Claire Knutson
Professor W. Scott Olsen
IWC 100
5 November 2021
Struggles of Working Mothers
Whether it’s being a stay-at-home mom or a mother who works full-time while a nanny watches her children, there is no one right way of being a mother. Many women who have children also have careers, and often struggle to find an effective balance between their work and families. Although all working parents share some difficulties, working moms face unique challenges due to gender roles in the context of family life. Since women began to enter the workforce, nearly all working mothers have dealt with these issues.
Appearing in What Work? What Life? What Balance? Critical Reflections on the Work-Life Balance Debate, author Ken Roberts brings up the point that “how married women workers balance their ‘two roles’ has been an issue since their labor market participation began to rise following the Second World War” (335). He’s referencing the shift that took place during World War II, when women began to transition from working in the home to outside of it. In the early 1900s, women were primarily viewed as wives and mothers and were responsible for taking care of household chores and raising children. The few that did work outside of the home were often employed in what were seen as “women’s jobs” – teachers, secretaries, nurses, etc.
During World War II, large masses of men were sent to serve overseas, leaving their jobs behind. Women began to step up and take jobs that were traditionally filled by men. With their husbands gone, they were now responsible for being the breadwinner of the family, but still had to attend to their responsibilities in the home. When the war ended and the men came home, women were expected to give up their jobs and go back to their previous roles as homemakers. Many wanted to continue working, and rates of women in the workforce began to rise. However, the responsibilities to take care of the home and children still fell heavily on mothers, and many women today struggle to balance these two roles.
One example of a working mother who has dealt with conflicts between her career and home life is Lynsey Addario. Lynsey is a war photographer who has spent much of her life travelling to foreign places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. She has written a memoir, titled It’s What I Do, where she documents her life story and her experiences as a photojournalist. This memoir contains accounts of many times where her work has pulled her away from loved ones or forced her to choose between a relationship and her career. After struggling for many years to find a partner that fit into the chaos of her life, she met Paul. He had a similar career driven mindset, and they were a good match for each other. They married and eventually had a son, Lukas.
Even though she loves her child immensely, she isn’t willing to stop working to stay home with him. When reflecting on her first months of being a mother, she says “it would be one of the rare occasions I could allow myself to indulge in nothing other than loving and caring for Lukas” (Addario 330). Lynsey knows that she will have to find a way to balance motherhood and her career because she refuses to give up either.
It’s difficult for her to adjust to being a working mother and she explains “I struggled, like so many professional men and women, to find that perfect, impossible balance between my personal life and my career. Inevitably one suffered at the expense of the other” (Addario 332). She describes being away from Lukas as “worse than any heartbreak…anything I had ever known” (Addario 332). The separation from her son is painful, but she can’t give up her passion for her photography either, so she’s stuck in an unpleasant limbo between the two where she doesn’t get to fully experience either. She has to watch her son grow more attached to the nanny than her and speak to him through a screen while she sits in a hotel. She also has to cut back on the amount of assignments she takes, causing her to miss breaking-news stories (Addario 332). She eventually settles into a comfortable balance, made possible by editors who respect her role as a mother and a supportive partner. Lynsey is able to juggle her role as a mother and as a photographer in this way, and although this kind of balance might not be effective for other mothers, it works for her.
Women, Work, and Families: Balancing and Weaving was written by Angela J. Hattery in an attempt to understand the different ways women try to balance work and family life. Hattery believes that the options for working mothers are: “never entering the labor force and staying at home raising children, permanently exiting the labor force when the first child is born, temporarily exiting the labor force with each birth but reentering the labor force between births, taking a leave but never exiting the labor force, and remaining childless” (Hattery 97). This book studies data collected from interviews with thirty mothers – all married with children under two years of age. By learning about the different approaches women take to juggling their career and family, Hattery is able to better understand the factors that contribute to these women’s’ decisions and actions. Three women – Cheryl, Emily, and Tammy – are examples of different ways women attempt to balance work and children.
