CHAPTER 6

The United States

“WE CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO IT ALL AT THE SAME TIME.”

Samantha is a lawyer at a Virginia firm located on a wide street lined with stately office complexes just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. She and her husband, John, have a five-year-old son and ten-month-old daughter named Taylor and Candace. John works for the federal government. I interviewed Samantha in a windowless conference room in her office building, a high-security facility with fluorescent lighting and sterile white walls where employees spoke in hushed voices. She closed the door before we began. Samantha had worked as a teacher before waking up one day with the realization that she was “taking no risks.” So she decided to attend law school and then pursued a career in private practice. After several years working at this firm, Samantha found out she was pregnant. She panicked: “I worked very hard to ensure that nothing was different as a result of being pregnant and that I was taking on the same workload and sometimes more, trying to prove that I was as available, as accessible, as committed.”

In Samantha’s opinion, her law firm wasn’t family friendly or amenable to employees with outside responsibilities that detracted from their job commitment. She recalled:

You could have children, but the general expectation was, if you made that choice, you needed to have a plan for someone else to care for them. […] And fully committed meant that you were available at all hours whenever anything was needed. There weren’t boundaries. And this, ironically, was a firm that I joined because they billed themselves as a “lifestyle firm,” as a firm that was supportive of families. Folks were supposed to be able to coach their kids’ t-ball teams.

It became clear to Samantha that women could have children only so long as they didn’t take time away from work to care for them. “Was this message explicit?” I asked. She said:

Whether it was said in so many words or not, the message was perceived loud and clear. […] I was thinking very much about having a second child, and thinking about the realities of how that would work. And looking back at the young go-getter female associates who had been in our office and in our practice, most had survived having one child, and those who went on to have a second child for one reason or another usually weren’t at the firm six months later.

Samantha’s firm asked her to start working from home nine weeks into her leave. She took four months off after giving birth to Taylor, cobbling together short-term disability leave with sick days and vacation days she had stockpiled. She went unpaid for the last month.

Taylor was born by C-section, and Samantha was “still knitting back together” when she started taking conference calls and working while her son slept. After her leave ended, she returned to the office. “I didn’t do any sort of gradual ramp-up. When I went back, I went back. I came back full force into the busiest time of our calendar year.” At this point in our interview, Samantha burst into tears. We paused for a few minutes while she closed her eyes and caught her breath, dabbing quickly at her cheeks with a tissue.

Samantha saw Taylor only in the mornings before he went to full-time daycare and on the weekends, although she worked a half day on Saturdays. Her husband picked Taylor up, fed and bathed him, and put him to bed each night. She returned home after Taylor was asleep. Samantha reflected softly:

Before I had children, the message that I received was, “I am woman, hear me roar. You can do everything. […] You can be at the top if you put your mind to it. […] You are awesome.” … Load of crap. I am awesome, and I can’t do everything. […] If I keep all the balls in the air, I’m broken. What’s going to fail is my health. While I was doing all of that, I was also suffering debilitating migraines. […] I’ve talked to so many friends in a similar position … and we can’t figure out how to do it all at the same time.

Samantha sobbed. Averting her eyes, with her hand over her mouth and tears streaming down her cheeks, she told me about an incident when Taylor was six months old. She had come home from work at 10 p.m. and had what she described as an emotional breakdown. She hadn’t seen her infant in a month. Something had to change. John calmly tried to discuss how to make her life feel a little less insane.

Samantha explained their three tactics. First, she transferred to an in-house counsel position at a less prestigious firm that demanded fewer hours. She got pregnant with their second child after starting this job. Samantha’s manager tried to convince her to not take any leave after giving birth. In fact, they “got into a bit of a tussle parsing weeks.” But again, she and John built up their savings so she could take twelve weeks’ unpaid leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act—this with no guarantee her position would be waiting for her when she returned.¹ Fortunately for Samantha, it was.

Second, she learned to be more efficient at work. “I get more done in a workday than most of my colleagues who are in a similar situation do in a day and a half,” she said with a smile. Third, she bought a product online called the Freemie, a hands-free breast pump with breast milk collection cups that fit into a bra. At her cubicle, she showed me how she attached the pump to herself under a poncho while seated at her desk so she could pump breast milk and not waste time walking to and from her firm’s lactation room (an extremely rare accommodation in American workplaces, as I discuss later). Because the lactation room available to her was a twelve-minute walk each way, she would have spent about ninety minutes of her workday traveling to and from the room. Samantha tried this briefly, but it got old fast. The Freemie was her time-saving solution. She laughed and told me, “Yeah, I’m pumpin’ at my desk! I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to go home and take care of people.” She currently works roughly forty-five hours a week.

Samantha exemplifies how Americans individualize social problems. Her solutions are textbook examples of how American mothers approach their work-family conflict: changing jobs, becoming more efficient, and buying a Freemie are all individual strategies that approach child-rearing as a private responsibility and work-family conflict as a personal problem.

