What women get from work

In 1953, when her youngest child was born, Dana Mazurek’s life looked a lot like the lives of other women of her generation. Born in rural West Virginia, she met Ed when she was a striking 21-year-old and he a handsome Marine who had recently returned from the Pacific theater. They were married within a year and headed for Chicago to live near his Polish-American family. By the time Dana was 30, she was a homemaker with five children, all skinny like their mom and blond like their dad, with the kinds of names that sound perfect for a charming family sitcom: Rosie, Mikey, Vicky, Timmy, Mary.

Behind closed doors, though, life didn’t look like 1950s TV. “These days we call it domestic abuse,” Mary, Dana’s youngest, told me. But back then she would just say, “He beat me up.”

Dana stayed, until she didn’t: She and Ed divorced when Mary was 2.

Dana was 32 with five kids under age 12, two of them still in diapers, to support on her own, in an era of staunchly conservative family values — single mothers were rare, and divorced women pariahs.

She didn’t have formal education past high school or much in the way of work history, but someone had to keep the lights on, and the $56 in monthly child support that she had to take Ed to court to get wasn’t going to cut it. And so Dana had two or three jobs at a time: She worked as a crossing guard from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m., and then as a waitress from 4 p.m. until midnight. She took other odd jobs, selling Avon for a while, working at a soap factory for a while — whatever would pay the bills. While she worked, she cobbled together child care, and the older kids often looked after the younger ones.

“All my life I remember her always saying her legs hurt,” Mary said. “‘My legs are killing me, my legs are killing me.’ She was never off of ‘em very much.”

This was not typical 1950s womanhood. In 1955, most adult women were married. Fewer than one-third of married women worked, and fewer than a quarter of marriages ended in divorce; even most divorced, widowed or separated women were not in the paid workforce. But watching her mother’s life taught Mary an important lesson: For women, work also meant independence.

That didn’t mean, however, that work brought happiness, fulfillment or purpose. That work could be central to women’s lives and identities was not then, and is not now, the dominant way we think about women and work.

We have a broad understanding that work is valuable for men, that it feeds their sense of importance as providers and meets some existential need related to identity and sense of self. This force is potent enough to be one factor that may have swung the 2016 elections: Working-class white men, out of work and watching blue-collar jobs dry up, lost their mooring as providers, and cast their ballots for a man who promised to take them back in time.

Historically, women weren’t supposed to need their individual identity to be formed through work, because women weren’t supposed to have individual identities at all: They melded into their husband’s identity when they married. Women’s identities have long been relational — daughter, wife, mother — rather than individual.

Which is perhaps why today, women finding individual identities tied to their work makes so many people uncomfortable — why people are so quick to assert that we can’t “have it all,” why the U.S. government and workplaces are so slow to implement policies that would enable us to at least have something a little better.

The “Leave It to Beaver” era during which Dana Mazurek raised her children was a historical aberration, but one many Americans continue to idolize. While the majority of Americans today — nearly 80 percent — do not think women should return to traditional wife-and-homemaker roles, something shifts when you replace “woman” with “mother”: Just over half of Americans believe children are better off with a mother who is at home full time and does not hold a job. Only 8 percent say the same thing about fathers.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the 1950s was women’s turn to the domestic, the first time in recorded American history where women got married sooner and had more babies than their mothers. The prevailing sensibility was that life as a suburban housewife was supposed to bring ultimate happiness.

But the pursuit of personal fulfillment was less about what actually made women happy and more about money — and men being able to make it without competing with women. Men’s wages rose steadily through the 1950s and ‘60s, while women’s stagnated. Although women had earned more than 63 percent of what men did in the early 1950s, by the mid-1960s they made less than 58 percent.

By the mid-1960s, the cultural blip of the hyperdomestic ‘50s was showing signs of decline. Mary, Dana’s youngest daughter, turned 10 the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that prompted mostly white, middle-class, stay-at-home mothers to ask themselves, “Is this all?” A few years later, as Mary prepared for high school, both Dana and Ed expected her to attend Jones Commercial, a secretarial training school, instead of a traditional school.

“This is the late ‘60s with the Vietnam War, with women’s lib starting, and the rules for this secretary school were you had to wear a hat, white gloves, your skirts had to be midknee, and you had to wear pantyhose and heels,” Mary said. “This is when kids were in jeans. I would have to walk down the street in a hat and gloves and pantyhose, going to secretary school when everybody else was having sit-ins. I hated it. After six weeks I begged my mom to let me go back to the regular high school, and she never batted an eye — she said yes.”

