San Antonio College Library

The author reopens the politically incorrect question of just how much children need their parents, especially their mothers. She contends that absent parents--and children who feel like just another chore to be outsourced--are the common denominator of recent epidemics among young people, including obesity, STDs, behavioral problems such as attention deficit disorder, and the use of psychiatric medication in even very young children; and asks whether...

Nostalgia for the idealized family of the 1950s is rampant in the news and on the campaign trail, but the modern family - with both parents fully employed outside the home - is here to stay. In fact, dual-income couples with children now make up the majority of American families and, according to a million-dollar study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, these families are really getting it right: men are sharing the burdens of parenting...

In a much-publicized and much-maligned 2003 New York Times article, "The Opt-Out Revolution," the journalist Lisa Belkin made the controversial argument that highly educated women who enter the workplace tend to leave upon marrying and having children. Women Who Opt Out is a collection of original essays by the leading scholars in the field of work and family research, which takes a multi-disciplinary approach in questioning the basic thesis of "the...

Working mothers today confront not only conflicting demands on their time and energy but also conflicting ideas about how they are to behave: they must be nurturing and unselfish while engaged in child rearing but competitive and ambitious at work. As more and more women enter the workplace, it would seem reasonable for society to make mothering a simpler and more efficient task. Instead, Sharon Hays points out in this original and provocative book,...

Examines the impact that a leave to care for children or elderly parents has on the career of professional women and proposes strategies that companies can undertake to retain and reintegrate talented female employees.

Overview: When significant numbers of college-educated American women began, in the early twenty-first century, to leave paid work to become stay-at-home mothers, an emotionally charged national debate erupted. Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy, a professional economist and an anthropologist, respectively, decided to step back from the sometimes overheated rhetoric around the so-called mommy wars. They wondered what really inspired women to opt out, and...

Taps into the quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered in the Women's Employment Study (WES), offering insights into the lives of women in an urban Michigan county who left welfare for work and the role their family decisions play in their labor market decisions. Describes the day-to-day struggles these women face and the reasons they tend to remain in low-wage, dead-end jobs.

In her remarkable new book, The Time Bind, Arlie Hochschild brings us startling news of the ways in which home is being invaded by the time pressures and efficiencies of work, while the workplace is, for many parents, being transformed into a strange kind of surrogate home. For three years at a Fortune 500 company, she interviewed everyone from top executives to factory hands, sat in on business meetings, followed sales teams onto golf courses, and...