The United States is an outlier among Western industrialized countries for its lack of support for working mothers.² Its liberal welfare state approach means there is no federal mandate that individual employers provide supportive policies to working families with dependent care responsibilities. Without an explicit national family policy, what remains is a set of patchwork policies from employers that are weakly institutionalized and subject to employers’ discretion.³

Because the state generally doesn’t offer supports for care, people have to turn to the market to purchase this care. As in Italy, middle-class women who pay for nannies and housekeepers come to rely on other women’s low wages to enable their own paid labor. Sociologists Jane Collins and Victoria Mayer remind us that, “Simply put, this is a case where the ‘haves’ doing well depends on the ‘have-nots’ having less.”⁴ Low-income mothers often lack the job security, living wages, and access to policies (e.g., maternity leave, health care, vacation and sick days) that would help reconcile the tensions between their own work and family commitments. The government does offer some assistance to very poor families, but it requires that mothers exchange certain civil rights for cash assistance. And in no state is this aid enough to pull poor families out of poverty. The United States’ free-market approach leaves women, especially working-class and racial/ethnic minority women, in the worst straits.⁵

Moms like Samantha are far better off than most. Advanced degrees, marriages, and stable, well-paying jobs work together as a safety net to help some women when they falter. Samantha is also white. She hasn’t had to contend with the lifelong set of cumulative disadvantages that constrain the lifeworlds of women of color.⁶ Despite all this, the truth is that every working mom in the US is in dire straits. The outlook for some is less dismal than others, but the picture isn’t pretty for anyone. Here’s the thing, though. Life can be better for mothers.

The United States’ Work-Family Policy

The US has no national work-family policy to support caregiving, no universal health care, no universal social insurance entitlement, no guaranteed income, no paid parental leave, no universal childcare, and no minimum standard for vacation and sick days.⁷ Cities and states can elect to offer more generous supports than those offered at the federal level, but this means only workers in larger, wealthier, more progressive locales benefit from them. For instance, only four states currently offer paid parental leave—California, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.⁸

The one federal leave policy is the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) that Samantha used after having her second child. This policy gives eligible employees up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to care for a new or recently adopted child, to care for a seriously ill family member, or to recover from a personal illness. FMLA applies only to businesses with over fifty employees, and workers must have worked for at least twelve months and a minimum of 1,250 hours to qualify. Workers are guaranteed a job upon return, but not necessarily their job. Given these stipulations, only about 62 percent of Americans work for a covered employer and are eligible for these benefits.⁹ White-collar workers tend to have greater access to this provision than low-wage workers. What’s more, not many workers can actually afford to use FMLA and take a break from work without pay. As I outlined in the book’s introduction, high-income earners are over three times as likely to have access to paid family leave than low-income workers in the United States.¹⁰

The US has no universal childcare for children of any age. The limited childcare provisions the federal government offers are means-tested for the poorest citizens. Low-income parents must be involved in work or a work-related activity, such as training, to receive childcare subsidies through the Child Care Development Fund.¹¹ Without governmental support for care, families are required to find private solutions to childcare. Those families that turn to the market find vast differences in the quality and cost of care. Until as recently as 2013, no national regulations governed quality of service, staffing, or health codes for daycare facilities, resulting in a wide range of care services.¹² Individual states were responsible for setting and enforcing minimum health and safety standards, such as the mandates for working smoke detectors, locked cabinets for dangerous substances, staff-child ratios, and a minimum age for caregivers. Many programs are exempt from any regulation or licensing requirements, such as those that care for a small number of children, those run by religious groups, part-day programs, and school-based preschool or after-school programs. Guidelines for nutrition, exercise, media use, and developmentally appropriate activities vary widely from state to state.¹³ The lack of regulations in standards for childcare in the United States means that wealthier families are able to provide safer, higher-quality environments for their children compared to lower-income families. Again, common wisdom among virtually all researchers is that investing in children early in their lives through strong education and care programs has enormous payoffs throughout adolescence and adulthood.¹⁴

Work-family policies like paid family leave, childcare assistance, schedule flexibility, and telecommuting are typically available to workers with greater market power. These tend to be men, those employed at large firms, and high-income professionals.¹⁵ Employed mothers are less likely to have access to family accommodations than fathers¹⁶ and are more likely to receive financial penalties for using them.¹⁷ The consensus among work-family researchers who investigate these phenomena is that the United States’ free-market approach to social provisioning has failed.¹⁸ We see evidence of this failure in high rates of maternal and childhood poverty, high rates of worker turnover, intermittent maternal employment, worker frustrations, and time squeezes.¹⁹

The failure of the US approach to work-family policy is reflected in happiness statistics. Parents report lower levels of happiness than nonparents across Western industrialized countries. But the difference in happiness between adults with and without children is reduced in countries that offer more assistance and resources to families than in countries that provide less support. In a 2016 study of twenty-two OECD countries, sociologists Jennifer Glass, Robin Simon, and Matthew Andersson found that the US has the largest subjective well-being penalty for parenthood, with the largest “happiness gap” between parents and nonparents.²⁰ In other words, the low-support context in the US means that parenting is particularly taxing and stressful compared to countries with greater work-family policy supports.

