Work Is Not the Only Problem: How the Concept of Family Contributes to the Work-Family Dilemma

This brief essay is based on a paper I presented as part of the special topics forum "Got Life? Finding Balance and Making Boundaries in the Academy" at the November 2005 American Academy of Religion (AAR) meeting in Philadelphia. I gave the presentation in response to a request from the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession (SWIP) that I talk at the conference about balancing work and care giving. The committee invited me to address this particular topic because my partner, Christina Crosby, was in a bicycle accident in 2003 in which she suffered a spinal cord injury. I was forced to take leave from my job—and, fortunately, my institution, Barnard College, was very accommodating, as was Wesleyan University, where Christina had long been on the faculty and that hired me as a visiting professor for the semester she was first home from the hospital. I was also unable to be with my compatriots on SWIP for a year (and I missed them), so they very much wanted to hear how I was managing (and I thank them for the opportunity to talk about it).

The story I related at the AAR went to the heart of the problem that the "Got Life?" panel was trying to address: the ways in which work and family often are presented as if they are in conflict. In my experience, if we talk about the problems that the structure of work presents for our lives in terms of "work-family issues" or what is commonly called "the work-family dilemma," then we have already set up the debate in terms that make us bound to lose.

My concern is not just with finding balance between work and life, but with the structure of work itself, both what is usually thought of as paid labor and what is called "domestic labor," paid or unpaid. In particular, I'm concerned that the social units that we try to balance with what is called "work," those of family and of individual life are themselves organized into and support the current structure of work. It may very well feel like there is a conflict in our experience of paid and domestic labor. But, while these two aspects of our lives may well be out of balance, they are mutually supportive and actually mutually constitutive social units. Work as it is currently structured is based on the idea of "family," and in the end, we cannot change one without changing the other.

So, here is my story:

The call came at around 8:00 P.M. on Wednesday, October 1, 2003. The caller identified himself as Officer Milardo of the Connecticut State Police and asked if I was Janet Jakobsen, to which I responded, "Yes." He then asked if I was a friend of Christina Crosby, to which I responded, "How bad? How bad? How bad?" Despite my now apparent distress, he was able to give me the crucial information—that Christina's injuries were not life-threatening and that she had been taken by helicopter to a hospital in Hartford. I was grateful to him that I did not have to go through the trip from New York City to Hartford with the worry that Christina might be dying; but because of the helicopter, I knew that the answer to my initial question was, "very bad."

And so it was. When I saw her in the intensive care unit about five hours after receiving the initial call, Christina was unaware of my presence and had no feeling below her sternum. Fortunately, she has recovered a great deal from that point, but she has a spinal cord injury between the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae and an official diagnosis of quadriplegia. Christina was in the hospital for a total of five months, and then persevered through another year-and-a-half of extensive and painful outpatient rehab. In fall 2005, she returned half-time to the classroom at Wesleyan. We do not know if she will ever be able to...