What's Happening to Home?

Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age

by Debra Levy

Maggie Jackson, a mother of two who is a former workplace columnist for the Associated Press and frequent contributor to The New York Times, reveals harsh and eloquent truths about the concept of "home" in her book What's Happening to Home? Observing the blurring of the boundaries between home and work, she set out to explore the changing meaning of home in this wired, fast-paced twenty-first century world.

Q Is work/life balance a euphemism for the blurring of lines between work and home?

A In our society, we have this tendency to look to the corporation or to businesses to solve our work/life dilemmas. By bringing more work into the home, not finding a real balance, we somehow shift work to other parts of our lives. In not turning to ourselves for solutions, we erode the idea of community. As it stands today, communities do not support families. A corporation's primary goal is profitability-so when work trumps family life, we ask corporations to step in and try to solve the dilemma instead of the individual or community. We begin to identify work as being our "home" the more time we spend there and the more services we use there. This attempt to bring more balance backfired-it just shifted the functions of home but did not draw real boundaries for workers.

Q At this time in history, who or what controls an employee's time?

A It is dangerous not to realize how work-centric we are and that many work/life programs and policies are Band-AidsŪ. Someone I interviewed said she wished she were not just using her home as a stopping point between "work and more work." What an empty way to live. We have to recognize that we are missing out on life by being so focused on work, and that this is a cultural shift no less than affirmative action or diversity training. We have to move beyond the Band-Aid approach and toward profound cultural change. We have to convince employers that employees will be better workers if we do. In the 10 years I've done this reporting, new technologies have come about that make this easier-but there is some learning to do with such ubiquitous technology. We have to deal with the repercussions of intrusiveness, being available 24/7, with appropriate limits.

Q Has September 11 left an imprint on our view of home and private life?

A In some ways it was the ultimate example of work/home tensions. It set up the values of home against the values of work, making people take another look, challenging us to make home a higher priority in life.

Q Part of the book is your diary where you explore your own dilemmas and boundaries surrounding work and home. Tell me about your home as a child and your home as an adult.

A As a child, my hometown was 20 miles outside of Boston, in Sharon, MA. Both of my parents were teachers. My mother took five years off work after adopting my sister and me. But she always did things even then, tutoring, working within the town. When she returned to work, she would always try to be home in the afternoons, but often as I got older I would be home alone.

In general, my parents' lifestyle was a family-friendly one. We took long vacations, traveled-it was a nice American life. My mother was different, not exclusively a "stay-at-home mom." But both Dad and Mom kept their work separate from home.

As an adult, a large part of my inspiration came from my experience living abroad for seven and a half years as a journalist, a foreign correspondent. I did not specialize in an area, so I covered varied aspects of other cultures. I had a great opportunity to observe another society and culture. To be an observer living elsewhere gave me an outside view of American society. The area of work/life became intriguing to me. In Europe, I found an approach to life that was more holistic, where objectives and aspirations in society did not fit into neat pigeonholes. Both in Tokyo and in London, what I saw was a different sense of private life. The question "what do you do?" is not asked as it is here. Being asked about myself in a way that did not solely identify me as a worker gave me another view of the world. This strong sense of private life was a contrast to the workaholic, narrow-minded 1980s, a time when many people did not have any other life.

Q The title of your book might lead some to believe you are urging a return to a kind of 1950s "hearth and home" view of the world, yet in the book you talk about the ambivalence associated with a life of domesticity for yourself and others. You seem to be striving to recognize the importance and value of making a home without the pressure to be perfect that mothers once felt in being tied to the home.

A Yes, the thing is, I am not domestic, and I struggled with this aspect of the book. I feared being misunderstood and almost cried in the library trying to think of every angle from which to defend myself. Would I be thought of as a closet Martha Stewart or Suzy Homemaker? My research told me that domesticity really is important, but we need and have to move away from tying women solely to the home. Women's lives are not secondary and I feared the book might be viewed, incorrectly, in that framework.

In the increasing struggle with such blurred boundaries between home and work, we cannot see where we are going, what we might be losing. I began to think that home was either politicized or viewed as archaic-that in trying to bring to light its importance, I would be seen as promoting a return to the past. I had to wrestle with it because this is important. The concept of home is too critical to our future to be boiled down to platitudes, and writing this book was too important to fear being deemed a throwback.

Q Do you think women rejected domestic aspects of home life as a way to break with the past and move into the workforce? That it was a necessity in their minds not to identify themselves with homemaking?

A There was a breaking off of the legacy of domesticity. It was left on the shelf and men had to learn to be domestic. Many women rejected domestic arts and did not want to be seen as a "brownie baker." That is why Hillary Clinton's remarks on the campaign trail caused such a stir.

This is the problem we have with work/life dilemmas. The boundaries drawn between worlds are either/or. Women cannot feel that one world-home-is demeaning. We cannot "run away from home," because it is emblematic, representative. It is a way to value private life. How can we expect men to care about it? How can we expect men to speak the language of caregiving?

It is only in the last 200 years that women were seen as shackled to the home. That is only a blip on the radar screen. Women were part of the economy for ages, part of the household economy. Throughout history you see a more 50/50 sharing of economic responsibility. There are amazing stories of women entrepreneurs, instrumental women in every era. Women were always breadwinners, even rulers. We do not want to be tied down, but there must be a middle ground between being shackled and a rejection of domesticity in the home.