Polling data show that Americans today are increasingly supportive of work-family policy, including paid family leave, universal preschool education, and stronger laws regarding fair wages and working hours.²¹ Younger workers also show more interest in work-family policy and less willingness to sacrifice personal and family time for work.²² But this interest hasn’t yet translated into federal policy change.

“I’m doing everything subpar”

“There are a lot of days where you feel like you are simultaneously a terrible professional and a terrible mother,” Kelsey confided. We sat at her large dining room table covered with documents, with her laptop, cell phone, headphones, and notepad spread out between us. Kelsey was telecommuting for the day so she could carve out time for an interview. A white married mother, Kelsey works roughly fifty-five hours a week in business management. Kelsey and her husband, Ryan, have a one-year-old named Rosie who was at daycare when we met in her high-ceilinged row house in Ballston, an upscale suburb of DC. Kelsey told me she often felt like a failure: “You’re like, ‘I’m doing everything subpar. Nothing is going well.’ ” American moms like Kelsey said they felt enormous guilt and tension between their work and family roles, similar to my western German and Italian interviewees. But whereas western Germans blamed outdated cultural norms and Italians blamed the government for their problems, the vast majority of the Americans blamed themselves for not “balancing” or “managing” their responsibilities. Kelsey made the conscious decision to lower her high standards once she had a child. I asked her if she thought it was possible for American mothers to get to the top in their careers. She said:

In general, yes, but […] you still have to negotiate a lot of the hurdles that may not necessarily be [set] by the industry or the business or other people’s expectations, but they’re hurdles you’ve set. Because you probably are a feeling person who has had a child. You don’t want to miss every football game or every piano recital or even every bedtime. I hate missing bedtime. If I can figure out a way to even have a flight that leaves at 9 p.m. to go where I need to go to make bedtime, I’ll do it. It’s just understanding that there’s gonna have to be a give and take, and that’s OK. You don’t feel like you have to be perfect in every way.

Kelsey believed that mothers put hurdles in their own way—they held expectations of themselves as parents that hindered their career advancement. She said these self-imposed hurdles are logical for any parent who wants to participate in their children’s daily lives. In Kelsey’s estimation, the problem wasn’t the hurdles themselves, but figuring out how to clear them easily. Her solution was to “figure out a way” and “do it” herself, even if it meant working a full day, coming home to tend to her child and tuck her into bed, and then dashing off to the airport to catch a red-eye flight. Reminding herself that she didn’t “have to be perfect in every way” implies Kelsey felt pressure to achieve perfection.

When US moms experienced work-family conflict and stress, they often thought it was their fault. Tiana is African American, has a bachelor’s degree in public health, and worked for a time as a community health worker. But she felt she didn’t get to see her daughter enough, and she took an administrative job working thirty-five hours a week at lower pay in order to have a better schedule. Tiana didn’t blame her stress on her long, taxing work hours, but on herself for choosing the wrong career path:

I think I just picked the wrong major. […] I really should have ended up as a nurse, because I would have been happy working in the hospital, in the doctor’s office, doing that kind of stuff. I just always make the wrong decisions. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was just thinking practically.

Tiana believed her work-family conflict was due to her own poor decision-making. She solved her conflict by changing jobs—a common solution for many of the American women with whom I spoke.²³

Many mothers felt guilty that the nature of their jobs, which they often loved, at times meant they had to sacrifice too much for their children—and their children lost out. Rather than critique their long hours, demanding employers, or lack of workplace supports, women tended to be upset with themselves. Lauren is a white ER doctor who works around forty-five hours a week. She has three children (ages one, three, and five), and her husband, Ken, is a stay-at-home dad. She cried during our interview as she recounted a health scare she had at work. A fluid splashed in her eyes while she was treating an HIV-positive patient, and the infectious diseases specialist at her hospital told her to stop breast-feeding her youngest that day. “I cried myself to sleep for, like, two weeks. I felt so awful about it.” To Lauren, this incident “was such a representation of the sacrifices that I was making, that I was forcing them to make. That was really hard for me.” Lauren faced a difficult trade-off: she got to keep working, but she had to stop breast-feeding—to her child’s detriment, she thought. Her baby’s switch from breast milk to formula felt like a heartbreaking loss.

With tears in her eyes, seated across from me at a two-top restaurant table, Lauren reflected, “In the end, I think the benefits of me working obviously outweigh the negatives. But when that balance shifts, it’s really hard.” Lauren’s exposure to HIV at work and subsequent need to stop nursing made her feel extremely guilty and anxious about what she was asking her children to risk and sacrifice for her to have a job she was passionate about. Lauren admitted there were times when it felt like her job wasn’t worth the hardships her family had to undergo. Although she wanted to serve as a role model for what women can achieve, she wondered whether she was being selfish and putting her children in harm’s way.

I asked Lauren whether anything had changed in the ER to try and improve safety, and she explained tactics she herself adopted: wearing eye protection and standing near the door in case someone tried to attack her. Unlike Swedish and German mothers who are guaranteed a year’s parental leave and usually stop breast-feeding before returning to work, Lauren had to return to work while she was still nursing, thus potentially exposing her child to the illnesses she treated in the emergency room. Yet Lauren only discussed what she could do differently to prevent another dangerous incident. She didn’t ask for safer accommodations and instead took on the work of staying safe on her own as a mom. Lauren felt she hadn’t protected herself (and therefore her infant) from the incident with the HIV-positive patient. She blamed herself, so she tried her best to implement steps to ensure it didn’t happen again.

In addition to the sort of acute workplace concerns like Lauren’s, women felt guilty about the mundane, everyday aspects of their jobs too. The moms I spoke to told me they worried that their busy work schedules and long hours detracted from being good mothers. Allie, who is married, white, and a writer working roughly fifty hours a week, explained:

I have such mixed feelings about that. I miss my kids a lot now that I’m here [in this job]. And I also commute an hour each way. Sometimes that turns into an hour and a half each way with traffic. And if I’m in here nine hours, sometimes ten lately, I feel like I don’t see my kids much. I feel like my husband is closer to my kids in some ways now than I am. And that’s hard as a mom to be dealing with that. […] But I do miss being able to be home with them. But I took this job.

Allie felt torn between her time-intensive job and her interest in being an involved and present mother. Her regret that her husband spent more time with their children is logical given that intensive parenting is typically reserved for moms in the US.²⁴ Allie didn’t question her employer’s decision to require such long hours and shouldered responsibility for this decision herself: “I took this job.” Figure 6.1 shows that most women I interviewed worked more than forty-five hours a week. These working moms felt an extraordinary amount of guilt about their inability to achieve “work-family balance,” usually blaming themselves for this conflict.

FIGURE 6.1. Weekly working hours for respondents in Washington, DC.

“I’m so lucky”

The American mothers I interviewed expected to be fully responsible for managing their households, children, and jobs on their own. Unlike their European counterparts, they generally expressed little confidence that their partners, workplaces, or the state would step up to help ease the stress and difficulties they experienced every day. When mothers received help of any sort—including when they earned it or paid for it—they used vocabulary like “being very lucky” or “feeling privileged.” Kelsey said, “I’ve felt very lucky. […] I did not know [maternity leave] was such a game-changer until I started talking with other friends of mine who […] were now having to take three months unpaid, because they got, like, a two-week maternity leave.” Kelsey worked for a corporation famous for its family-friendly policies and took four months’ leave at full pay, acknowledging how rare this was. The more advantaged women told me they felt lucky to have work-family accommodations at their companies, whether formal or informal. I’ll delve more into the quagmire of maternity leave like Kelsey’s later in this chapter.

For the most part, German, Swedish, and Italian mothers didn’t use this language of “luck.” In fact, I heard the opposite: as I discussed in previous chapters, European working mothers invoked the discourse of rights and entitlements to work-family policy. These discourses never came up during my US interviews, and only a small handful mentioned the state as having a role in promoting “work-family balance.” For most, the government stood outside women’s lifeworlds as a source of possible help. When I asked whether the government could do anything to support working mothers better, Allie, the writer and mother of two, said, “That’s a good question. I hadn’t really thought about it before. I’d love to be home when [my kids] got home. To change the work schedule. But that’s like turning around the Titanic.” Allie found it implausible that her work hours might change to accommodate her family; in contrast, women in Stockholm and Berlin expected these accommodations.

Moms in DC were also grateful for understanding, supportive bosses. Usually this “generosity” manifested for women as informal flexible scheduling. Imani is a Hispanic/African American property manager for an office building. She has a demanding forty-five-hour-a-week work schedule and a two-hour daily commute each way—four hours a day in the car. In fact, we struggled to find time to meet because Imani’s schedule was so challenging. Eventually her husband agreed to pick up their kids so she could stay late after work to meet me at her office. She let traffic die down as we talked before driving home. Imani told me her family can’t afford to live closer to her work:

You can imagine, my job is insane. I was so stressed it was making me sick. […] I asked if I could work from home twice a week. That would take a huge load off. Not having to commute […] would make it easier for me. Otherwise I felt like the pressure of it was—I don’t know how to explain it. The pressure of it was—I was a key component to the big chain. […] It pushed me healthwise to the limit. […] The goal is to be here at 7:30, but that never happens. It’s too unpredictable. And luckily, my boss, our company, this building, it’s very flexible. […] It’s a blessing. It’s amazing. It’s the first time in my career when I feel like I’m at a place where I know what I’m doing, I can handle things, and it doesn’t feel so super-overwhelming. It does get overwhelming sometimes.

Imani’s ability to telecommute two days a week and adjust her start time made her job feel less overwhelming and helped ease her stress. Rather than feeling frustrated at her employer for the intense pressure and long working hours, Imani was grateful for the flexibility.

US interviewees also felt lucky when their bosses had children themselves and “got it.” One mother said, “I’m lucky in the sense that at the time my boss in California had four kids of his own and he was a very good father, so he gave me a lot of flexibility.” Another explained, “We’re lucky that it’s a nonprofit and that lots of people in the organization higher up have kids. Almost everybody on the executive team has kids. They all get it.”

