Winter 2004

Volume 33
Number 2

Balancing Act

The gangly teenage boy grew six inches in six months and had not quite learned how to move in his new body. He kept automatically returning to the mental models of his former body, and each time he did, he lurched forward unsteadily. That is what the academy is like in its halting, awkward accommodation to women with family obligations. It has invited them inside the ivied walls, and it has proclaimed, to some degree, that it wants to affirm families. But then it reverts to old mental models. When it does, everything and everyone totters, especially women.

Women are the majority of undergraduates and masters candidates. Women are also the majority, or are nearly even with men, in almost all doctoral programs, in law school, and in medical school; and they are increasing their numbers in business schools. Many earlier barriers to entering professional careers are crumbling. But institutions have forgotten that in most cases, when you admit or hire a woman, she comes deeply attached to family obligations, obligations that continue throughout her professional career.

Anthropologist Micaela Di Leonardi refers to this labor, most typically done by women, as kinwork. It is usually unpaid and rarely acknowledged, but functions as the glue that holds people, families, and communities together. Like washing dishes, kinwork is not noticed until someone stops doing it. Academic institutions have their own version of kinwork that allows some schools to boast with pride that they are "like a family." Not surprisingly, often most of the institutional kinwork is also done by women.

But given the current socialization and structures of academia, kinwork needs to be understood as an integral part of women' lives--whether they are working as secretaries, faculty members, cafeteria workers, or college presidents. The time is long overdue for colleges to create policies and practices that take kinwork into account along with research, teaching, and service.

The college that has opted to hire women, then, needs to consider what to do when a woman has a baby, nurses a sick child, has to get to the childcare center before six o'clock, needs to see a child's theatrical performance, cares for a frail parent, or attends to a dying one. Because the academy's default system still reverts to the old model--"someone will take care of all that for you"--it hasn't yet developed new structures, policies, and, most of all, new cultural attitudes toward the integration of family responsibilities into one's professional life.

In the old model, there never was a conflict between having a rich professional life and a warm and loving family. At least there was not a conflict if you were male. In that model, rooted in the nineteenth-century notion of separate spheres for men and women, men with families went out to work and women's work was to take care of everything else. Today, when nearly 72 percent of mothers work, some major adjustments need to be made. But colleges and universities are behind the curve in figuring out how to catch up to the present.

In the meantime, women juggle, multi-task, sometimes furtively attend to family matters, and sag under the stress of it all. This issue of On Campus with Women gives eloquent testimony to the fortitude, endurance, and exhaustion of many women as they attempt to find individual solutions for what should be a public policy and institutional issue.

In a New York Times article on Mother's Day, May 9, 2004, Andrew J. Cherlin and Prem Krishnamurthy report on a survey by Sandra Hofferth and John Sandberg. The latter compare the lives and attitudes of employed and non-employed mothers. "Working mothers get less sleep, watch less TV, spend less time with their children, and generally have less free time than mothers who don't work," the article asserts. That same unacceptable level of stress is evident throughout the OCWW articles as women talk about their lives as graduate students, faculty, and administrators.

Report after report on the status of women on college campuses identifies this same, nearly constant challenge women feel as they seek to balance the demands of work and family commitments. Providing a childbirth policy is certainly a necessary step, but it hardly begins to address the magnitude of the demographic and cultural shift we have witnessed in the last four decades.

Revealingly, the New York Times article points out that the percentage of working mothers in the survey who say they "get a great deal" or "a very great deal" of pleasure out of their family lives is actually higher than the percentage of non-employed mothers. The majority of women don't want to have to choose between a family and work. They want both. They want work that is meaningful to them but also want to be good daughters to parents, good mothers to children, and good sisters to siblings. Academic women want to live part of their lives in academia, but they want to honor the kinwork in their lives as well. If, through new policies, structures, and cultural frameworks, colleges and universities can finally catch up with the dramatic shifts that have occurred, they might actually be able to move in the future with grace.