Tag Archives: work/life balance

What’s This New Domesticity Movement?

 

Emily Matchar in her book Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity says this movement “relates to our growing disenchantment with the mainstream workplace, which has failed young people, mothers, and families in so many ways.”

Complaints about “work/life balance” and “antifamily policies” surfaced after women entered the workforce in large numbers. Matcher’s book addresses these issues. As I read her book, I asked: What was so great about the workplace for men before women joined it? Isn’t it important for men to have a work/life balance, too? Singles as well as marrieds? Families and also childless couples? What about the retired, with more relaxed schedules but still with skills to share?

Matchar calls on men as well as women to change. “We need to make sure that the rallying cry of ‘take back the home’ is shouted just as loudly by men as by women.”

Should a career dictate our consuming interest in life?  Men and women live longer than in generations past. We have more years for both careers and other pursuits. Why should all our years from young adulthood to sixty-five be given over to careers? Why should the population then be divided into “career” and “retired”? Why does consumption so rule our lives, guaranteeing that most adults must work full-time to sustain it?

Perhaps we could encourage a less materialistic model which allows dropping out occasionally to focus on children or schooling or creative pursuits or civic work or taking a sabbatical in a monastery or the deliberate choice of part time work for several years.

How about a new dialog blending domesticity (community?) and career for all of us?

Work/Life Balance: Which Side Does the Scale Tip Toward?

 

Hillary Clinton, who recently stepped down as Secretary of the U.S. State Department, spoke in October to a gathering that explored work/life balance. She talked of the time her child was born in 1980, and she demanded and received a four-month leave to be with her new daughter.

During her tenure as Secretary of State, Ms. Clinton advocated worldwide rights for women at the same time she mandated family-friendly policies for the State Department.

Current articles often cite the percentage of women in particular roles, such as CEO’s, or the percentage of women choosing certain courses of study, like the much-publicized STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

Women have long been stereotyped. We now understand that women’s talents are needed as much as men’s, but does that mean the days of the “full-time” wife and mother are over?

If some women choose not to enter the paid labor force (provided they can afford to opt out), their actions will skew the numbers to less than fifty percent of women in it. Is that a tragedy? Should we provide day care so that a mother has no excuse not to work outside the home even if she’d rather stay there with her young child?

Will the choice of staying “at home” lead to frustrated empty nesters later in life, as they, perhaps, search for a career they can no longer have because they are beginning too late? Or is there such a person who enjoys taking care of others, not only children but also the hungry who come to food kitchens, the disadvantaged who need tutoring, and so on. Do some men gravitate toward this calling?

Many of our programs, like one that nurtures at-risk mothers for the first two years of her child’s life, are necessary because we lack natural “nurturers.” Nurturing, it seems, is needed as much as engineering and computer networking.

How shall we work out this dilemma? Where will our nurturers come from?