Women who had an office space in which to pump breast milk were effusive in their gratitude for it, knowing that this privacy was atypical. Chelsea, a white woman working forty-five hours a week in sales management for a transnational firm, said,

I pump twice during the day. And I am so lucky about pumping. I am at a level in my company where I actually have my own office. At least for the time being, because we are moving to [a new space that is] open office, collaborative. It really saves money and whatever. So, I am dreading the day I lose my office.

Employers are required by law to provide the space and time for pumping. The rhetoric of gratitude obscures what is actually a legal right for mothers in the United States. I explore later whether the legal entitlement to pump at work was borne out for my interviewees.

Mothers also expressed gratitude if they liked their children’s daycare. Many had personal experience or knew friends who detested the facility where their kids spent their days, which caused moms guilt and stress. Ashley, who has two daughters and is a white married mother working as a secretary, explained, “I’m sure there are below-average daycares, but […] I have had great luck. Both her daycare providers are very kind people who just view the kids as extensions of their immediate family.”

The lack of federal work-family policies in the US tends to exacerbate race and class inequalities among mothers. American moms may use the discourse of luck and privilege to sidestep the guilt associated with the knowledge that they have access to work-family policies (e.g., maternity leave, flexible schedules) or support (e.g., relatives, housekeepers, nannies) that help ease their conflict when other mothers do not, especially in a cultural environment that emphasizes personal responsibility. Mothers who had these benefits didn’t express that they deserved or expected them as European mothers did. The rhetoric of luck seems to be the women’s attempts at acknowledging their own privilege given systemic US inequalities: some women—white, wealthier women—have greater access to this assistance than others—racial/ethnic minority, lower-income women—as a result of racism and classism.

This rhetoric also reaffirms the mothers’ sense that these are privileges and not rights—demonstrating their inculcation of a broader system that doesn’t offer these policies or supports universally.²⁵ Mothers embodied the ideal of personal responsibility: they believed their work-family conflict was their own problem to solve. American women did not expect to have understanding bosses, supportive families, or accommodating jobs.

Sources of American Mothers’ Work-Family Conflict

Moms in DC felt agonizing work-family conflict, and it seemed to come at them from all sides. The way they spoke, they seemed to me awash in stress, struggling to stay afloat in an unrelenting storm. The cause of their stress, though, was tough for women to pinpoint. As an outsider hearing their stories, which seemed defined by nearly constant struggle, I wondered, What’s a person to do? Blame the whole ocean?

In unpacking their stories, I found that moms faced both normative and material sources of work-family conflict. Mothers felt caught between the competing devotions of ideal worker norms and intensive mothering norms.²⁶ Unsurprisingly, they also felt stressed because of the unequal gender division of labor in their homes and the United States’ weak safety net.

These women felt pressured to live up to a set of pervasive norms that glorified workers who were single-mindedly committed to their jobs. Similar to Italian and western German moms, women often worried about announcing their pregnancies to employers. Makayla is an African American nonprofit public relations executive working forty hours a week. She and her husband, William, have two children. When Makayla first discovered she was pregnant, she told me, she believed her boss would be unhappy at the news:

I work in PR, so I knew how to frame it [laughs]. I did a little research on how you tell your bosses that you are expecting. I went in and said, “I have fantastic news.” You can’t be disappointed when you go in telling people how they must feel about it. So, I walked in and said, “I have fantastic news! I’m pregnant! I’m gonna have a baby!” […] It worked, like magic. My boss, a man, he was supportive. I’d been at the organization a long time.

Makayla’s spin on her pregnancy seemed to work. She also indicated that she had earned her boss’s trust with her long tenure at the firm. Moms like Makayla reported feeling relieved and grateful for bosses who didn’t get angry at them when they announced their pregnancies.

And it turns out that Makayla isn’t the only woman who has felt the need to devise a strategy. Forbes, the Washington Post, and New York Magazine have all run stories in the past few years with some variation of the title, “So you’re pregnant. How do you tell your boss?”²⁷ Mothers generally don’t feel their pregnancies will be supported, which suggests that motherhood is perceived negatively at work. Stories wouldn’t appear in top news outlets if it wasn’t a source of worry for women.

Moms were expected to be dedicated to their jobs regardless of any family emergencies, even during their pregnancies. Mary is a white attorney who works fifty-five hours a week. She is also a single mother “by choice.”²⁸ Her twins were born prematurely at twenty-eight weeks. They spent two months in the hospital, and she petitioned HR to let her work from their hospital room so she didn’t use up her short maternity leave: “[W]e talked about it, and he let me work. […] It allowed me to stretch my maternity hours a lot longer. That was really nice, that I had that flexibility.” This is more evidence of American women’s low expectations of their employers. Any leave time at all felt like a luxury to these moms. Mary explained that the mother of the child in the room next door was a Hispanic housekeeper who worked nights. She took the bus to and from the hospital, and had no choice but to leave her infant alone there for long stints. This mother couldn’t ask to work remotely, and she had no leave available to her. Mary thought that, in contrast with this other mother, she was extremely fortunate because she could work remotely. Mary didn’t seem to question whether new mothers should be required to work at all while their newborns were ill in the hospital.

