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Today, more and more middle- and upper-middle class women are combining career with motherhood, traditionally regarded as mutually exclusive for most women of their group in our society. “Career” here refers to work that demands a deep inner commitment and the expenditure of time and energy beyond that of a “mere” job, even if the job be full-time and outside the home. The need for outer social adjustment, such as the provision of quality, affordable child care and the modification of the conditions of professional advancement (as, for example, the timetable for meeting requirements for tenure in a college professorship) has been better recognized than has the need for inner, psychological change. The authors address themselves mainly to the latter: the need for a new female identity-synthesis.
Saddled with the legacy of the “cult of domesticity,” the present generation of women must struggle for the integration of a new identity, a process that commonly arouses anxiety, guilt, and conflict. This book explores this struggle on both the sociohistorical and psychoanalytic-psychological levels. Organized by Alan Roland, psychoanalyst, and Barbara Harris, historian, the authors also include the feminist writer Jane Lazarre and psychoanalysts Esther Menaker, Doris Bernstein, Charlotte Kahn, and Harriette Podhoretz. Each of the women contributors is herself a career-mother, and two of them, Harris and Lazarre, write of their personal experiences. Roland is the husband of a career-mother and he, too, writes of personal experience from a male perspective, All the contributors present fruits of their professional investigations, and the overall result is richly cross-illuminating, as a good interdisciplinary study should be.
In a survey of the past 100 years in the United States, Harris traces the social changes from preindustrial times through the period following the industrial revolution, which gave rise to the “cult of domesticity” and the view of female nature on which it