|
Employed mothers with school-aged children
often choose night work over the day or evening shift because night
work maximizes family time. It lets them welcome their children home
from school, and supervise dinner, homework, and bedtime. According
to sociologist Anita Garey, it also enables women to define themselves
as available at home in the daytime--to be the kind of mothers they
want to be--even if they are asleep and their children are in school.
Yet most describe serious sleep-deprivation. Reports from three nurses
Garey interviewed for this book show the compromises these women make.
- Patricia skips sleep an entire day
to make a dance costume for her daughter. On weekends, she also cuts
back on her own sleep to take her child to dance lessons and other
activities.
- Arlene, a single mother, recalls rushing
home from work to get her first-grader dressed and take him to school.
She'd return home and sleep until school was out at noon. Sometimes
she'd oversleep, so aggravating the teachers that she began sleeping
in her car in front of the school. She still had a hard time waking
up, and often was late because the school wouldn't allow the boy to
leave the building alone. One presumes she was far from an alert driver.
After waiting five years, Arlene finally got a slot on the day shift.
- Julia describes her vacation: "I
slept and slept and slept and slept and slept and slept."
The view is widespread in this country,
Garey asserts, that working and mothering are conflicting roles. Why
is it that men with jobs who are parents rarely are called "working
fathers," she asks, when women with the same attributes are termed "working
mothers?" And why do people think being a "full-time mother," is inconsistent
with being employed?
Garey talked extensively with 37 female hospital workers with children
living at home for this book. These women hold jobs typical of the kinds
of female-dominated occupations that account for most women's employment
in the United States today. Nearly 3 in 4 married women with children
under age 18 in this country are in the labor force. Although popular
magazines and even scholarly studies often focus on professional and
corporate women with briefcases and nannies, such women comprise only
a small fraction of this group. Garey spoke instead with registered
nurses, licensed practical nurses, nurse's aides, secretaries, typists,
clerks, and janitorial service workers.
She documents the multifaceted ways employed women with children think
about working and mothering, telling how they weave these threads into
a unified and complex tapestry. The American Sociological Association's
Family Section recently named this book the year's best book-length
contribution to family sociology.
In a chapter called "Motherhood on the Night Shift," Garey notes that
the night shift often provides additional pay with lower child care
costs, because the children's father or another family member can be
home while mom is at work. The night shift, however, gives couples the
least time to be together, awake or asleep. Chronic lack of sleep--trying
to get by on about 4 hours a night--often becomes the tipping point
that forces women to seek other schedules or leave their jobs.
"The finding that many mothers want to be able to do certain things
as mothers," Garey notes, "does not mean that these women are not also
committed as workers." Yet they lack societal support for combining
these goals. A United Nations survey of 152 International Labor Organization
member countries found the United States to be one of only 6 countries
not requiring paid maternity leave. The others all provide or require
that employers provide it for 12 to 28 weeks. The Family and Medical
Leave Act in this country, which does not apply to all workplaces, requires
only 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave.
Garey makes a compelling case for changing this law and finding other
ways to better accommodate the joint tasks of working and mothering.
Families will be the ultimate beneficiaries, she points out. "Almost
all workers are connected to families in some way."
|