Disrupting work for childbirth was a big concern for the women I interviewed in DC. American moms who were allowed to take maternity leave or were given some flexibility after having a baby often explained that they owed it to their employers to work right up until childbirth and to dive back in when they returned. Some worried that the timing of their childbirth would be problematic for their employers, so they worked hard to “make up” for any time off as soon as they returned to their jobs. And others worked hard literally up until childbirth, like Chelsea. She told me she was “a little worried” when she found out she was pregnant for the first time. She organized a major event for a top client that took place two weeks before her due date. Chelsea went into labor seventy-two hours after the event ended. She went to the hospital with contractions and felt obliged to work from her hospital bed as she started labor—“I was on my BlackBerry the whole time”—because she worried that her junior colleague who would fill in for her during her leave couldn’t do the work alone. Recall that in Italy and Germany, mothers are required to leave work four to six weeks before childbirth. This isn’t an option in the US.

Some mothers felt the need to continually earn this support or repay employers by working harder and longer, as was the case for Italian mothers (see chapter 5). Yasmine is a single Lebanese mother who has a flexible schedule: “It is the flexibility, mainly, that made me stay here. This is why I like to put in more hours of work, because I want to pay back for that flexibility.” As I mentioned, sociologist Allison Pugh calls this the “one-way honor system” between employers and employees in the US: workers feel loyalty to employers, but expect very little in return.²⁹

Mothers told me they were sometimes expected to be available to their employers at a moment’s notice, even right after maternity leave. Robin, who is white, married, and a psychologist working at a prison roughly forty-eight hours a week, occasionally had to drop everything to go to the prison when she was off-duty. After having to stop breast-feeding her fourteen-week-old to return to work at 9 p.m. one night, she recalled thinking, “I can’t live like this. This can’t be my own existence on their clock anymore because I have someone else’s clock that matters to me.” Robin explained that she also had to travel for work, often last minute, which was a great source of work-family conflict (a comment other mothers echoed): “Why is travel so important?” she asked. “Why does it have to be me? It’s like it’s a test. You have to jump through hoops.” Robin remembered aloud,

I was in my office one afternoon, and they know I have a family. None of them do, so they can do whatever. But they decided they wanted me for an event the following morning in another state, and I had to run. There was no way I was gonna get a flight out if I didn’t physically run. I came home, I ended up with four pairs of shoes and no pantyhose because I packed so frantically. […] I was a mess. But they needed me there. I thought, “Thank God Andrew could cover.” I stopped by the preschool. [My daughter] was napping, and I just gave her a kiss, because I was not leaving without seeing her. And then hopped in the cab and off I went. I arranged the flight on the phone.

Robin thought it was unnecessary to be asked to drop everything and literally sprint for a flight. She thought these requests were really about performing a sort of all-consuming allegiance to her job, even though she knew it was irrational.

The sense that workers needed to be ever-present also made women feel like their workday never ended. Whereas flexible schedules could make life easier for women, they could also enable this culture of constant work for mothers. Still, mothers expressed gratitude for the benefit. Chelsea the sales manager called this constant blending of work and family “the swirl”:

I think my big key here is I have an awesome, awesome, understanding, flexible boss who takes advantage of things herself and just kind of trusts me to do my job. We always talk about the swirl. That’s what we call it. Like when you’re a working mom, there is no hard line between work and home. So, you swirl from one to the other, it’s all swirled together. You get online at seven in the morning and you send a couple of emails that have to get out, and then you’re making breakfast, and you drop the kids off and maybe at lunch you either go for a run yourself or run to the grocery store because you have no other time to do it. But then after you put them to bed, you’re back online.

It all bleeds into each other. All the time. I’m sending work emails and then I’ll jump over really quick to Amazon and order more diapers because that’s what I need to do and it popped into my head. There is no guilt for doing it that way because—you know, it’s good and bad. It means I can easily work from 8 to 10 at night a lot, but it allows me to do what I need to do and see them as much as I can.

Chelsea said her understanding boss, flexible working hours, and ability to work from home early in the morning and late at night made her feel less stressed. Yet she expressed ambivalence about this arrangement, saying she didn’t feel “guilt for doing it that way” but also admitting that “it’s good and bad.” She implied that perhaps this setup worked best for her children and household. But Chelsea also signaled that this scenario caused her to have “no hard line between work and home.” She seemed to sacrifice her own sense of balance, time, and boundaries for the sake of her job and her family—in alignment with dominant ideals about the self-sacrificing mother. So in addition to feeling that they needed to demonstrate an all-absorbing commitment to their employers, moms like Chelsea also felt pressured to live up to extraordinarily high expectations at home as mothers.

