A MYTH

New Book Challenges Assumptions About Working Mothers

By Robin Wilson

Steve is a policeman in a town outside Dallas. He works nights, primarily so he can be at home when his 7-year-old stepdaughter returns from school. Connie, Steve's wife, is a flight attendant whose schedule is erratic.

Last month, Connie was called to work on short notice and Steve couldn't get home from work before she was due to leave. Connie spent hours finding someone to watch their daughter. It is at times like that when the couple feels the strain of their dual-career marriage.

Still, Connie insists, she would never quit her job to stay home. "That would drive me nuts," she says in an interview, just before leaving for the airport one afternoon.

Steve and Connie are among four couples whose lives are detailed in She Works/He Works (HarperCollins), a new book by two academics. The book, which refers to the men and women by first names only, is based on the authors' study of 300 dual-career couples, which was financed by a $1-million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 31 million two-earner couples. She Works/He Works argues that these couples defy stereotypes about women's and men's roles -- and about what makes for happy families.

The authors, Rosalind Barnett, a senior scholar at Radcliffe College's Murray Research Center, and Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University, have been the co-authors of two other books on women's issues. The first myth shattered by their new study, they say, is that everyone in the family is happier if Mom stays home.

On the contrary, in a chapter called "The Myth of the Miserable Working Woman," Ms. Barnett and Ms. Rivers say such a choice can be devastating for mothers. Being at home with small children all day and taking care of the household can be drudgery, they say, citing studies of women who did just that in the 1950s.

"We're fighting this myth that women are terribly happy at home. What we know is that home contains more dangers to their well-being than work," says Ms. Rivers. "Housework is worse than being on the assembly line at Ford."

Even women who simply cut back at work to spend more time at home may be making a mistake, say the authors. "Mommy-tracking your way to mental health sounds great, but it can be risky," they say.

Studies show that women who work fewer than 20 hours per week feel even more hassled than those who are employed full time, the authors note. This is probably because women who choose part-time work often are given less-challenging assignments, and because part-timers may feel responsible for their jobs as well as for managing everything that must be done at home, the authors say. Women who work full time, on the other hand, are more likely to share tasks with their husbands, or to hire someone to handle household work.

The study involved a series of interviews with couples over four years. It dealt with men's lives as well. Although men are thought to have the ability to tune out problems at home when they are on the job, Ms. Rivers and Ms. Barnett say this isn't so. Rather than claw their way up the corporate ladder, the authors say, many men are trading high-pressure jobs for work that will allow them more time with their children.

"While the media seems never to tire of stories about high-level women abandoning their careers to go home, we rarely hear about the men who cut their hours," the authors say.

Men and women are better off now than in the days of Ozzie and Harriet, Ms. Barnett and Ms. Rivers believe, but what about the kids? The authors' response: No data show that children are harmed when both parents work.

Other researchers, however, argue that children need a parent at home, and that day care can be dangerous for young ones. Books like She Works/He Works, they worry, make it attractive for mothers to jettison their role at home.

Charmaine Crouse Yoest, a graduate student in government at the University of Virginia and the mother of two small children, wrote a book on motherhood. "The research is piling up that it's very difficult for children, particularly babies, to be placed in non-maternal care," she says. "But you have this whole movement saying intelligent women shouldn't spend their time this way. It is emptying motherhood of all social content." Ms. Yoest's book, published this month by Zondervan Publishing House, is called Mother in the Middle: Searching for Peace in the Mommy Wars.

Ms. Yoest says Ms. Barnett and Ms. Rivers are out of touch with what women want. Most, she says, don't mind sacrificing career goals to spend more time with their kids. "You find these working mothers saying, 'I'm crazy about these kids, and it's killing me to be apart from them,'" she says.

Both Ms. Rivers and Ms. Barnett are mothers, too, but they were mavericks. When their children were young, in the late 1960s and early '70s, they worked -- at a time when most mothers didn't. Ms. Barnett took off only two weeks when her first child, Jonathan, was born in 1967.

She also helped form an after-school program when her second child, Amy, started kindergarten, because she knew she could not quit work in the afternoon to pick up her kids. Such programs are now common at elementary schools across the country.

Amy Barnett calls her mother a role model. "My mother left me to grow the way I wanted to," she says in a telephone interview from Paris, where she has started a business that helps tourists.

Jonathan Barnett also admires his mother's accomplishments. But as he and his girlfriend talk about marriage, they are contemplating a different approach to child-rearing from the one his mother took.

Mr. Barnett is starting in an M.B.A. program at the University of Chicago this summer. He and his girlfriend have "talked about a need to make sacrifices" in raising children, he says. "She's said that during their early years, she wants to stay home. I'd like to make that possible."