Interconnecting Work and Family: Race and Class Differences in Women's Work Status and Attitudes

Shifting Work-Family Realities

The interdisciplinary work-family field has grown apace in recent years, as scholars, writers, and policy makers have all focused renewed attention on women's work status and attitudes. Much of this resurgence, however, has addressed the behaviors and attitudes of middle- to upper-class white women and their decision to work or parent. But this narrow focus limits our research and theorizing and overlooks how women respond in creative ways by "interconnecting" (or "weaving together") their work and family lives (Garey 1999, 14). Although this work-family reality is relatively more recent for middle- to upper-class white women, it is a much older reality for many working-class or poor women and women of color. In this essay, I broaden the research focus to a more diverse group of women. My goal is to understand how different women respond to new work-family realities.¹

Structural Changes in the Work-Family Landscape

New work-family realities are best reflected in the "structural mismatch" between changed family demographics and partially changed customs, norms, and organizational practices (Moen and Roehling 2005; Roos, Trigg, and Hartman 2006, 201–2). Women's dramatic entry into the labor force, and changes in their pattern of participation, now mean that they more closely resemble men in their labor force participation. Blau and Kahn's (2005, 42) analysis of Current Population Survey data reveals that between 1980 and 2000 women's work status became less sensitive to both their own and their husband's wages, and they now supply their labor much as men do. Increased labor force participation has been most stark among married women and women with children, those most subject to work-family conflict. Dual-earner families are now the most common household type: by 2000, 62 percent of married couples were dual earners, compared with 44 percent in 1975 (Costello, Wight, and Stone 2003, 203).

Since 1970 women have also made significant inroads into more demanding "male" professional and managerial occupations (Reskin and Roos 1990). Careers are less likely to unfold in a predictable progression of jobs within single organizations, and workers move frequently across firms in boundaryless careers. Both men and women compete as ideal workers in an increasingly global market, scheduled around a 24/7 economy. The resulting time bind negatively affects workers, especially those with higher education and in time-intensive professional and managerial jobs (Jacobs and Gerson 2000). Entry into professional and managerial occupations is more likely to characterize the changing work prospects of white women, even though black middle-class women preceded their white counterparts into the labor market by many years (Landry 2000, 91).

Beyond Separate Spheres

The popular and scholarly literatures rely on dichotomous language to describe work and family. Garey (1999, 8) faults researchers for relying on "separate spheres" terminology to describe women as either "work-committed" or "domestically oriented" (e.g., Gerson 1985), or as women who "live to work" or "work to live" (e.g., Mason 1988). More recent work (e.g., Blair-Loy 2003) theorizes the existence of a "devotion to work schema," where "greedy workplace institutions" demand all our time and commitment, and a "devotion to family schema," where intensive mothering is a woman's major commitment, regardless of her work role. Blair-Loy argues that these cultural schemas powerfully shape women's attitudes and behaviors and are embedded in the beliefs of their husbands, the practices of employers, and workplace institutions more generally. In this view, women are seen as committed to either work or family, a cultural divide that emerges from a male-breadwinner-female-caregiver gender ideology that creates "naturalized" boundaries that working women must cross (Gazso 2004, 465).

The changing landscape of the American (now global) labor market makes the choice between work and family largely the prerogative of the privileged (Johnson, 2002) and diverts our attention from the restructured realities of women's lives. Like men, most women are both workers and parents, and they operate in a changed workplace environment. From her interviews with a broad spectrum...