Sociologist Mary Blair-Loy found in her study of American mothers working as finance executives that they tend to feel caught between feelings of work and family devotion.³⁰ In the same vein, the women I interviewed believed their employment made it difficult to be the devoted mothers they wanted to be. Susan’s comments exemplify the intensity of this conflict. She is Puerto Rican, a mother of nine-year-old twins, and a senior-level manager in the banking sector who works between fifty and fifty-five hours each week. Susan called this tension “mommy guilt”:

For me, mommy guilt is the constant trade-offs and being sure that you’re making the right decisions. I’ve told people, for a woman, nothing undermines your innate self-confidence as much as the moment you become a mother, because from that day on, you are constantly aware of the fact that you’re not just responsible for yourself any more. Every choice you make, every act you portray, you are shaping this life. Therefore, you second-guess yourself all the time. […] And it gets easier over time, but […] it’s crippling.

She implied that every move a mother makes shapes her child. Not only are moms responsible for their children’s development in general, but even the smallest, most inadvertent parenting choices affect who their kids become. Susan told me it took “nine years of tears” to stop feeling guilty all the time. The guilt finally abated when she rearranged her schedule in order to attend an event at her children’s after-school daycare, and she saw that they were fine even though she worked full time. For the first time, Susan perceived her daughters as resilient.

Blair-Loy finds this is a common tactic among career-committed mothers in the US: they craft a definition of children as autonomous and resilient, preserving their understanding of themselves as good mothers. I heard this same definition among women in Sweden, who also mostly worked full time. My interviewees in Germany and Italy held a different cultural definition of childhood, one that Blair-Loy calls “family-committed.” Family-committed mothers “define their children as fragile and needful of their attentive care,”³¹ a definition that prompts German mothers to work part time and Italian mothers to outsource childcare to grandmothers and paid careworkers.

Although my Swedish and US participants saw children as highly capable, their opinions diverged when it came to who they thought should raise children. American women largely believed child-rearing was a family’s personal responsibility—they didn’t expect help. Swedes’ views aligned with the social democratic welfare state model: they believed everyone has a responsibility to ensure that children are raised well.³² Cross-national survey data about cultural attitudes make these differences clear. For example, 57.3 percent of people in the US think that primarily family members should provide childcare to children under school age. Only 5 percent of Swedes agree. Three-quarters of Americans believe that families themselves should cover the costs of childcare for children under school age, compared to one-quarter of Swedes.³³

Americans tended to talk about the importance of “family members” raising children and caring for the home, but this really meant mothers. The majority of my participants believed in dividing childcare and housework equally with their partners in theory, but few achieved this goal in their day-to-day lives. Most women in DC explained to me why an equal division of labor wasn’t possible in their own homes. Some mothers said that their husbands’ work schedules prevented them from helping much. Ashley is a white mother with daughters ages eight and three, whom we met earlier. She works twenty-five hours a week as a secretary and is married to James, a police officer who works 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. five days a week:

This has offended him, but a couple of my mom friends have said, “It’s like you’re temporarily a single parent.” In some ways I am, but I have the emotional support of a second person to talk to, so I’m really not a single parent. But when it comes to Girl Scouts and soccer practice and showers at night, that’s all me. He’s just not around. […] That’s the biggest flaw in our whole relationship. We have this little window of time to download information between each other. We leave a lot of notes for each other. He comes home at 11:30 and I’m usually asleep. I’ll talk to him for ten or fifteen minutes and then I’ve got to go back to bed.

Ashley was responsible for virtually all of the housework and childcare. I asked her whether she and James divided tasks differently around the house before having children. “Not so much,” she said. This didn’t come as a surprise to her. “I knew from the moment we had talked about getting married that this was how it was going to be. He was never going to be the guy who was around a lot and very involved.” She thought James became a more involved parent once their children reached toddler age and beyond: “He’s especially good once they can talk. When he’s home, he will take them on walks or give me a break. But I always knew that the general day-in, day-out tasks were gonna be mine. […] I’m the oldest of five kids, so I’m already used to doing all that. I didn’t mind. This way I get to do it my way.” Ashley said she didn’t expect anything different and justified this vastly different workload by explaining that she liked getting to parent and care for their home herself.

Most women told me their husbands would participate with a specific housework or childcare task if the wives asked them and explained how to do it. Some mothers said they didn’t mind having to ask for this help because they were more aware of what needed to be done than their husbands were, which is logical in a culture in which women are socialized to assume responsibility for these arenas. Others were irritated that they had to ask, feeling exhausted by the added burden of constantly speaking up and requesting help. Some said they felt it was easier just to do it themselves.

A few mothers drew on gendered understandings of women’s and men’s parenting abilities to explain why they did more of the caring labor than their partners. I heard these explanations often during my conversations with women in Germany, Italy, and the US, but not in Sweden, where parenting discourse was gender-neutral. Ruth, whose husband, Gunnar, is Swedish, hinted at the fallacy of this explanation for men’s incapacity to help out at home: “He does his own laundry. My friends are like, ‘That’s incredible.’ […] I don’t know what it is about having a penis that makes you not able to do laundry.” The women I spoke to thought that their partners were willing to help out at home, but they said the issue was that they literally didn’t know how to—it wasn’t in their genes, or at the very least, they weren’t socialized to know how to complete basic household tasks.

