FEMINISM AND FAMILY: The Morality of Time: Women and the Expanding Workweek

...When they are not offered, most say they would be willing to trade some income to get them...

...What's more, this growing inequality in working time mirrors the growth in income inequality...

...That figure, however, remains vastly larger than the 31 percent who were in the labor force in 1976...

...As Jerry A. Jacobs and I show in our book The Time Divide, the evidence simply doesn't support the assertion that most Americans are working long hours either to indulge an outsized desire for material goods or to escape the difficulties of life at home...

...Yes, Americans appreciate the honor and dignity of hard work...

...Because as marriages have become fragile and women have become ever more committed to a life outside the home, the increase in single parents and in the number of dual-earning couples has created households where all the adults work...

...The world of work seems to be on a collision course with the needs of families, leaving too many households facing wrenching choices between time together and economic survival...

...We need a moral critique of institutions, not individuals...

...Equally important, the image of the workobsessed American shifts our attention away from the failure of our social institutions to meet new family needs...

...The common wisdom, presented in both the popular press and among highly respected social analysts, argues that a growing taste for overwork has led Americans to neglect their families and communities in favor of long days at the office...

...And it implies that workers, read women, are responsible for the very circumstances that make their lives so difficult...

...This situation takes an especially ironic form in the insistence that impoverished single mothers leave their children to take poorly paid jobs without the benefit of high quality, low cost child care, while more affluent mothers are expected to relinquish promising careers to care for their children...

...High-earning professionals and managers are far more likely to be putting in long days at the office, while those in less well-rewarded jobs are likely to be struggling to find enough work to meet their families' needs...

...The good news is that Americans share a set of common—and laudatory—values, including a desire for balance and fairness in their public and private lives...

...This is a high price to pay for being an involved, responsible parent, and it continues to leave women especially disadvantaged...

...For those putting in weeks of fifty hours or more, nine out of ten women and eight out of ten men say they would prefer to work less...

...This will require rethinking the organization of work and child care to strengthen both family support and gender equality...

...In 2000, 60 percent of all married couples had two earners, while only 26 percent depended solely on a husband's paycheck, down from 51 percent in 1970...

...Yet, despite the stream of articles that seems to arrive with each new generation, proclaiming yet again that women are (finally) abandoning work and careers for hearth and home, a careful look shows that contemporary mothers, like fathers, are committed to forging lifetime ties to work...

...In examining national surveys on workers' job experiences and outlooks, we find that most workers are experiencing a sizeable gap between their preferred and actual working time...

...Indeed, the same report found that mothers with children older than one look just like other women in the same age group, with 72 percent of mothers and 71 percent of childless women either holding a job or looking for one...

...The real story is both more complicated and more hopeful, for it suggests that the issue of time can form the basis for an inclusive and progressive political coalition...

...What's more, both women and men want more flexible work schedules and other familysupportive policies...

...The Myth of the Average Worker Surprisingly, in the last three decades there has been little change in the length of the average workweek, which continues to hover around forty-three hours a week for men and thirtyseven for women...

...From workers' perspectives, employers too readily equate work commitment with time spent at the workplace and place too little emphasis on the need to balance a job with a satisfying personal life in both the short and longer runs...

...Shifting our focus, however, DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 53 FEMINISM AND FAMILY requires letting go of some prevailing myths about how and why Americans apportion time...

...In place of worrying that the values of ordinary people need realigning, we would do better to focus on how irreversible changes in the nature of jobs and household organization have created new time divides among American workers, new time dilemmas in American families, and a growing disconnection between the needs of workers and the structure of jobs...

...This leaves some workers with a sense that they are shouldering too much at the workplace and others with a desire to shoulder more...

...And, among the overworked, is the main culprit a shift in values that leaves people preferring to spend inordinate time at work to the detriment of their families and communities...

...Yet, by suggesting that the roots of these pressures lie in workers' taste for overwork, this argument can also become, even if unwittingly, an occasion for moralizing about people's most private choices—women's in particular...

...And although women, on average, wish to work several hours less than men, the more fundamental finding is that across the widening time divide, women and men are converging in their aspirations for work/family balance...

...In contrast, among other workers, only 20 percent of men and 7 54 n DISSENT / Fall 2004 percent of women put in such long hours...

...It is no surprise to hear social conservatives point to the erosion of "family values" among ordinary workers, women especially...

...When it comes to working time, most workers are not "average...

...Most workers want to build lives that allow them to integrate satisfying work with commitment to their families and communities...

...Instead, the proportion putting in fifty-plus hours a week has risen from 21 percent to 27 percent for men and from 5 percent to 11 percent for women...

...Here, too, the evidence tells another story...

...Amid these widespread and deeply anchored family changes, however, the workplace has hardly budged...

...Put simply, workers with long days on the job generally wish to work less, while those with relatively brief workweeks would like to work more...

...The proportion of employed mothers aged fifteen to forty-four with children under the age of one declined from a peak of 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2002...

...But this does not describe the outlook of most of us...

...It is, nevertheless, misleading and counterproductive to attribute these new time dilemmas to the values and aspirations of ordinary Americans...

...The Myth of the Work-Obsessed Worker The second myth that needs to be questioned sees workers' preferences as fueling the rise of overwork...

...Instead, overwork among a segment of workers represents one aspect of a growing mismatch between job reward structures and workers' aspirations...

...In place of all-or-nothing choices, most women, like most men, continue to search for an all-too-illusive balance between home and the workplace...

...Bureau of the Census report that employment had declined FEMINISM AND FAMILY among mothers with infants received widespread attention, but closer study reveals a different trend...

