Woman's work: Seeking identity through occupations

Abstract

Most adult women now hold full-time jobs outside the home, and the proportion is growing. While women's labor market experiences and successes have come closer to men's experiences and successes, their attachment to a labor market career, at least for married women, is not the compulsion that it is and has been for men. While many women have won the right to go off to the corporate citadel every morning, they have more often than not retained the obligation to bear most of the responsebility for the home. Ideally, postfeminist women woumen would like to be able to strike a balance between the responsibilities of the job and home. In reality, they are forced to choose between the two. Women have a right to seek identity through work as well as through parenthood-as men have always done. Those few women who insist on the right to meaningful work and the right to a family will have to push for changes in the work place as hard as they had to push to gain admittance to the jobs in the first place.