Full Description
What is the relationship between work and family in a world where employment creates endless tensions for families and families create endless tensions for the workplace? This collection of articles broadens this discussion by addressing issues from the perspectives of often neglected populations: from white middle-class women with young children to people of colour, to poor families, to the families gays and lesbians are struggling to construct, to fathers and to older children. To discuss work and family is also to discuss gender. Ranging from California's Silicon Valley to a remote fishing village, part one shows how new work arrangements have created new expectations for what it means to be a woman or a man, and how slow and uneven the pace of change can be. Nowhere are the tensions of work and family more potent than around childcare. Part two takes up these tensions, showing how various ""solutions"" to caring for children of all ages (whether infants or teenagers) create problems. Parts three and four turn outward to show how the relationships between families and work are changing the relationships between families and the communities in which they live and generating social policy dilemmas.
Contents
Part 1 Family Labour and the Construction of Gender: Being the ""Go-To Guy"" - Fatherhood, Masculinity and the Organization of Work in Silicon Valley, Marianne Cooper; My Wife Can Tell Me Who I Know - Methodological and Conceptual Problems in Studying Fathers, Annette Lareau; Constructing Gender and Occupational Segregation - Women and Work in Fishing Communities, Carrie L. Yodanis; Domesticity and the Political Economy of Lesbigay Families, Christopher Carrington. Part II Employment and the Care of Children: Halving it All - The Mother and Mr Mom, Francine Deutsch; I'm Here, But I'm There - The Meanings of Transnational Motherhood, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Ernestine Avila; Using Kin for Childcare - Embedment in the Socioeconomic Networks of Extended Families, Lynet Uttal; Work-Family Issues of Mothers of Teenage Children, Demie Kurz. Part III Family, Community and Social Context: Black Picket Fences - Growing Up in Groveland, Mary Pattillo-McCoy; Single Mothers and Social Support - The Commitment to, and Retreat from, Reciprocity, Margaret K. Nelson; The Third Shift - Gender and Care Work Outside the Home, Naomi Gerstel; Producing Family Time - Practices of Leisure Activity Beyond the Home, Marjorie L. DeVault. Part IV Policy, Politics and Working Families: Challenges for Studying Care after AFDC, Stacey Oliker; Living with Violence - Women's Reliance on Abusive Men in Their Transitions from Welfare to Work, Ellen K. Scott, Andrew S. London, Nancy A. Myers; Union's Responses to Family Concerns, Naomi Gerstel, Dan Clawson; The Contradictory Effects of Work and Family on Political Activism, Rebecca E. Klatch.
