San Antonio College Library

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.

Why do Americans work so hard? Are the long hours spent at work really necessary to increase organizational productivity? Leslie A. Perlow documents the worklife of employees who assume that for their own success and the success of their organization they must put in extended hours on the job. Perlow doesn't buy it. She challenges the basic assumption that the more employees work, the better the corporation will do. For nine months, Perlow studied...

Virginia E. Schein shatters the stereotype of mothers on welfare. The women she interviewed in cities, towns, and rural areas talked to her about their deep commitment to the children they are raising in poverty, about the abuse they have endured, about their eagerness for meaningful work, and about their inventiveness in stretching scarce dollars. In a policy debate increasingly dominated by shrill, punitive voices, Schein argues that the experiences...

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...

Balancing Act draws upon multiple census and survey sources to detail the shifting conditions under which women balance their roles as mothers, wives, and breadwinners. The authors show how women have made great strides in education, where female college enrollment now exceeds that of males, and in the workplace, where women now enter a wider variety of occupations and stay on the job longer than previous generations, even after becoming wives and...

Perceived as a somewhat weakened institution, or at least as an institution worthy of state support, the family has emerged as a major issue on the political agenda of governments in industrialized countries in recent years. Questions of how best to support families with children, working parents, lone-parents, and families in need have been given increasing attention. Talk of family-friendly policies has been recurrent on the political scene, and...

In When Work Doesn't Work Anymore, Elizabeth Perle McKenna gives passionate voice to an issue that concerns every woman working today. With eloquence and candor, she exposes the unlivable bargain women have made in order to have meaningful work in a world whose rules are still designed to suit men. Consequently, no matter how high the rise in salaries or positions, women's stress and dissatisfaction are higher still. McKenna speaks with profound understanding...

As the author of The Feminine Mystique and head of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan helped spark a movement that revolutionized the fight for equal rights and opportunities for women. Now, in Beyond Gender, Friedan argues that the old solutions no longer work. The time has come, she contends, for women and men to move forward from identity politics and gender-based, single-issue political activism. Without yielding on particular...

One volume in a series of books on the status of American women, this work focuses on workforce issues such as unemployment, welfare, pensions, retirement, and the family.