Work and Family in America: Growing Tensions between Employment Policy and a Transformed Workforce

Abstract

About 30 years ago, the Work in America (1973) report noted the countervailing trends of growing numbers of women juggling work and family (W-F) coupled with ambivalence over societal support of domestic and caregiving work. Kanter (1977) articulated the “myth of separate worlds” between work and family—the notion that workplaces often are designed as if workers do not have families that compete for their attention and identities during working time.

Housekeeping may still be the main occupation of American women, but it is no longer the only occupation or source of identity for most of them. In the past, a woman’s sense of identity and her main source of satisfaction centered on her husband’s job, the home, and the family. Today, there are alternatives opening to increasing numbers of the female population. In addition to the fact that half of all women between the ages of 18 and 64 are presently in the labor force, Department of Labor studies show that 9 out of 10 of women will work outside of the home at some time in their lives.

The clear fact is that keeping house and raising children is work—work that is, on the average as difficult to do well and as useful to the larger society as almost any paid job involving the production of goods or services. The difficulty is not that most people don’t believe this or accept it (we pay lip service to it all the time) but that, whatever our private and informal belief systems, we have not, as a society, acknowledged this fact in our public system of values and rewards. Work in America 1973:56–57, 179