When we talk about the work-life balance, Sarah Jaffe asks,
does "life" just mean more work for women? In a recent
New York Times piece, for instance:
... the women who did manage some sort of “work-family balance” seemed to have little time for anything else. Many of the former “opt-out” women she spoke with had opted back in, and while these well-off women had slid more or less successfully back into the workforce, they now had new forms of guilt. One woman lamented the loss of travel and shared interests with her husband as she juggled her family responsibilities with her new career. “They spent their evenings on separate floors, she downstairs in the kitchen, on her computer, catching up on the work she missed during her hours of caring for the children; he, upstairs, watching TV alone,” Warner wrote.
Too often, for men there's work and there's leisure, while for women there's work, family (work), and leisure. Against that, Jaffe argues:
A gendered demand for leisure would argue that women's time is as important as men's, whether we are spending it parenting or reading a book or lying on a beach. It would take into account the racialized and classed expectations of different groups of women, and argue that low-income women deserve time off too (and it would argue that they deserve to make enough money to enjoy that time.) It would point out that what is earned vacation for white women is not “laziness” in women of color.
And more: