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How Feminism, the Market, and Policy Shape Family Life
Yale University Press
May 2008
On Sale: April 28, 2008
240 pages ISBN: 0300119674 EAN: 9780300119671 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The question of how best to combine work and family life has
led to lively debates in recent years. Both a lifestyle and
a policy issue, it has been addressed psychologically,
socially, and economically, and conclusions have been hotly
contested. But as Neil Gilbert shows in this
penetrating and provocative book, we haven’t looked closely
enough at how and why these questions are framed, or who
benefits from the proposed answers.
A
Mother’s Work takes a hard look at the unprecedented
rise in childlessness, along with the outsourcing of family
care and household production, which have helped to alter
family life since the 1960s. It challenges the conventional
view on how to balance motherhood and employment, and
examines how the choices women make are influenced by the
culture of capitalism, feminist expectations, and the social
policies of the welfare state. Gilbert argues that while the
market ignores the essential value of a mother’s work,
prevailing norms about the social benefits of work have been
overvalued by elites whose opportunities and circumstances
little resemble those of most working- and middle-class
mothers. And the policies that have been crafted too often
seem friendlier to the market than to the family. Gilbert
ends his discussion by looking at the issue internationally,
and he makes the case for reframing the debate to include a
wider range of social values and public benefits that
present more options for managing work and family
responsibilities.
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