A memorable moment in American labor history was the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Mass., when, according to lore, predominantly female workers marched with signs reading, “We want bread, but we want roses, too.” The apocryphal slogan, revived in songs recorded in the 1970s and ’80s by Judy Collins and John Denver, came to mean, “We need a decent living, but we need a life, too.”
But that was then and this is now, when the dream of a life with time enough to smell the roses seems farther away than ever. Among professionals, work weeks of 50 hours or more have become commonplace. Among mothers, three-quarters with young children now work outside the home. Working parents combined are putting in about 28 more days of paid work a year than they did in 1970. As in 1912, the people who feel the loss of leisure time the most are mothers.
“Overwhelmed,” by Brigid Schulte, a writer for The Washington Post and a married mother of two school-age children, is the latest cri de coeur. Schulte asks whether her “scattered, fragmented and exhausting” life is just her or a byproduct of something bigger — something shared by millions of other time-starved women.
Schulte reports that the “ideal worker” norm prevails in the American workplace: an individual who has no family obligations, no interests that can compete with work — preferably no private life at all. People who don’t measure up to this ideal risk being treated like Kleenex: used up and then tossed aside.
Why have we come to this? And why, after decades of anguish, has so little been done to relieve these extreme pressures? “Overwhelmed” provides several answers.
Source: The New York Times, March 30, 2014
