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Sara Ann Friedman
Work Matters: Women Talk
About Their Jobs and Their Lives
Viking Press, 1996
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Sara Ann Friedman
Work Matters: Women Talk
About Their Jobs and Their Lives
Viking Press, 1996
Reviewed by Teresa Callies
I approached Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives by Sara Ann Friedman with a great deal of anticipation, and ended up feeling ambivalent - enlightened and enthused, but disappointed - in much the same way as many of the women interviewed in the book. Perhaps I had expected something new or groundbreaking. What I got was a fairly interesting snapshot of American women and their lives, as told to and interpreted by Friedman. However, it wasn't quite enough.
Friedman is a product of the 1950's. She graduated from Smith College in the days when the only degree a woman was expected to get was her "Mrs." She says she was no different from her college friends, and took the expected traditional female path - marriage and motherhood. Her road to enlightenment about women and work began when she co-authored her first book, No Experience Necessary, a career guide for women with liberal arts degrees. She began the book the same year that Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique was published. Friedman's work was finally published in 1971.
Along the way, her consciousness was raised by realizing that women who had to work, women for whom motherhood did not provide a refuge from the business world, were not visible either in her psyche or the nation's psyche. She confesses that until she began writing Work Matters, she didn't realize that, in 1960, 23 million women were already in the workplace, and more than one-third were working mothers. Her belief that women didn't work outside the home in those days was so strong that she was genuinely shocked by the statistics.
Friedman's goal in writing her latest book was to discover just how things have changed for women since she began her first book in 1965. Over a five-year period she talked to more than 200 women, some of whom were working during the earlier era, and many others of whom had not yet been born. She tried to reach a broad, cross-section of American society by interviewing women of various ages, classes, races, sexual orientations, marital status, and geographic regions.
Her main discovery was that, despite endless public discussion by and about working women, and despite the many changes that have taken place in the last 30 years, many women keep to themselves their most important truth: that "what we do matters to us."
It was hard for me to get beyond that kind of naivete in Friedman's introduction, perhaps because I came along after Friedman, and, thus, am a product of a slightly different time and economic background.
My mother was one of the 23 million women working in 1960. She was a single parent with three children to raise. She never had the luxury of staying at home, certainly not during my childhood. The basic idea that "work matters" was always assumed in our household. However, once I kept in mind that this was Friedman's snapshot of working women, and that it was her interpretation of the "picture she took," I could enjoy the stories that unfolded.
Basic truths about women, their lives and attitudes toward work, came from the voices of those interviewed. I also learned about Friedman's growth as a writer and her particular journey through life as I read the stories she recorded about other women's lives.
One of the most interesting interviews is in the first section of the book. It deals with breaking through barriers and overcoming discrimination in the workplace. Friedman talked to Laurel Bellows, then president of the Chicago Bar Association. Bellows, married and the mother of a teenage daughter, described how "having it all" for women is just the starting place for most men. She talked about how women have to work twice as hard and perform twice as well as men in order to go the same distance as men.
She also talked about the price that women pay when they have to judge other women. Women have felt pressure to be the best, but also to "best" one another. What are women's responsibilities to themselves and one another, especially when they are conflicted about the competition? Bellows believes that women who are extremely successful are not willing to accept the average woman, and that this pattern must be changed if women's place in the world of work is to improve overall.
"... I and every other women in my position should be willing to bring along the average woman. We should give them the same push, include them in the network, share our experience with them about how to make it. We should help women in business become the CEOs of the future. They're the ones who are going to be giving out the business. If we are not supportive, we are not going to grow. If it's a man, other men say, "He's a good guy." As a routine, they reach back and bring younger men along. Women don't do that. They don't open up the circle. They see this as breeding competition and say things like, 'If I teach her everything I know she's going to complete with me. I like being the only woman.'"
The next section of the book deals with "a woman's worth." Friedman interviewed women about their feelings about money. Along the way, she writes eloquently about her own fears for her survival following her divorce in 1980. She discusses the common fears that women have. While they've been trained by society to be caretakers of others first, they are taught that they cannot, and that they should not, take care of themselves.
She discovers that "money and self-worth are uneasy partners for women." If women learn to take care of themselves financially, will they lose their femininity or identity? Worse yet, will they lose the love and respect of the men in their lives? She found that her interviewees wanted to talk about money issues. They wanted to find out what other women were saying. She also found that the higher a woman's income, the "quieter" she became, the greater her embarrassment, and the stronger the admonition that Friedman not reveal the amount of money she earned. Carol King discusses the conflict she has with men and money:
"I no longer struggle about money. The only place I struggle with it is in my relationships with men. Because men do have trouble with a very successful woman. Because I do ask for what I want, and although on some level I think men like that, on another level, I scare the hell out of them. Men aren't used to dealing with a woman who is direct and honest and very upfront about what she wants and who makes a lot of money. It terrifies them. That's part of me. I'm unable to give that up. It's not a question of being willing."
