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Departing from mainstream research, Damaske finds three main employment patterns: steady, pulled back, and interrupted. She discovers that middle-class women are more likely to remain steadily at work and working-class women more likely to experience multiple bouts of unemployment. She argues that the public debate is wrongly centered on need because women respond to pressure to be selfless mothers and emphasize family need as the reason for their work choices. Whether the decision is to stay home or go to work, women from all classes say work decisions are made for their families.
In For the Family?, Sarah Damaske at last provides a far more nuanced and richer picture of women, work, and class than the one commonly drawn.
Chapter 1: Women's Work Trajectories: Need, Choice And Women's Strategies
Part I: Expectations about Work
Chapter 2: The Shape of Women's Work Pathways Chapter 3: A Major Career Woman? How Women Develop Early Expectations about Work
Part II: Work Pathways
Chapter 4: Staying Steady: Good Work and Family Support Across Classes Chapter 5: Pulling Back: Divergent Routes to Similar Pathways Chapter 6: A Life Interrupted
Part III: Negotiating Expectations
Chapter 7: For the Family: How Women Account for Work Decisions Chapter 8: Having It All? Egalitarian Dreams Deferred Appendix
JonathanJonathan
Posted October 2, 2011
Sarah Damaske has written an excellent book. The traditional story we've told ourselves is that working class women stay working out of necessity while middle class women have the opportunity to opt out of working in order to start families. Well, thanks to Damaske's research, it turns out that women's work pathways are far more complicated than that. In For the Family? the writing is as entertaining as the findings are convincing and the thinking is elegant. Damaske presents us with stirring portraits of some of the 80 women she interviewed for this book and often I felt as if I were sitting in the kitchens and living rooms, myself participating in the firsthand telling of these women's lives. The evidence and findings are thoroughly and convincingly presented, the thinking is penetrating and broad and as readers and members of society at large we're challenged to address ourselves to the problems Damaske's book is concerned with. Perhaps most exciting, however, is that in For the Family? a powerful and creative thinker of this new generation of sociologists is discovered.
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Overview
In the contentious debate about women and work, conventional wisdom holds that middle-class women can decide if they work, while working-class women need to work. Yet, even after the recent economic crisis, middle-class women are more likely to work than working-class women. Sarah Damaske deflates the myth that financial needs dictate if women work, revealing that financial resources make it easier for women to remain at work and not easier to leave it.
Departing from ...