Q You hear a lot about protecting our personal information because of the spread of technology. We feel vulnerable in that way. You comment on another aspect of privacy, the selling of our privacy. How is that happening?

A No one talks about the privacy of time and space. Technology leashes us to work. We are in an age where others can find us at any time, in any place. What does this say, this permeability of home? The workplace has the most power of any force. In exchange for going home early to be with our kids, we trade the privacy of our homes to work into the night. We are tallying up time at each place, bartering, trading our space and time. The whole concept of quality time-even having to use that phrase-points out the awful dilemmas we have about how we spend time.

We are beyond traditional boundaries. Work has broken out of the boundary of place. We are faced with trying to keep people out, screening unwanted calls, erecting fences.

We have to be able, in our own lives, to think clearly. Boundaries allow this kind of empty slate for thought. Boundaries are about privacy, about private life and being able to concentrate purely on one thing.

Q In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "company towns" such as Pullman (currently a Chicago neighborhood) tried to be the "hub" for company workers, providing them with amenities and goods. Is there an analogous situation today between those "company towns" of the past and the perks and benefits offered by companies today?

A Companies today attempt to create a culture where the loyalty resides with the workplace, an atmosphere that fosters comfort on the job in exchange for long hours and greater accessibility to work. But we often forget, who has the power in an organization? How does the organization control our lives? The company town concept seems ridiculously old-fashioned. It was very authoritarian. They were building a whole world within the company town. We are doing the same thing today, trying to keep people happy. The motivation isn't Machiavellian but it does reveal who has power and who does not. This pseudo-world of low cost on-site dry cleaners, childcare, being able to take work with you anywhere at your convenience-why would you work anywhere else? This false world has big repercussions such as the huge layoffs where people lost jobs. In writing a recent article, I had counselors tell me that downsized workers are much more shattered now than in earlier cutbacks. They've lost not only jobs, but a community and a support system. The phrase "married to your job" fits and it is dangerous.

Q We fear big government. Should we fear big corporations too?

A We have to realize that companies have power over our lives, too. We look to the private business sector for answers. Yet, we forget how much power companies wield.

In my book, I wrote about an early morning pancake breakfast at a high-tech company. Everyone there had a different read on what it was all about, but it was clear that the pancakes were not being flipped as a way to care that employees eat a good breakfast.

I return to the analogy of workers with disabilities entering the workforce. The accommodations in most cases are easy to manage for companies. What really needed changing was the culture itself, to allow the possibility of including those with disabilities. Genuine work/life programs are a good start. But partnerships with communities, businesses and workers will drive change to a place where there are jobs we can control.

Q The history of human development and our relationship to home is a fascinating area of inquiry. What did you find out?

A I researched the work of an anthropologist, Peter Wilson, who studied nomadic societies. In those cultures, people navigated the world through the prism of "focus," based on the immediate needs of the group. Was it food? Shelter? Some necessary task. The landscapes and the places changed so frequently, but with domestication of animals and a more communal life, home became an anchor. People moved into a world of boundaries. The industrialized world preserved these boundaries, but technology strips boundaries. The idea of "separate spheres" and boundaries of time have changed.

Where once we were bounded by the clock, or the rising of the sun with set times of rest, the weekend, vacation, we now have this borderless life both physically and temporally.

Q Why are boundaries important? Why do humans need them?

A Boundaries provide us with rituals, anchors both physical and emotional. Humans still need them. We are obscuring this need and the cost of its loss through our sophisticated use of technology and accessibility. In discarding a key aspect of our development, this need for boundaries, we are paring down to a more primitive style of living, that immediate "focus" way of conducting our business. We focus on the cell phone, the fax. We let ourselves be permeable to whatever comes our way, anywhere. We no longer can give attention to one thing at a time, and that has a cost to the efficiency of our communities and to ourselves. We are frazzled and making a "muddle of everything."

Q How do you envision the future? Are you hopeful we can recapture our sense of private life and boundaries?

A Well, we've come to the end of the road. We have choices to face. I hope that in the future we will be able to live life and find fulfillment by being together. The betterment of the human condition can come about if we give ourselves the time to maintain the kind of purity of thought that leads to fulfillment.

If everyone had an expectation that weekends were for private life, a lot of the game would shift. We're at the gate, deciding what we want, burning out. We've seen the costs to private life and family.

Q Your visit to Sweden revealed a society that had already encountered many of the boundary struggles workers and families face today here in the U.S. What can we learn from them?

A Companies such as Microsoft and Nokia have set up centers in Sweden to study the "futuristic marketplace" for their new products. Swedes have the same "love of new technology" that many have here. Sweden became "wired" before we did and had to balance a pervasive use of technology and a strong protection of private life. There, as here, one of the problems and blessings is that workers get to use large doses of creativity and skill in what they do, but this kind of engagement requires an intense investment of time, and the lure to overwork is great.

They are ahead of us in that they have a different view of private life. While there I learned that small gestures are momentous-turning off the cell phone during an interview, for example.

My time there revealed some good questions for us. For instance, when and where are we going to have a home life? Who are we going to listen to for priorities? We ourselves have to take more responsibility for our work/life and home/life balance.

Debra lives with her two children, cat and husband in Dallas, TX and admits that her daughter permeated her work boundaries as she prepared this interview. She is the Director of Advocacy for Mothers & More and constantly juggles this work with her "home" work.