Working Women Don't Have Wives: Professional Success in the 1990s - Hardcover

Apter, Terri E.

9780312096755: Working Women Don't Have Wives: Professional Success in the 1990s

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312096755 ISBN 13: 9780312096755

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1994

Many working women feel that their lives would be much easier if only they had a traditional "wife" figure at home. Unfortunately, rarely does such a situation exist. But how are women today actually handling the dilemmas created by their dual needs? What compromises and conditions are necessary to allow women to realize their full potential? Can women ever expect to succeed in a male-dominated society? How does this affect their children?
Terri Apter, acclaimed author of Altered Loves, examines the pressures on today's working women as they try to balance the responsibilities of marriage and childcare with the growing demands of the workplace. Blending over 100 interviews with working women into her analysis, Apter shows how the myth of the "superwoman" masks the problems that real women must face. In chapters such as "What Do Women Want?", "Why Do Women Mother?," and "Having it All: New Options, New Myths," Apter shows how increasing working hours and decreasing job security have presented today's working women with a new set of conflicts. She also makes the point that women who succeed in combining the best of both worlds do so only by changing patterns at work and home.
This important book should be read not only by all working women but also by anyone concerned with this increasingly problematic issue.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

A subtle and sensitive exploration of why professional women continue to fail at achieving equality with men in the workplace: a follow-up to Apter's Why Women Don't Have Wives (1985). Drawing from interviews with professional women conducted over a ten-year period in Britain and the US, and analyzing feminist theory from Friedan to Faludi, Apter (a fellow at Cambridge Univ.) concludes that women have failed to achieve equality with men not because men are conspiring to keep them barefoot and pregnant or because women secretly yearn, Cinderella-like, to be taken care of by men, but because of fundamental conflicts between work and family life: because working women, unlike men, don't have wives. The workplace--in which men are expected to labor long hours while a wife or other domestic watches the children--isn't set up to meet the needs of working mothers. Meanwhile, every woman who opts to have children faces hard choices: If she takes time off, she faces economic dependence or banishment to the ``mommy track''; if she doesn't, she risks exhaustion and guilt. Still, women--more than 50 percent of the work force, with half of childbearing women returning to their jobs within a year of a child's birth--continue to juggle work and family life: to strive, as men have always done, for success in love and work. It's these women--as well as their individual struggles and solutions--who will continue to offer blueprints for changing the structures of society. A thoughtful analysis of an extraordinarily complex problem, as well as a concise summary of feminist thought over the past four decades: of appeal to anyone interested in understanding the feminist revolution. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Although "the glass ceiling" and other obstacles inherent in professional life may still prevent women from reaching the top, argues Apter ( Altered Loves: Mothers and Daughters During Adolescence ), the primary reason for women's slow career progress is that they don't have wives to take charge of domestic details. Basing her conclusions on studies of working women conducted in 1982 and 1992, the author found that most--even those who in the early 1980s were aggressive careerists--have families to whom they devote a good deal of energy. Our society offers minimal social supports for working mothers, and few companies promote women who need or want to spend more time at home. Apter further suggests that 1970s- and '80s-style feminism may actually hinder women's upward mobility on the job, tending to value traditionally male characteristics (e.g., ambition and competitiveness) over such "womanly" traits as nurturing. Unlike men, observes the author, the most successful women often do not have families--their job is their life. In this provocative book, Apter makes a plea for company policies that would enable women to take time off to be with their children or to work flexible hours without having to sacrifice professional success.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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