...After all, we didn't worry about overwork in the decades before the rise of committed women workers, when most of the people engaging in it were men...

...A critique of institutions, rather than individuals, also offers a way to build a more inclusive political coalition across our new time divides—bringing together the underemployed and the overworked, men and women workers, the time poor and the income poor, around jointly held needs and aspirations...

...In our analysis of a national sample of American workers about their strategies for juggling work and family time, we find that the source of growing time pressures can be found in our social conditions, not our personal values...

...To be sure, there will always be some workers who want to dedicate their lives to their jobs, even if this means forgoing the pleasures that others find in family and leisure time...

...Employers still assume that paid workers owe their allegiance to the job and can count on someone else to take care of private needs...

...Focusing on the values of ordinary workers rather than on the organization of the workplace runs the risk of blaming workers, women especially, for conditions beyond their control...

...56 n DISSENT / Fall 2004...

...Most adults, and especially women, must contend with "damned if you do and damned if you don't" alternatives, in which working too much and not working enough are DISSENT / Fall 2004 n 55 FEMINISM AND FAMILY deemed equally suspect...

...In fact, the labor force is bifurcating, with more workers putting in excessively long workweeks—of fifty hours or more—and others contending with relatively short workweeks of thirty hours or less...

...In short, the rise of overwork does not reflect most workers' preferences...

...Are Americans, as a whole, working more than ever...

...There is little doubt that a growing number of Americans face time dilemmas that warrant serious concern...

...The critiques of contemporary parenting offered by well-known commentators such as David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America, or David Popenoe, who heads The Marriage Project, echo the longstanding conservative lament that the rise of employment among mothers, like the rise in divorce, is part of a larger process of cultural decline that is leaving our families undervalued and unattended...

...Criticizing women workers for their failure to accomplish what verges on the impossible only adds insult to injury...

...Whatever their differences, these families share a common circumstance: they cannot call on an unpaid caretaker at home...

...These aspirations can form the basis of a political coalition that unites apparently disparate groups to seek genuinely progressive resolutions to our new time dilemmas...

...When these options are offered, most make use of them...

...This gender and family revolution has brought many positive changes, not the least of which is women's increased empowerment at home and at work...

...Although half of all workers put in a forty-hour workweek in 1970, only 40 percent do so today...

...Workers find themselves increasingly divided between the overworked and the underemployed...

...KATHLEEN GERSON is a professor of sociology at New York University and co-author, with Jerry A. Jacobs, of The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality...

...Averages, however, are misleading, and the more important story lies in how the lives of workers have diversified...

...There are now more dualearner couples than there were male-breadwinner households in 1970...

...Growing numbers of families experience time squeezes even if the individuals living in them are not working more than their counterparts in earlier generations...

...The more accurate story is that neither women nor men want to be forced into either-or dilemmas that pose untenable choices between work and family time...

...Yet workers also fear that taking up so-called "familyfriendly" options will jeopardize their longer term work and career prospects along with their financial security...

...Among professionals and managers, over a third of men and about a sixth of women work fifty or more hours a week...

...IRONICALLY, IN addition to being chastised for working too much, mothers are also being told, as Lisa Belkin put it in her now famous New York Times Magazine article, that they are "opting out" of high-powered careers...

...Yet the options confronting Americans today make it an uphill struggle to achieve a reasonable balance between time at work and time for the rest of life...

...Equally important, it lets employers off the hook...

...What's more, these conflicts between time and money have fallen most heavily on women, most of whom want and need to integrate parenting with the economic, social, and emotional rewards of paid work...

...At the other end of the spectrum, the proportion working less than thirty hours a week has risen from 4.5 percent to 8.6 percent for men and from 15.5 percent to 19.6 percent for women...

...The current debate, however, is complicated by the emergence of highly respected progressive voices that also stress the deleterious consequences of a culture of overwork...

...Most mothers either remain at the workplace or return to it not long after their children are born...

...This includes many workers who cannot get as much work as they want or need, as well as those who would like to trim their overly long days and weeks...

...These voices, most visibly and compellingly represented in works such as Juliet Schor's The Overworked American and Arlie Hochschild's The Time Bind, rightly point to the intensifying time pressures facing American workers and their families...

...Our political culture extols both "the work ethic" and "the ethic of care," while our social policies fail to provide the institutional supports that would allow a balance between the two...

...What's more, common wisdom holds that this cultural shift signals a moral decline that is harming our children and weakening civil society...

...Women and men both view paid employment as a means to care for others, a way to meet important personal goals, and as a value in itself...

...Achieving these goals will be difficult, but refusing to moralize when it comes to private choices about how to allocate time would be a good place to begin...

...A close look at the evidence suggests that the answer to both of these questions is "no...

...Indeed, amid the rise of "overdemanding" and "underdemanding" jobs, a shared ideal unites workers across the working time spectrum...

...Most workers—men as well as women— would like to work between thirty and forty hours a week, so that they can use the rest of their time for family, friends, and themselves...

...But that does not mean they wish to work fifty-plus hours a week or to starve their families of time and attention...

...Even as the bifurcation of working time has created too much work for some and too little for others, the transformation of family life has created a growing number of households that are pressed for time even if individual workers are not working more...

...Single-parent households, overwhelmingly headed by women, also claim a growing proportion of American households, rising from 11 percent in 1970 to 25 percent in 2000...

...A recent U.S...

...The Politics of Time Although time squeezes are real and spreading, the prevailing image of work-obsessed Americans neglecting their families is illfounded and politically counterproductive...