Excerpt: Weaving Work and Motherhood

Garey, Anita. [1999] 2005. "Weaving Work and Motherhood". Pp. 239-244 in Understanding Society, 2nd ed., edited by Margaret L. Andersen, Kim Logio, and Howard Taylor. Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, Inc.

Anita Garey describes her experience growing up in the 1950s. It wasn't like the TV sitcoms or idealist movies with homemaker wives and breadwinner husbands; every woman she knew in her community held jobs. It was later that she learned many of these working women weren't officially working; what the Department of Labor and many researchers and organizations consider "work" is "full-time (forty hours or more), day-shift, year-round employment in a defined occupation".

The working mothers she saw growing up were not the suit-and-briefcase, professional image portrayed in popular culture or academic studies today:

Although more than two-thirds (70 percent) of all married mothers with children under the age of eighteen are in the labor force, scholarly and popular attention to the topic of working mothers has been narrowly focused on the small percentage of those mothers employed in managerial or professional positions.

In the United States today, women are considered "work oriented" or "family oriented" with little room for overlap. Using what she terms the "orientation model of work and family", Garey details the cultural depictions of mothers and fathers occupying separate "spheres" of social life, focusing their attention to either the domestic (family-oriented) or public (work-oriented). She calls us to consider the apparent dichotomy and the fact that the label of "working mother" is not equivalent to "working father"; it's "a gendered and asymmetrical conceptual category".

She proposes that we "weave" motherhood and employment together in understanding people's lives, rather than adhere to a framework of dichotomies. In doing so, we can better "define the situation" as women see it; defining some women as "family-oriented" marginalizes them with respect to "wages, benefits, job security, and national employment and child care policies"; defining some women as "work-oriented" reinforces the dominant cultural images, which leads women who are employed to feel "exhaustion from trying to do everything and guilt from feeling they are never doing enough".

This is an individualistic cultural analysis to be sure, but in relating the broader hegemony to the experiences of those burdened by it there is a good deal of sociological theory. Why do these portrayals persist? What does it profit those with the power to change them to abstain (Or, is it even possible to change them?)? Functionally, to what end does culture preserve traditional family structure and the division of labor?

Relevance: 4/5 (relevant)
Salience: 3/5 (neutral)

References:

• none.