However, we are so often blind to the system itself that is creating these problems, that is the problem.
The Time Bind
By Arlie Hochschild
In chapters 14 and 15 of her book The Time Bind, Arlie Hochschild examines the relationship of workers to their jobs. She does so by exploring the different types of workers in relation to the different types of family-work models. She establishes the workers situation as a result of their pre-existing environment as well as of their own choices.
According to Hochschild, the first type of family-work model is the “haven model,” in which the worker finds his or her job unpleasant and considers his or her family to be a haven. This model usually consists of workers of low occuputational levels, such as factory hands. The second model is the “traditional family model,” in which the work sphere and the family sphere are divided according to gender. Those partaking in this model “make pleasurable ‘homes’ for themselves at an office to which they devote most of their waking hours, while their real homes become like summer cottage retreats” (202). Hochschild presents a third model she calls “no-job, weak-family” model, which consists of poor people who cannot find jobs and identify their family as the source of their need to find a job. The prevalence of this model depends on the economic situtation of the time. The former two however, particularly, particularly the second one, are in decline as a new model seems to be emerging. Hochschild calls this model the “work-family balance” model and identifies it as a reversal model in which home is becoming work and work is becoming home.
In this shift, parents are devoting greater amounts of energy to work, while establishing a “cult of efficiency” in the home. Hochschild acknowledges that it is monetary necessity and the fear of losing ones job as a result of this necessity that keeps people conforming with growing norms. However, she insists that it is people’s personal choice that keeps them in the workplace. Hochschild attributes this widespread personal choice to the fact that workers often feel more comfortable in the work place than at home. Many workers say this is because they feel that emotional support is more available at work than at home. Hochschild stresses the value that work assigns a worker as the reason for the comfort the workplace provides. Work in the workplace is more widely acknowledged and rewarded than is work in the home. People are more visibly and immediately commended in the workplace than in the home and they therefore may feel more appreciated, competent, and valuable in the workplace than in the home.
In chapter 15, Hochschild identifies the ways in which parents—particularly mothers—establish their work-family relations. Since parents are less willing to compromise their work life for their family life, more and more they are choosing to hire outside workers to complete the domestic duties, such as housekeepers to tend to the cleaning and nannies or daycare to tend to the children.
Maternal Employment and Time With Children: Dramatic Change of Surprising Continuity?
By Suzanne M. Bianchi
In this article, Bianchi addresses the impact that the phenomenon of the working mother has on the children. She argues that women’s increased participation in the workplace has not reduced their time spent with their children. Furthermore, she insists that children of working mothers do not experience negative effects.
According to Bianchi, the argument that children of working mothers experience less care is based on several flawed assumptions. The first of these assumptions is one that overestimates the amount of time non-working mothers spend with their children. These mothers do not allocate all the hours to her children that a working mother devotes to work in the workplace. Rather, stay-at-home mothers devote much of this extra time to domestic chores such as cleaning. Bianchi explains that working mothers report less time spent on themselves, i.e. less sleep, less leisure time, and less time given to personal care. However, Bianchi also claims that these women guard their time spent with their children as it is more confined and do not fill it with other activities.
Bianchi identifies two other rising trends that counteract any negative effects children might endure from having a working mother. The first is one of fathers’ increased participation in child rearing. The second is the increased emphasis of and subsequent participation of children in pre-school, summer camp, after-school programs, and other such programs. These programs make children less available to their parents and while they allow parents to focus to more time to work, they also provide children with enriching educational experiences.