CAN WORKING MOTHERS HAVE IT ALL TODAY?

Can working women have it all today? No, say a majority of respondents in a 30-year study conducted by Cambridge University's Professor Professor Jacqueline Scott. Prof Scott of the University's Department of Sociology, compared social attitude from the 1980s to the present as to whether family life suffered when a mother went to work.

In 1994, 51 percent of women in Britain and 52 percent of men said they believed the family would not suffer if a woman returned to work. By 2002 those numbers had fallen to 46 percent of women and 42 percent of men. Clearly, as Professor Scott, puts it the, "shine of the super-mum" is wearing off.

Those of us who aren't trying to compete compete with Nicola Horlick or now with the other famous super-mum, the new U.S. vice-president-elect and mother of five, Sara Palin, can find some find solace in the implications of Scott's findings.

Scott says that we are headed the wrong way in the UK, "after a period when there was a greater support at an ideological level for an equal division of labour..." She defines the problem when she states, "If we are to make progress in devising policies that encourage working opportunities for women, we need to know more about what gender roles people view as practical, as possible and as fair."

The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equal rights between women and men in the UK, said it in even stronger terms, explaining why attempts to force women into a male-created workplace were failing.

Commenting on the study, Kat Banyard, Campaigns Officer at the Fawcett Society, said, "This study points to the fact that attempts to shoe-horn women into workplaces made by men for men have failed. Women still shoulder the bulk of caring and housework at home. The long working hours culture and lack of flexible working means women are presented with impossible choices--forced to choose between caring for a family at home or maximising their career opportunities. The result? Motherhood carries a penalty and women and men are straight-jacketed by gender stereotypes."

She goes on to say that working couples need "wholesale transformation".

Public opinion and the media would seem to concur. The Independent.co.uk in their coverage of this study, admitted that in one respect the finding is "profoundly
dispiriting" in that "it indicates that, for all the efforts by women to achieve all-round equality, the old gender stereotypes never really went away..." and that it is business as usual--"the women left to take the rap and who are expected to adjust their ambitions."

Another question that this study raises is who is expected to do the baby-minding and household work? Scott notes with some scorn it would seem that today's younger generation still expects the division of household chores their parents grew up with-- "gender role division people thought was eradicated 25 years ago,"
Scott said.

The author of When Mothers Work: Loving Our Children Without Sacrificing Ourselves, Joan K. Peters, reminds readers that the "mother at home" is the American ideal. The traditional style of American parenting is really parenting equals mothering. Peters believes the answer is that the idea of mothering will have to broaden and evolve until fathers do equal "motherwork." The family of the future depends on people changing their attitudes about mothers who work.

Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, wrote about how unique to Western culture it was for the mother to take sole responsibility for children.

Jesse Bernard, the "mother" of sociology, wrote that the mother alone with her children, may be the worst child-rearing arrangement of any culture.

Women with children are working more than ever, according to Reuters in a June 12, 2008 article, despite the so-called "opting out" revolution popularized by the media according to a new study. Using data from the U.S. Census and the American Community Survey, Christine Percheski, of Princeton University, found that the number of full-time working mothers born between 1966 and 1975 has risen to 38 percent, up from 5.6 percent among women born between 1926 and 1935.

More benefits are needed for working mothers, but clearly more division of labor at home is crucial to family well-being as a whole. It is true that there have been numerous economic measures to help women in the workforce with no social drive to address the problems that result.