Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It, and: Not Guilty! The Good News for Working Mothers, and: Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas (review)

Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It by Joan Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 352 pp., $30.00 hardcover.

Not Guilty! The Good News for Working Mothers by Betty Holcomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, 384 pp., $14.00 paper.

Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas edited by Julia E. Hanigsberg and Sara Ruddick. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999, 324 pp., $26.00 paper.

Startling news of the twenty-first century: We are still trying to figure out how women can work and mother at the same time—or if they really should, or if children suffer? Or how to persuade employers to treat working mothers the same as everyone else, while also understanding the multiple demands on their lives. Forever women have worked and mothered. Why is it so hard to build a society that values the contributions of women in the workplace and concurrently values parenting and childcare? Why doesn't the political championing of "family values" translate into actual support for working parents? The questions are easier to formulate than the answers. These authors, working mothers all, are tackling the persistent questions about mothering and work. Their books articulate the insight and passion brought to their research, along with a few concrete answers. They offer more questions than answers, because they are honest researchers.

The three books have much and little in common. They each address dilemmas regarding the social rules and constructs of women as mothers. They all draw primarily on research with families in the United States. They all struggle with how women and their families can better juggle their conflicting demands and expectations. Ranging in format from social policy critique to popular press to collected essays, these three books focus on distinct facets of this broad issue. Collectively, the authors bear witness to the complexity of mothering in America today.

In Unbending Gender, Joan Williams addresses the conflicts for women and men in the current structuring of market work and family work. Both structures rely, she argues, on particular norms of domesticity and the ideal worker. These are central concepts in Williams's carefully developed thesis that traditional families and traditional work do not serve men, women, or children well. All segments of our society are limited and ultimately harmed by our commitment to an antiquated view of who should do family work and what the ideal worker must do to be valued.

Williams, a law professor at American University and co-director of the Gender, Work, and Family Project, writes persuasively, incorporating legal research, policy analysis, and extensive interviews with individuals about work and family choices. As she points out early on, the language of choice becomes a misleading rhetoric when the options are narrowly defined to ensure adherence to the norms of domesticity and the idealized worker. Many women, and a few men, have discovered that "I chose to stay home with my kids," also meant, "I chose to give up my health benefits, access to professional opportunities, and a decent income." Most women have been told, "You can't be simultaneously committed to your children and also committed to your work." This implicit argument is found repeatedly: in federal policies about maternity leave which require employers merely to offer unpaid leave; in the custody and child support rulings which penalize mothers who work long hours to support their families, but which force them into such work nonetheless; in the corporate attitudes about part-time work and parental leave which marginalize all who pursue these so-called options; and in the persistent stereotypes about inherent differences between men and women.

The solutions proposed by Williams are challenging and far ranging: 1) we need an increased awareness...