Friedman's interview with Sandy Pope, Executive Director of the Coalition for Labor Union Women, was no less revealing about money conflicts and the fact that money is a symbol for power in American society in terms of personal relationships and self-reliance:
"The men don't start getting resentful when the paycheck starts coming in. They get resentful when the woman starts expressing interest in going to college or somehow controlling her own life. Once she does, it's usually the point of no return. It's very risky. It causes a lot of conflict. Parents aren't supportive. In-laws yell at them. They're abandoning their children because there are more demands on their time when they earn more."
Friedman's work with her book led her to believe that the American workplace is a relentlessly male institution, and she also tackles the subject of combining family life and work. In her era, women often continued working after marriage until their first pregnancy. At the time they began to "show," their jobs were history. Today there are 25 million working mothers, and new laws prohibit practices which discriminate against women in the workplace. Most young women are planning their lives to include some kind of work while raising a family.
Friedman says these changes did not come about by accident, but were hard won by women who demanded them. While things have changed for the better, there is danger, too, of regression. She notes that only 15% of large companies or government agencies offer daycare services on-site. She also advocates a real work/family revolution that includes child-care benefits and family leave policies for both women and men, a shorter work week for both, and a shift of energy from work to family life. Real choice includes work and family, not work or family.
Lawyer Ann O'Shea discusses her own conflicts with both: "More and more I started to realize that work was not going to define me, and that my life satisfaction was not going to come from work. Maybe some part of it would, but the bulk of my joy, my interest, my satisfaction was going to come from my kids, and I think of this often as heresy, not as something that is politically correct. Certainly not back in the seventies when I was saying I would have it all."
Friedman also discusses her surprise when discussing how far her expectations about work and love were from the reality of the women she interviewed. When she started, she thought she would discover a new generation of women for whom love was no longer a major issue, who had found true marriage partnerships comprised of shared careers, shared child-care, and husbands following their wives to new workplace assignments. Instead, she found the opposites of these. Husbands are still threatened by their wives' incomes.
She found that the most significant change of the last three decades has not been the increased numbers of women in the workplace, but their change in attitudes and the anxiety that comes with those changes. The women she talked with indicated that defying old values and changing society is almost impossible without a willing partner. A true shot at equality works when both partners are committed to those ideals, and, naturally, money plays a role. Sally Merriam, a thirty-something divorcee in a new relationship sums it up like this: "Because of my childhood, because of my marriage, because of the way the world is, I associate being economically dependent on somebody else with subservience, a lack of freedom, and a lack of power."
Throughout the course of the book, the reader sees how Friedman's journey has altered her assumptions about social change, the women's movement, and the world of work. Women still struggle with independence, money/power issues, and their love relationships after thirty years, and still have conflicting feelings about these things. All this seemed to surprise the author. She comes to the realization that real change comes slowly. She says the desire to integrate work and love in a society which does everything to make it impossible for women promotes profound anxiety.
Women have always worked, but she claims that they now want to acknowledge their desires about work and to confront the conflicts within themselves and their partners. None of this came as a surprise to me and will not come as a surprise to a great many other women.
In fact, given the swinging political pendulum that we've witnessed over the past three decades, it is difficulty to believe that greater equality and social changes for women has resulted. We take a few steps forward, and, then, a couple of steps back. Change isn't linear. It ebbs and flows, as do the fortunes of the political parties.
While I enjoyed reading Friedman's book and also enjoyed learning about her personal growth and the greater awareness that developed along her writing journey, I really sensed a lack of the bigger picture, one that extends before 1965. Does she realize that American women were talking about their rights back in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, when they held their first convention to discuss their Declarations of Sentiments, Resolutions and Principles? Lynn Sherr and Jurate Kazickas wrote a wonderful book called Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women's Landmarks. A quick perusal of this book will provide the sense of history that is missing from Friedman's book.
When I was shopping for Friedman's book, I came across a handmade greeting card with a quotation by Gloria Steinem. The quote summed up nicely the dichotomy in men's and women's lives, and it goes like this:
"I've yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and career."
Teresa Callies
July 27, 1996
E-mail: tcallies@hotmail.com
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