The Problematic of Work Life Balance, Part 1

Debjani Chakravarty

This guest post is by Debjani Chakaravarty, a PhD in the Women and Gender Studies Program at Arizona State Debjani ChakravartyUniversity who worked as a journalist and a social worker in India. Her global approach to this much discussed topic of work life balance starts today and will continue through the week. Please ask your questions, tell your stories, and leave your comments for Debjani in the comments section below.

Here is Cosmo’s sagacious take on the issue: “When you have a million balls in the air— job, gym, boyfriend—life becomes a blur. You’re so busy struggling just to get through the week; you lose sight of what’s really important to you”—this particular notion of work life balance has generated a million self discovery quizzes and “work-life balance calculators”, been the subject of many self improvement books and is almost always directed to women, and working mothers.

From the popular framing of this issue, it does seem that it is only women that must achieve this fine balance, women with jobs, access to formal workout spaces and with a man and/or children in their lives.

Let us, for the moment consider the question of women’s work life balance, which is a significant discourse is women’s biopsychosocial health. The Handbook of Girls’ and Women’s Psychological Health (2006) names the stress of balancing the work inside and outside the home as a major trigger for depression in working mothers. The advent of capitalism, industrial and scientific revolution and the spread of globalization in the last hundred years have placed women’s labor outside the home, in a more definite, visible, entrenched manner. The idea of prioritizing and achieving a balance between multiple role sets can be harrowing. Gendered asymmetries at work (more unpaid work at home and similar paid work in the economy with lesser reward) increase women’s stress and constitute a form of invisible oppression.

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Such stress can always be written off as chosen. Because women “choose” to work and/or “choose to have a happy family life”, because they want to “have it all”, they are expected to deal with the attendant stress. That is where the discourse of self improvement comes in. Just as a woman chooses to play multiple roles, she can choose to balance, to prioritize, to compromise. The issue of work life balance is feminized and the state and society’s roles to support working women are often conveniently glossed over.

8 Comments

  1. Elizabeth Gregory on July 8, 2009 at 3:42 pm

    Yes – although the kids women bear and raise are essential to the operation of commerce and of their nations–which demand citizens, workers and consumers for their continuation– the rationale we’re given for getting only minimal public framework support for families (like good affordable childcare) holds choice against moms: It was their choice to have kids, so any consequences are their problem.

    Here are a few links to my thinking on this issue:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-gregory/remember-mama_b_195450.html
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-gregory/childcare-as-infrastructu_b_147555.html
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabeth-gregory/never-done-and-under-paid_b_122003.html

  2. Gloria Feldt on July 8, 2009 at 3:43 pm

    Thanks, Elizabeth–very important points and great links.

  3. Debjani Chakravarty on July 9, 2009 at 3:43 pm

    “In effect, mothers have been underwriting the national bottom line by raising their young for no pay.”

    One among your many insightful comments on motherhood, gender, nation and the political economy. Your problematizing of the notion of “choice” is refreshingly accurate, Elizabeth. The postfeminist connotations of “choice” and “empowerment” are informing policy to a large extent and hurting already marginalized women.

  4. Gloria Feldt on July 9, 2009 at 3:43 pm

    Debjani-
    what do you mean when you say “postfeminist”? I don’t think we are post feminism at all. I usually see this term used by people who are trying to disparage feminism, but I know that is not what you are doing. So please share your definition of the term with me.
    thanks,
    Gloria

  5. Debjani Chakravarty on July 9, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    You are right Gloria, and I apologize because I wasn’t clearer. Post feminism is quite dangerous; it constructs feminism as an obsolete thing of the past, because women now “have everything”.

    “Choice” and “empowerment” when framed in a post feminist manner just indicate that those things are pervasive, that everyone irrespective of class, race or gender has achieved their goals. The post feminist rhetoric is promoted by a consumerist media and a global market which certainly offers a lot of choice, of goods and services to those with access. Empowerment becomes a question of affordability. Young women of today find the post feminist position especially attractive, it absolves one of the burdens of thinking, choosing, acting—as a citizen and not merely as a consumer wondering whether to choose yoga or deep tissue massage, Revlon or Dior, Rocky Point or Miami for spring break. Post feminism makes women proud to pronounce that they are “not interested in politics” or write off feminism as “crazy bra burning stuff.”

    This apathy, this sense of illusory individualism disconnected from a community (political or otherwise) does not promote political activism, citizenship rights and duties and critical thinking. Yes, post feminism is sticky. And widespread.

    What I meant when I said “The postfeminist connotations of “choice” and “empowerment” are informing policy to a large extent and hurting already marginalized women” is that, the post feminist rhetoric of “I can choose what I want to be” or “there is no inequality anymore, I am an empowered individual and there’s no excuse for me to not do better” justifies the state’s apathy towards the poor and the marginalized. Since everyone is free and equal, the only thing that must stand between personal and community achievement must be one’s own self which fails to take advantage of all the great opportunities just waiting to be exploited. Freedom, manifested through the “project of the self” has been historically put together in the United States for the “greater common good”. Freedom, autonomy, personal responsibility are the new strategies of governance. The rhetoric of freedom allows the state to withdraw from welfare, and end welfare as we know it. Both Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) have some unrealistic provisions that further marginalize women without access.

  6. Gloria Feldt on July 10, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    I make it a point not to use the overused word “awesome”, but Debjani, your discussion of what post feminism means and the consequences of the term in our discourse is indeed awesome!

    Thank you for opening up the conversation about the true meaning of choice and freedom to those who have few of either. Your pointing out the consequences of consumerism as the basis for thinking about choices gave ma a whole new framework for looking at the problem (I think it is a problem) of women who don’t see the political as well as the personal in their concerns.

    One of the concepts I have tried to advance, not very successfully so far, is that choice is sacrifice as well as freedom. In other words, when one chooses one option, she is usually forgoing the others that might have been available. I do think that in the largest philosophical sense, everyone does have choice even in the most constricted of situations. Even if it is just the choice between despair and hope. So I have always been pushing for a deeper definition of choice, one that is rooted in the nature of being human and choice as the very core of morality. But perhaps I am going too far afield.

  7. Aletha on July 10, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    Another twist on empowerment and choice that drives me up the wall is the casting of prostitution, stripping, pornography, cosmetic surgery, etc. as empowering choices for women. The rationale is that any choice a woman makes, no matter how much it damages her and other women, is a free and empowering choice. Such choices may gratify male ego, but to call them free, liberating, or empowering for women is dubious at best.

  8. Debjani Chakravarty on July 11, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    So true Aletha. Perfect post feminist examples there. And I would not mind any of those practices you mentioned were they theoretically not hurting anyone, but mostly they do. It’s their framing (as freedom, as choice or feminist empowerment) that seems most objectionable.

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