Weaving Work And Motherhood

Emanating from a thesis, presents the outcome of interviews carried out in 1991-92 among women working in a private hospital in California. Covers the effects of night, shift and part-time work on child rearing and family life.

This examination of the extraordinary juggling skills of working women who balance obligations to work & family goes beyond description of possible conflicts of interest to seek an understanding of the decision-making process through which they accomplish this balancing.

"Hattery′s book is an important contribution to this literature. The book is engaging and is well written. I would recommend this book and encourage Hattery to continue examination of this construct." - Psychology of Women Quarterly Women, Work, and Family: Balancing and Weaving is a fascinating examination of the extraordinary juggling skills of working mothers who balance their obligations to both work and family. Angela Hattery goes beyond a mere description of women′s conflicts of interest and seeks to understand the decision-making process through which they accomplish this balancing. Through intensive interviews with 30 married women, all with children under 2 years of age, Hattery uncovers a remarkable range of ways in which these women weave together the complex strands of their lives. The data in the volume are examined from a number of theoretical standpoints, including structural theory, motherhood theory, and feminist theory. A key variable that runs through the data is economic need, which has an obvious effect on work patterns. Women, Work, and Family will make a major contribution to family studies and will illuminate the difficult choices that women make within the family/work context.

This examination of the extraordinary juggling skills of working women who balance obligations to work & family goes beyond description of possible conflicts of interest to seek an understanding of the decision-making process through which they accomplish this balancing.

The first edition of Do Men Mother? (2006) was awarded the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociological Association and remains one of the most widely cited books on primary caregiving fathers and stay-at-home fathers. This second edition of Do Men Mother? builds on interviews conducted between 2000 and 2004 with 101 fathers and 14 mother/father couples, and follow-up interviews with six of the mother/father couples about a decade later. It charts how fathers and mothers navigate and negotiate parental and breadwinning responsibilities and calls attention to the generative changes that occur for men when they share responsibilities for their children’s care. Working closely with Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989), Doucet advocates for a wider maternal lens that focuses on entanglements between dependence/independence/inter-dependence and argues that fathers’ stories expand how we think about mothering and caregiving In this expanded second edition, with a new Preface and two new chapters, Doucet takes on three revisiting projects: returning to interview several research participants; re-entering scholarly fields of work, care, and parenting in shifting neoliberal contexts; and rethinking her approach to knowledge making, concepts, and narratives. Bringing together what she calls "diffractive" readings of feminist philosopher Lorraine Code’s ecological approach to knowledge making and historical sociologist Margaret Somers’ genealogical and relational approach to concepts and her non-representational approach to narratives, Doucet lays out an innovative ecological and non-representational approach to knowledge making, concepts, and narratives about care work and paid work. This book calls for greater attention not only to what we claim to know, but also to how we come to know, write about, and intervene in shifting practices, concepts, and narratives of work and care, the politics of care, and growing crises of care.

Women are encouraged to believe that they can occupy top jobs in society by the example of other women thriving in their careers. Who better to be a role model for career success than your mother? Paradoxically, this book shows that having a mother as a role model, even for graduates of top universities, does not predict daughters progressing in their own careers. It finds that mothers with careers, whilst highly influential in their daughters’ choice of career path, rarely mentor their daughters as they progress. This is partly explained by ‘quiet ambition’ – the tendency of women to be modest about their achievements. Bigger issues are the twin pressures from contemporary motherhood and workplace culture that ironically lead career women’s daughters to believe that being a ‘good mother’ means working part-time. This stalls career progress. Based on a large, cross-generational qualitative sample, this book offers a timely and original perspective on the debate about gender equality in leadership positions.

In the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, a large indigenous population lives in rural communities, many of which retain traditional forms of governance. In 1996, some 350 women of these communities formed a weavers’ cooperative, which they called Jolom Mayaetik. Their goal was to join together to market textiles of high quality in both new and ancient designs. Weaving Chiapas offers a rare view of the daily lives, memories, and hopes of these rural Maya women as they strive to retain their ancient customs while adapting to a rapidly changing world. Originally published in Spanish in 2007, this book captures firsthand the voices of these Maya artisans, whose experiences, including the challenges of living in a highly patriarchal culture, often escape the attention of mainstream scholarship. Based on interviews conducted with members of the Jolom Mayaetik cooperative, the accounts gathered in this volume provide an intimate view of women’s life in the Chiapas highlands, known locally as Los Altos. We learn about their experiences of childhood, marriage, and childbirth; about subsistence farming and food traditions; and about the particular styles of clothing and even hairstyles that vary from community to community. Restricted by custom from engaging in public occupations, Los Altos women are responsible for managing their households and caring for domestic animals. But many of them long for broader opportunities, and the Jolom Mayaetik cooperative represents a bold effort by its members to assume control over and build a wider market for their own work. This English-language edition features color photographs—published here for the first time—depicting many of the individual women and their stunning textiles. A new preface, chapter introductions, and a scholarly afterword frame the women’s narratives and place their accounts within cultural and historical context.

Using interviews with technical professionals from a wide range of employment settings, examines the difficult path traversed by people who choose to work less than the standard, forty-hour week and refutes the popular myth of the customized work schedule as a return to traditionalism among women. Shows that most of these workers, male and female, young and old remain strongly committed to their jobs, but wish to combine work with other activities they value just as highly. Argues that these professionals are challenging the accepted view of time requirements for careers in organizations and they are also helping to shape a new agenda for the future of the workplace: to transform their individual successes into a normal practice of customized work time.