Cheryl is what researchers would call a conformist – she tends to adhere to society’s expectations. When her interview was conducted, she had two young children with another on the way. With traditional views about child rearing, she stated “she had always believed that her job or role was to be at home full-time with the children” and that “her desire to be the primary care provider for her children stemmed from two places: her own experience as a child and her beliefs about the moral development of children” (Hattery 53). When she was growing up, Cheryl’s mother stayed home with the children full-time. Although she was always physically there, Cheryl felt that she never paid much attention to her kids and didn’t do enough to encourage their development. Cheryl plans to raise her children differently – she wants to be the one who teaches them everything. Knowing that the first few years of children’s lives are critical for development, it’s important to her that she is present during that time. In order to do this, she has chosen to be a stay-at-home mom and this method is good for her and her family.
Emily is classified as a nonconformist – she goes against what society declares is the norm. When Hattery arrived for their interview, she described Emily as “the picture of success” (54). Working as a healthcare administrator, she had the highest salary of any of the women interviewed. Emily’s husband made significantly more money than her, so it wasn’t a necessity that she return to work – she did so because of her desire to keep her career. She always knew that she would continue working, even after having a child. Hattery explains, “She felt that she was not obligated to stay at home full-time. Rather, she was entitled to pursue her own interests…in fact, Emily believed she was a better mother precisely because she continued to pursue her own interests” (56). The idea that she is a better mother because of this differs from Cheryl’s opinions on the best way to raise a child. Although Cheryl would feel uncomfortable with this arrangement, it’s exactly what Emily wants.
Emily described the prospect of staying home full-time as “claustrophobic” (Hattery 55). She didn’t want her life to completely revolve around her baby – she wanted it to remain her own. Growing up with parents that argued about finances often, it was important to Emily to make her own money. Shying away from the idea of being economically dependent on her husband, she stated “I wanted to be independent. I’ve always worked. I wanted my own resources” (Hattery 55). Emily prioritized her career and a feeling of security and therefore, maintaining a work-life balance wasn’t as much of a struggle because she didn’t feel guilty, as many mothers do, for pursuing her own needs.
Tammy is a pragmatist – she’s practical about her approach to being a working mother. At the time of her interview, Tammy was a stay-at-home mother of two young boys. She had previously held a job for many years at a local insurance firm. Before the birth of their first child, she and her husband had discussions over whether she would return to work. They agreed that it was necessary for her to do so, due to their economic circumstances – they had recently had a house built, and were nervous about making house payments with only one salary.
After her child was born, she chose to ease herself back into the workplace, starting over the phone by joining conference calls from home. However, once she began working again, she struggled to maintain a healthy balance between her career and her home life. She ran into problems when her desired part-time employment turned into her working full-time for part-time pay. She decided to put her child in daycare and return to work full-time. After discovering the unsatisfactory conditions of the daycare when she went to pick up her son, she was stuck trying to find a different place for childcare (Hattery 57).
Her boss was unhelpful in her attempts to do this, refusing to reduce her workload temporarily while she searched for a new daycare. She said “it was this insensitivity to the needs of working mothers – not only the need for good childcare, but also the need to juggle the commitment to work and family – that eventually drove her to quit her job” (Hattery 58). Though Tammy and her husband had agreed that she needed to work, she was under too much stress from both her work and her family life. Everything was a compromise and she was sick of having to make sacrifices in order to maintain both. She explained, “When I went to work, I felt like I should be at home. And when I was at home, I thought I left in the middle…And that’s when I was just like, this is not worth it. I don’t care how much I’m making; it’s not worth it” (Hattery 58). Tammy feels pulled between two obligations – to her child and to her family’s economic well-being. Eventually, she snaps and chooses to quit her job to stay home with her child. She tried to adapt to being a working mother, but it wasn’t right for her.
Every mother is different and every situation is different, therefore every balancing act is different. Some mothers want to work full-time, some want to stay home with their children full-time, many want to do a mix of both. In the book, How Women Can Make It Work: The Science of Success, which explores how women can effectively mix their home and family lives, King and Knight argue “there is no ‘right’ way to have balance. Only you can decide for yourself what ‘balance’ means to you (222). Each mother must figure it out for herself and her family.
Similar to Tammy, another mother describes how this feeling of being stretched between two roles affects her and how she deals with it. Katie Couric says, “like all working mothers, sometimes I feel like a terrible mother and sometimes I feel like a terrible employee. But for the most part, I try to give myself a break, which is something I urge all mothers to do —to live your life with a cloud of guilt about everything you are doing is just not good for anybody” (King and Knight 226). Most mothers who work often feel like they’re failing to effectively balance their two roles, but it’s important that they know they aren’t alone in these feelings.