After high school she went to nursing school at the local community college, and at 19 started dating Mike, a guy from her South Side neighborhood, who was paying his way through law school by working at the local steel mill. In 1978, when he was 25 and she was 24, they got married. By 1981, they were off to Seattle for Mike’s job. She worked as a nurse the whole time, and at 29 she had her first child — me.

I was born in 1983, and my sister was born a year and a half later. My mom scaled back, working the night shift two days a week so she could be home with us during the day. Leaving her kids was wrenching — “there are not descriptive emotional words to explain the thought of being away from your babies” — but the family needed her income, and she also liked her job and what it meant for her independence.

Unlike my grandmother, whose status as a divorced working mother made her an outlier, my mother was a woman of her generation. Between 1950 and 2000, the number of hours married women spent at work more than doubled. While married black women have long been more likely to work outside the home than their white counterparts, they also saw their workplace participation skyrocket in the same half-century. IN THE 1970s, when my mom was working her first few jobs, women across the country were surging into the workforce, and for the first time more than half of American women between the ages of 25 and 54 worked outside the home. By the time I went to college, more than 75 percent of women in the same age group were in the labor force. I expected to be one of them.

And yet, for all the emphasis modern adults place on the dreams of the young — asking boys and girls what they want to be when they grow up — Americans remain ambivalent about whether adult women working, and especially mothers working, is a good thing.

The idealized vision of 1950s womanhood that still permeates our politics ignores the fact that staying home may not actually make mothers happy. Unfortunately, there’s no robust feminist ideal to counter it. Instead, we fall back on the language of “choice”: that it’s best if women simply get to choose to work or stay home, as if these choices are inherently equal and made without carrying the cultural baggage of sacrificial American motherhood. Or the fact that inhospitable workplaces and economic constraints mean many women never have a real choice in the matter at all.

That feminists are so often unable or unwilling to make a vigorous moral argument in favor of women working outside the home is perhaps one reason we have not yet seen the political groundswell necessary to pass the workplace policies we so desperately need. This is especially unfortunate, given that women are better off when we work outside the home: Working correlates with better mental and physical health, and working women not only report higher levels of happiness than women who don’t work, but the more hours women work, the happier we are (with the important exception of women who have very small children and work very long hours).

Mothers who work are also good for families: Daughters of working mothers tend to be higher achieving, work themselves, make more money and spend more time with their children than do daughters of women who did not work; men who were raised by working mothers do more household work and help more with child care than sons of stay-at-home moms. And women’s presence in the workplace is good for women in the aggregate: Men who have stay-at-home wives are more likely than men with working wives to penalize their female co-workers, denying them promotions and viewing them unfavorably.

Not working also puts women at risk. Without financial independence, we are more likely to get stuck in abusive or simply unhappy relationships. Although many women who take time off assume they can come back into the workforce easily, even a few years off can have a lifelong impact on earnings.

Lawmakers know all of this. They also know that refusing to provide paid parental leave, adequate sick days and affordable child care means women are routinely forced out of the workplace — women don’t choose to opt out, they’re pushed. Politicians make this choice and then claim it’s women who are free to do the choosing.

Unlike my grandmother and my mother, I grew up with a steady whisper of “follow your dreams” in the background of my educational and career choices — the idea that a job was for both financial security and personal happiness. My own career also flourished atop a foundation of small but crucial benefits that were on offer to my family — low-interest loans under the GI Bill, which enabled the purchase of my mother’s childhood house, for example, generally weren’t given to African-American parents.

And my expectations for career happiness also brought with them a different calculus for work and family: While I internalized the message that I should work for pay, and while I had the privilege of shaping a career that forms my identity and gives me purpose, I also entered my 30s acutely aware that these fragile personal victories could be upended by the ratcheted-up expectations of modern motherhood.

Until I interviewed my own mother, I hadn’t thought about how her emphasis on finding happiness by chasing a passion was borne not only out of love for her kids but also from a childhood of observing its absence.

“Grandma wrote songs,” my mom told me about her mother. “And most of her songs were love ballads — ‘I don’t care anymore, it doesn’t matter, though my heart may be breaking in two.’ Her songs were about heartbreak, and I didn’t realize that until I was older and I sat down and started reading the words. She never got to go any further. She didn’t have the time or the money or the ability to follow any of her dreams. She didn’t have the luck to have dreams.”

My grandmother worked. So did my mom. Only I was told to seek fulfillment in a career