2005 Mothers Day Campaign:
Mothers - The Real Story

Reading List

These are sorted by publication year, with the most recent first.

The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? by Miriam Peskowitz, 2005. Parents don't want to fight one another at all; they simply want more options. Moreover, the very sides in this debate don't exist: one third of all mothers work part-time, falling into the vast abyss between full-time careerist and at-home mommy. How does the corporate climate in America force women to claim either a career or a family at any given time? Are the choices women are making -to either adjust careers, "carousel" in and out of the workplace, or quit altogether - really choices at all? And how do we expand the definition of productive worker to include an engaged parent?

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner, 2005. Warner's examination of over-involved parenting among 20- to 40-year-old, upper-middle-class, college-educated women living in the East Coast corridor is the mothering book of the season.  Whether shuttling kids to "enriching" after-school activities or worrying about the quality of available child care, the women of Perfect Madness describe a life far out of balance.  Warner argues for a saner society, where everyone would have access to a decent living and enough family time for themselves and their children. Warner spends most of the book explaining how things got to this point, and very briefly suggests a few solutions. Warner explores the nascent "motherhood movement," and is critical of what she perceives to be its early flaws, hastily grouping the varied groups involved together. She does not do justice to the current "movement landscape," leaving out important developments. This movement has deepened since Warner first began writing her book and much of it is left to the reader to discover.

The Naked Truth : A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters by Margaret A. Heffernan, 2004. It's a collection of stories from women about their experience in the workplace with Ms Heffernan tying it all together along the way. She talks a lot about motherhood (she has two kids herself) and about our desire to bring our whole selves to work and how workplaces don't work for women and mothers. At the same time, it's a very uplifting book about the paths many women are forging for themselves and how women are changing the workplace in a way that's better for workplaces too.

If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home by Ann Crittenden, 2004. Crittenden, who also wrote The Price of Motherhood shows how parenting experience is relevant to the business world, and blows away the myth that the job of raising children is not "real" work. The skills we learn as parents make us better, more effective managers and workers, and this book provides specific and detailed proof.

Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World by Marie Wilson, 2004. Women comprise half of the U.S. population and workforce, yet they hold only 14% of seats in the U.S. Congress and 12.4% of Fortune 500 board positions. More embarrassingly, the United States ranks 60th in women's participation in government, behind India and tied with Andorra. Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation for Women and founder of the "Take Our Daughters to Work" day, argues that the future could be a brighter place for all by "changing society from a system built on the labor of women to one led equally by their vision." To do this requires nothing short of a cultural revolution. With so-called women's issues like health, education and senior care at the forefront of everyone's agenda, women more than ever have a substantial contribution to make in shaping government policy and leading in both the workplace and home. Infusing the workplace with women's values-"inclusion, communication across lines of authority, the work of caring, relationship building"-would integrate professional and personal life for everyone's benefit, Wilson argues.

Necessary Dreams : Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Anna Fels, 2004. After introductory comments about how life has changed for modern women, thanks to increased longevity, birth control and other factors, Fels raises a curious question: why do women still feel anxious or evasive about admitting to having ambitions, but men don't? The answer lies in understanding that ambition has two components: the mastery of some specific skills and the recognition of that mastery by others. While many professions have opened to women in the 20th century, allowing them to learn a variety of skills, Fels says, women have still not found a plethora of sources for recognition, or ways of being valued by others for the special skills they've acquired.

The Career Mystique : Cracks in the American Dream by Phyllis Moen, Patricia Roehling, 2004. The Career Mystique examines taken-for-granted rules of the career game--that continuous, full-time, hard work pays off--deeply embedded in the American Dream. Possibilities of fulfilling the career mystique are dwindling, given insecurities and risks of a global economy, strains and double demands on the job and at home, uncertainties and ambiguities around retirement. This outdated myth stands in the way of fashioning innovative policies more in keeping with life in 21st century America.

The Mom Economy: The Mothers' Guide to Getting Family-Friendly Work by Elizabeth Wilcox, 2003. Wilcox tells moms how to negotiate terms of employment that suit their lifestyles and allow them to meet their kid's needs. This practical volume helps moms get what they need most from the workplace-and find the work that works for them.

Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America by John De Graaf (Editor), 2003. This book shows how wide-ranging the impacts of time famine in our society are, and what ordinary citizens can do to turn things around and win a more balanced life for themselves and their children.

It's About Time: Couples and Careers by Phyllis Moen (Editor), 2003. It’s about Time draws on the data from the Cornell Couples and Careers Study to demonstrate that: regardless of income, time is a scarce commodity, time is built into jobs and career paths in ways that make continuous full-time (40 or typically more hours a week) paid work a fact of life in American society, and the multiple strands of life--career, family and personal--unfold over time. Spouses move through their life courses in tandem, with early choices - to have children or not, to work long hours or not, to switch jobs or not, to relocate for his or her career or not--all having long-term consequences for life quality and for gender inequality. The evidence from this book suggests that it is about time for the United States to confront the realities and needs of contemporary working couples and indeed, all members of the new workforce. To do so requires more than Band-Aid, short-term (and often short-sighted) policy remedies.

Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment by Janet C. Gornick, Marcia K. Meyers, 2003. Parents around the world grapple with the common challenge of balancing work and childcare. Despite common problems, the advanced, industrialized nations have developed dramatically different social and labor market policies - policies that vary widely in the level of support they provide for parents and the extent to which they encourage an equal division of labor between parents as they balance work and care. In Families That Work, Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers take a close look at the family-work policies in the United States and abroad and call for a new and expanded role for the U.S. government in order to bring this country up to the standards taken for granted in many other Western nations.

This Day: Diaries from American Women by Joni B. Cole (Editor), Rebecca Joffrey (Editor), B.K. Rakhra (Editor), 2003. "What is a day in the life really like for a CEO, a single mom, a TV celebrity, an inmate?" This was the question that inspired This Day, a book project that invited a cross-section of women to create a "day diary" on a single, ordinary Tuesday. The result is an intimate, informative, often humorous window into the life of the American woman, transporting readers into corporate board rooms, concert halls, play groups, TV studios, prisons, soup kitchens, classrooms, and an amazing array of households across the country. Individually and collectively, these diaries reveal what women love - and don't love! - about their families, jobs, and lives.

What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age by Maggie Jackson, 2002. Not a book exhorting families to return to another time, this is instead a provocative look at work and family that challenges us to examine our lives and find our own solutions. Jackson, a workplace columnist for the Associated Press, shows how work is creeping into the home and asks whether we need a home and what it provides us. From there, she examines what we can do to create a haven. She believes that everyone (woman, man, or child) can contribute to the creation of a home.

Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World by Peggy Orenstein, 2001. Orenstein offers insight into the lives of women who have grown up with an unprecedented sense of possibilities yet battling traditional expectations. Interviews with hundreds of women show how women navigate the opportunities and constraints of their personal and professional lives and come up with unique models for a fulfilling life.

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work by Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1997. Hochschild exposes the time bind of American families: parents putting in more hours at work to support their families, which creates more stress at home and a time crunch in both places. In the last chapters, Hochschild proposes that parents unite to liberate themselves from the tyranny of work.

The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet Schor, 1992. The author, an economist, presents an excellent discussion of the evolution of the American culture of work and consumerism. Even though our society has doubled its productivity in the past 50 years, we do not have more leisure in our lives. Schor makes compelling arguments for restructuring our work to spend more time on living.

Women's Two Roles by Phyllis Moen, 1992. Moen addresses the following central questions: What are the major implications--for society, families, husbands, children, and women themselves--of the substantial and progressive movement of American women into the labor force? The dominant focus is on employed mothers of young children (those under the age of six) since it is these women who have experienced the greatest change and who encounter the greatest difficulty in reconciling employment demands and family responsibilities. An overriding theme is the unevenness of social change: American mothers of young children may be moving into the labor force in unprecendented numbers, but husbands, employers, and public policies are slow to accommodate this emerging reality.

The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1989. Hochschild examines the dual-earner family and its impact on the traditional family structure.

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