Beyond the struggle to balance work and family life, working mothers also have to deal with the “second shift”. Arlie Hochschild, a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley, coined this term in her book, The Second Shift. First published in the 1980s, it examines how working parents struggle to divide household responsibilities. Her book analyzes a study she conducted by looking at time diary data and interviewing and observing 50 couples.
Hochschild defines three types of marriages: traditional, transitional, and egalitarian. In a traditional marriage, a woman places her identity in her home life, a man places his identity in his work, and the wife has less power than the husband. Both of them agree that this is what they want. On the other hand, an egalitarian marriage consists of an equal balance of power between spouses and both are focused on the home and their jobs. A transitional marriage is what most of the people in Hochschild’s study found themselves in. A transitional woman wants to put her identity in both the home and the workplace and expects her husband to focus on his work. Hochschild states “A typical transitional man is all for his wife working, but expects her to do the lion’s share at home too” (15). Although the father is expected to be the prime provider for the family, the vast burden of the housework and child rearing falls on the mother. This leads to women feeling overwhelmed and unable to do everything that needs to be done.
Hochschild also discusses what she calls “supermoms” – moms who try to do it all. These women, about ⅓ of the participants in Hochschild’s study, don’t want to burden their husbands, so they work long hours, then come home and take care of most, if not all, of the household responsibilities. This often leads to mothers overextending themselves and rarely attending to their own needs – “To prepare themselves emotionally, many supermoms develop a conception of themselves as ‘on-the-go, organized, competent,’ as women without need for rest, without personal needs” (Hochschild 194). Putting their family’s needs above their own for long periods of time led women to “talk more intently [with other mothers] about being overtired, sick and ‘emotionally drained’” (10). Upon listening to women discuss the amount of sleep they got each night or how to get back to sleep after their child wakes them up, Hochschild remarks that “women talked about sleep the way a hungry person talks about food” (10).
Working mothers are not only affected by lack of sleep, but a deficit of leisure time as well. In her 1980s study, Hochschild found that husbands got an average of four weeks more leisure time per year than their wives (266). Though this was the case in 1989, when her book was first published, there has been some progress made. Her book, The Second Shift, was republished in 2012, with an afterword that discussed how things have changed since the original publication. Hochschild found that the leisure gap had narrowed to about two weeks a year, so she acknowledges that “twenty-five years didn’t rid women of an extra shift. But it did cut the length of it in half” (266). Although this is a positive trend, women still carry an unfair amount of the “second shift” work.
Another positive trend is how people’s beliefs about traditional gender roles have changed. Seemingly from the beginning of time, there have been set roles for women and men – mothers were responsible for the household and raising the children and fathers were responsible for being the breadwinners. The issue of work-family balance was irrelevant because men and women had separate roles and could both do them effectively without trying to juggle too many things. However, this trend has changed in recent years. From 1977 to 2006,, there was a 30% decrease in the amount of people who believe women should stay home and take care of the kids and men should work to financially support the family (King and Knight 221). People are becoming more accepting of working mothers and traditional gender roles are lessening some, but they’re still relevant enough to cause difficulties for working mothers.
Although conditions for working mothers have come a long way since World War II, there is still much progress to be made. Women deserve to be supported by partners and bosses in their endeavors to create a work-life balance that is effective for them. They deserve to be free of gender roles that push an unequal amount of household work onto them. They deserve to give themselves grace when they feel insufficient in their role as an employee or as a mother. Working mothers face challenges, but many are able to overcome them and create a life for themselves that satisfies them.
Works Cited
Addario, Lynsey. It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. Penguin USA. 2015.
Hattery, Angela J. Women, Work, and Families: Balancing and Weaving. E-book, SAGE Publications, 2000.
Hochschild, Arlie. The Second Shift. Penguin USA, 2012.
King, Eden and Jennifer L. Knight. How Women Can Make It Work: The Science of Success. E-book, ABC-CLIO, 2011.
What Work? What Life? What Balance? Critical Reflections on the Work-Life Balance Debate, edited by Doris Ruth, et al. E-Book, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2007.
Work/Life Balance, edited by Group Emerald. E-Book, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2005.