Between Family and Work
Reviewed by Roz L. Spafford
CONSUMER HEALTH INTERACTIVEFlux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World
By Peggy Orenstein
Doubleday
324 pp $25 
Are you feeling divided and conquered? Alternately succeeding at work and failing at home? On the cusp of having children -- or deciding not to? If so, you are in Flux, according to Peggy Orenstein in her book by the same title. Peggy Orenstein investigates the experience of women 25 to 45 who grew up with the promises of feminism and are now discovering its contradictions, women who believed they could succeed in the work world and still be good mothers and wives. Flux is at once an entrancing book and an infuriating one. If you are in Orenstein's demographic -- female, adult, college-educated, professional -- you may find she tells your story. Through interviews and analysis, Orenstein exquisitely describes the dilemmas that confront so many women in our time. She catches the hope and anxiety of women in their 20s as they try to imagine the future; the interior conversations of women in their 30s, puzzling over how to find a partner with whom to have a family; the restlessness of women in their 40s, ready to accomplish something outside the structures of home and work. With these portraits, she gives us a sense of what women need to survive the competing and contradictory demands of work and personal life. Orenstein punctuates her narrative with her own story, as she struggles to decide whether to have a child and then confronts a miscarriage and breast cancer. Different choices
Orenstein also introduces us to a variety of fascinating and thoughtful women, among them Denise, 41, a corporate attorney who has recently been put in charge of her company's charitable foundation. Married to a sweet man who has gradually taken more responsibility at home, Denise has two children, 8 and 10; the couple has weathered a stillbirth and her husband's devastating layoff. Denise is African American and has struggled with exhaustion and isolation at work, lacking the sense of "fit" that Orenstein says is essential to feeling at home on the job. She is sustained by her friendships, including one close friend and an extended African American community. Dana, also an attorney, is the mother of a 1-year-old and finds her primary support in her mother. At 36, without a partner or the prospect of one, she researched single parenthood and chose a sperm donor. Orenstein intimately describes the precarious balance that makes Dana's life viable: not only her mother's help but also high-quality on-site childcare at work, where she is also permitted to nurse. (Finding a place and obtaining permission to nurse or pump at work was a struggle for many women Orenstein interviewed.) Friends and a friendly workplace aren't enough, though: Equity in marriage is equally essential to women's happiness. Orenstein chooses Emily, a white woman in her mid-30s who is a mother of three and a partner in a consulting firm, to illustrate how equality works. Her husband Dan does half the household work and childrearing -- cheerfully and competently. What Orenstein keeps setting aside, though, is that this equality is made possible by Joanne, a younger woman who works as their nanny 10 hours a day. Though Orenstein at times puts Joanne in the foreground, interviewing her and featuring her opinions, at other times she forgets her, simply celebrating Emily and Dan's arrangement as a model of an egalitarian marriage. Would Dan still do 50 percent of the work if there were no Joanne? Would Emily be able to sustain her job? We can't know. It is disappointing that among all Orenstein's contacts -- she interviewed some 200 women -- there was no one to show us a partnership between equals that was not dependent on full-time household help. Among the more memorable of Orenstein's subjects is Mira. Twenty-six, of mixed heritage, Mira is determined to be a corporate vice president by the time she is 30. Having given a cold, hard look at what it takes to succeed, she is willing to forgo children, marriage, and what she thinks of as feminine characteristics to achieve her goals. Mira is at the far end of a continuum; other professional women in Orenstein's book have decided to stay home while their children are small. Almost all of the women she talks to are surprised by what their choices entail, by the extent of the compromises their lives require. While Orenstein does full justice to the women she has chosen to represent, that group is limited to upper middle-class women who have a broad range of choices. She is careful to include white women, women of color, lesbians, women with and without children, single mothers, mothers who work only in the home, and mothers who work outside of it as well. But all of them have options most women can barely imagine. Income boost
Most mothers who work outside the home did not get their jobs, as popular lore would have it, to pay for an upgraded lifestyle. They work because they are the sole providers for their families or because their income is essential. For these women -- for most of us -- the debate about whether to stay at home for a few years and risk being mommy-tracked is moot. The median income for a family of four in the United States in 2003 was $65,093 -- that is, half the families in the U.S. made less than that amount and half made more, according to the most recent census numbers. On average, women in two-income families contribute 30 percent of the family income. In a double-income "median" family, then, the working wife contributes over $21,000, nudging that family into the middle class. Families whose incomes are somewhere down the rungs from that $65,093 median would have a progressively harder time managing with one-third less income. As her subtitle suggests, we surely do live in a half-changed world. Orenstein is instructive about the structural conditions that widen or impede women's choices, and her book sets out issues that need to be addressed in order for women to plan their lives. She points out, for instance, that jobs requiring massive overtime and substantial travel make it difficult for both men and women to have reasonable personal lives; that women must expect considerable income loss if they take out any time at all to have children; that for fathers to be involved in child raising, not only do mothers have to let them, but men, too, must have flexible workplaces. But the choices of Mira, Emily, and Denise are cushioned by two or three times the median income in the United States. How do their stories relate to everyone else? -- Roz L. Spafford teaches writing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she runs programs in Communication and Journalism. In addition to her fiction and poetry, she has published articles on women's work and women's wages and is a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News.
Reviewed by C.E. McLaughlin, MD, a professor of sports medicine at the University of California at Berkeley.
Our reviewers are members of Consumer Health Interactive's medical advisory board.
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First published January 22, 2001
Last updated November 21, 2007
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive
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