Women, Work, and Family: Balancing and Weaving (review)

Women, Work, and Family: Balancing and Weaving. By Angela Hattery. Sage Publications, 2001. 231 pp. Cloth, $75.95.

The main tenet of Women, Work, and Family is that ideology matters. Hattery argues that the ideology of "intensive mothering" is so pervasive that few women escape its reach. Embedded in U.S. culture and therefore our collective psyche is the notion that mothers are the best child-care providers for their children, all others are poor substitutes, and mothers should therefore be the ones who care for and are always available to their children. Women's paid market work challenges this ideology, creates cognitive dissonance for women, and forces them to negotiate a balance between market work and child rearing, a balance that extends from full-time mothering, at one extreme, to foregoing motherhood altogether at the other extreme.

To explore her thesis, Hattery investigates maternal employment among women who have given birth 12-15 months earlier. Most of the book draws on in-depth interviews with 30 women, a purposively selected subgroup from a larger probability sample drawn from birth records in a Wisconsin county in the mid-1990s. The volume focuses on the qualitative interviews but provides useful appendices analyzing the data from the larger quantitative study. The discussion is insightful and the quantitative information is nicely interwoven as background for the qualitative material.

Hattery constructs ideal types for the women she interviews. Motherhood ideology — women's views of what is, what should be, what is possible - distinguish the types. It is not so much whether or not a mother is employed but how she views motherhood that separates women into distinct groups. One-sixth of her mothers she labels conformists, those who subscribe fully to the intensive mothering ideal. These women choose full-time motherhood, even when a spouse's earnings were low, because of their intense belief that mothers should be the sole caregivers for their children. At the other end of the spectrum, accounting for about 10% of her interviews, are those she labels nonconformists: women who feel entitled to the realization of individual achievement and the pursuit of economic goals and who subscribe to a belief system that says that children are better off when they spend time away from their mothers. However, even nonconformists arrange for the care of their children and tend to assess child-care costs relative to their own earnings rather than against family income. Hattery believes this is further evidence of the hegemony of the "intensive mothering ideal." Care of children is ultimately women's work. This view may be changing but it is changing slowly.

The bulk of the women Hattery interviews are somewhere in between these two ideal types: not fully subscribing to the intensive mothering ideal but also not totally comfortable with the pursuit of their own individual goals either. These women are of two main types: pragmatists who often change employment and child- care arrangements during their childrearing years in order to adjust to changing circumstances and innovators who subscribe more fully to the intensive motherhood ideal but think outside the box, as it were, arranging their lives so as to do some market work but also minimize their children's time in child care.

Hattery devotes a chapter to exploring mothers' decisions about whether to work for pay or not and explains how mothers in each of her ideal types negotiate this terrain. Another chapter explores the decisions about whether or not to use child care, for how long, and in what capacity. Perhaps the most interesting chapter explores the whole issue of economic need, arguing that the perception of need and what constitutes an adequate standard of living is constructed to be consistent with one's ideology of motherhood. This perception of need, far more than any objective measure of economic need, is what influences labor market and child- care decisions of new mothers.

Hattery may place too much emphasis on ideology, but she is convincing...