I wrote a paper for school earlier this year titled Women and the Work Life Balance. It was a very interesting study. Here are snipets of my paper...

Women have a unique job. In addition to childbearing, childrearing, domestic, and familial duties; seventy two million women also work full time. (US Department of Labor, 2008) The demands of maintaining so many roles are often dizzying. Consequentially, there is an urgent need for balance in the lives of these women. The Work-Life balance describes the balancing act between work and personal life.

Angela Thomas-Jones advises women to be realistic about trying to achieve the work life balance. She asks women to accept the fact that they are not home for eight or nine hours and when they get home they can’t possibly compensate for those hours lost, that would equate to working two fulltime jobs. “At some point one (job) will need more attention than the other. If you realise this then you can decide about your career and family trajectories.”

The 20th century gave way to the Superwoman or what may be better known as the Superwoman myth. Women gained the right to work full time, but their childrearing and home keeping duties did not disappear. Instead women found that working full-time was in addition to marriage, childbearing, childrearing, cooking, cleaning, laundering, gardening, etc. Instead of women having one full-time job as wife and mother; women now have two full time jobs; wife/mother and career woman. This is the crux of the work-life balance; women and their pursuit of juggling two full-time jobs.

At the onset of the Women’s Liberation Movement women thought that “being successful required becoming a man…success was about the male definition of money and power…”(Belkin, 2003) Today, “when women talk about success they use words like satisfaction, balance, and sanity.” (Belkin, 2003) In fact, “seven out of ten working women tell pollsters they would stay home with their kids if they could…”(Bennett’s, 2007) Many women started asking, “What happened to all the self-fulfillment we were supposed to feel? …What’s wrong with me? I have everything! Why am I not happy? Why am I so tired?”(Carter, 1995) By the end of the eighties women began to understand, “we were being used. We were lawyers, doctors, judges…but we were still swabbing out the toilets at home!” (Carter, 1995) Women are the ones caring for sick children in the middle of the night and taking off from work the next day. Women still do almost all the housework and children’s homework. “None of this sounds much like real freedom…women seem more burdened and vulnerable than free.” (Bruno, 1998) “Women use phrases like “torn apart, ripped in two, to describe their lives…”. (Berg, 1986) What is there that makes combining a job and motherhood so terribly hard? (Berg, 1986) The answer according to Berg: “Guilt, the excoriating interface between our two roles…insistent guilt.”( Berg 1986) Working women feel guilty about working long hours, too tired for sex, too tired for housework, not spending enough time with children, missing important milestones in children, childcare arrangements, quality time vs. quantity time, etc. Working women are bombarded with guilt, and there is no end to all the things working women feel guilty about.

It was just fifty years ago that women coveted the role of working outside the home, yet today seventy percent of them would choose home. Not even a century later most women bemoan their positions and many women are opting out of the work-life balance for a semblance of balance. Now that women have it all, they are finding out that they don’t want it all and it isn’t worth it all.