E-Book Overview
The wrenching decision facing successful women choosing between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living. Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. The professional level these women have attained requires a huge commitment of time, energy, and emotion that seems natural to employers and clients, who assume that a career deserves single-minded allegiance. Meanwhile, these women must confront the cultural model of family that defines marriage and motherhood as a woman's primary vocation. This ideal promises women creativity, intimacy, and financial stability in caring for a family. It defines children as fragile and assumes that men lack the selflessness and patience that children's primary caregivers need. This ideal is taken for granted in much of contemporary society. The power of these assumptions is enormous but not absolute. Competing Devotions identifies women executives who try to reshape these ideas. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.
E-Book Content
COMPETING
DEVOTIONS
C O M P E T I N G D E V O T I O N S Career and Family among Women Executives
M A RY
B L A I R - L O Y
Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2003
Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blair-Loy, Mary. Competing devotions : career and family among women executives / Mary Blair-Loy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-01089-2 (alk. paper) 1. Work and family—United States. 2. Women executives—United States. 3. Dual-career families—United States. I. Title. HD4904.25.B57 2003 305.43'658—dc21 2002192238
To David
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1
1 The Devotion to Work Schema
19
2 The Devotion to Family Schema
50
3 Reinventing Schemas: Creating Part-Time Careers
91
4 Reinventing Schemas: Family Life among Full-Time Executive Women
115
5 Turning Points
142
6 Implications
172
Appendix: Methods and Data
203
Notes
219
References
239
Acknowledgments
261
Index
263
COMPETING
DEVOTIONS
I N T R O D U C T I O N
American women today have the opportunity and experience to be highly successful in a world that previously excluded them.1 Within the past twenty years women have started to compete for the prize jobs in American businesses. Yet during this same period, firms have increased their demands on professionals.2 Some women, willing and able to devote long hours to their careers, have thrived in traditionally male jobs. At the same time, many women feel that mothers should devote a great deal of time and energy to their children. Many women are torn between these seemingly irreconcilable commitments to work and family.3 I study success stories of liberal feminism: women who have reached senior positions in a male-dominated world. Using in-depth interviews and life-history questionnaires, I analyze the ways these women struggle to reconcile work dedication with their commitment to family. Althoug