America’s ruminations about women and work are so politically loaded these days — there are breakthroughs and backlashes, mommy tracks and mommy wars, glass ceilings and pink-collar ghettos — that it is often hard to get at the truth. Consider the mixed message from Women and the Work/Family Dilemma by Deborah Swiss and Judith Walker, a much touted book to be published this month. Based on a survey of 902 female graduates of Harvard’s law, medical and business schools, the book makes the woman-and-work story more complicated than ever — if only by suggesting that on this subject what women say is not always what they mean. On the one hand, 85% of the Harvard professionals who responded to the survey said they had been “successful” at combining career and family. Here, quite explicitly, was the message that companies across America were implicitly handing down last week on Take Our Daughters to Work Day as they invited thousands of young girls to crawl down manholes, up telephone poles, into trading pits and office cubicles. But the survey also delivered more pessimistic news: this uppermost tier of American professional women, those who have secretaries to help organize birthday parties, big salaries to afford customized child care and private offices from which to call the pediatrician, discovered that the workplace often turned hostile when they became mothers. This apparent contradiction may reflect the fact that women will instinctively offer an official let’s-buck-it-up line even if, with more prodding, they are prepared to paint a gloomier anecdotal picture of their office life. What is clear, however, is that Swiss and Walker were cured of one presumption — that change always comes from the top down. “We thought that if we surveyed the best-credentialed women in the country, we would uncover creative solutions to balancing work and family,” says Swiss. ! “Instead, what we found was incredible anger and frustration about the difficulty of being a working mother.” On the down side, the survey offered two startling statistics: 53% of the women who responded said they had changed their jobs or specialties as a result of their family obligations, and 25% of those surveyed with M.B.A. degrees from Harvard had left the workplace completely. The conclusion, according to Swiss, is that “if these women are having a hard time, it’s frightening to think of what is happening to working mothers who do not have the advantage of a Harvard education and a senior professional position.” Of course, the opposite could be true. The majority of mothers, who fall in the working and middle classes, could take after Roseanne, the prime-time television character who is too busy, too gutsy and too existential to worry about how to strike a perfect balance between her waitressing obligations and her housecleaning ones. After all, the problem of these Harvard women could simply be the yuppie, baby-boomer hubris that says this generation of upscale Americans is going to make easy what their parents found hard. Or it could be just plain Harvard hubris. “In the Harvard community,” says Suzanne Braun Levine, a Radcliffe graduate and editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, “there is such a historic sense of people with a need to overachieve and with a streak of self-criticism. A lot of people feel that they didn’t achieve everything they could.”