Some women said they decided to “train” or “teach” their husbands to help out more as a method of self-preservation. Makayla, the nonprofit executive whose husband, William, had a high-ranking government job, explained:

It is normally me asking and he says yes. It’s not common that he will just do. I’ve been training my husband on certain things, so he’s now been officially trained that Mom does not do dinner on Fridays and Saturdays. […] Little things like that where even I am learning for myself to self-preserve and not do things.

She tested out this new approach by not arranging everything at home before she took an international business trip, leaving it to William to manage the household. “I got home from London and I opened the refrigerator and there was, like, an echo,” she told me, shaking her head in what seemed like frustration and a tinge of embarrassment. “There was nothing in the refrigerator, no milk, no bread, nothing.” Facing a giant snowstorm that was projected to shut down the city the next morning, Makayla explained, “At 8:00 in the morning—literally the day after I got back from London—I jumped in my car, I drove to the grocery store and got us basic provisions to get through the snow day.” Men’s clumsy lack of awareness was a common trope I heard among American women. Interesting, too, is Makayla’s phrasing that William had been “trained that Mom does not do dinner”—maybe implying a sense that she had to parent her husband at times.

Whereas Italian women described Italian men as being immature, lazy, and self-involved, American women tended to say men were poorly trained, as Makayla indicated. Both groups of moms thought their partners had no idea what it takes to run a household. It fell to women to continually ask their partners and try to teach them to help out regularly. Women laughed often during our interviews about men’s perpetual inability to help in even small ways, but their laughter was accompanied by shaking heads, raised eyebrows, shrugged shoulders, rolling eyes, and pursed lips. These nonverbal cues signaled an underlying annoyance and resentment toward their spouses.

Even when moms worked hard to teach their husbands to contribute, men’s efforts seemed lackluster. Knowing that most of these women’s husbands held high-paying jobs in Washington, DC, it is puzzling that these men who were clearly successful at work couldn’t succeed in helping their wives feel less stressed by helping at home. Sociologist Francine Deutsch calls this disconnect learned helplessness.³⁴ These men may assume that if they don’t follow through on household tasks, especially those involving kids, it’s likely that their female partners will complete the task instead. When men fumble, women are likely to solve the problem. When women fumble, fixing the issue is also on them. Because keeping a nice home and taking good care of one’s children is central to the American understanding of good mothering, it makes sense that these moms were unwilling to simply let these tasks—like laundry, changing diapers, helping children with homework, and scheduling doctor appointments—fall by the wayside.

While twenty-five American mothers I talked to couldn’t routinely rely on their partners’ help, seven of the thirty-two described greatly reduced work-family conflict because their partners did participate actively in child-rearing and housework. I noticed this trend in families in which husbands’ jobs were more flexible than their wives’ (Robin); both parents identified as feminists or worked to have an egalitarian relationship (Kelsey, Layla, Talia, and Rachel, who was married to a woman); the father was a stay-at-home dad (Lauren); or the father was from a country where it was normal for dads to be equally involved at home, as was the case for Ruth’s Swedish husband, Gunnar. As in Sweden, it often took substantial effort to try to achieve equality at home, but in the US, this planning tended to fall to mothers even in the most equal households.

American mothers experienced a weak public safety net—the collection of services provided by the state that gives citizens social supports to try and prevent hardship and improve people’s quality of life. Some of the frustrations I heard from moms in DC were particular to large metropolitan cities. For instance, women like Imani often had long commuting times and the cost of living was higher than elsewhere in the country. But the majority of women’s frustrations stemmed from issues common to all American working families.

One of the most significant challenges is the lack of paid maternity leave, which hugely shapes mothers’ lifeworlds. The women I spoke with wove together sick days, vacation days, short-term disability leave, unpaid time off, and, for some, paid time off in order to leave work after their children were born. Admittedly, I often felt confused and overwhelmed when mothers recounted exactly how they scraped together time away from work after giving birth—a feeling I rarely had in interviews with moms in Europe. Here is Gail (who is Asian, married, and a librarian with two children), explaining her two maternity leaves:

For both of them I took six weeks completely off and then I did another six weeks—well actually, with my first one I did a six-week transition time back, so it was part time three days in the office, two days out. And with my second child, I ended up quitting that job and then starting a new job, so I got an extra—those extra six weeks in between. And then with my new job, I worked out that I would be three days in the office. That was just, sort of—they approached me and said, “We want to hire you,” and I said, “Oh, great,” but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go back to work after having my second one, and so they said, “Well, what would it take?” and I literally said, “I want to work three days in the office and I want this much money.” And they were like, “Fine.” And I said, “OK, I guess I’m working for you, then.”

Gail’s explanation took well under a minute, and of the bunch, I’d describe this as a fairly straightforward account. I still struggled to follow answers like these and asked for clarification in nearly every interview. Gail’s description also underscores just how central maternity leave and schedule flexibility are to mothers’ employment decisions.

All in all, I surmised that most women in my sample took between six weeks and four months off work after childbirth, depending on what they were allowed and could afford. One mother quit and took ten months off because her children were gravely ill. Several took only a few days off before returning to work. A few women who could afford it quit work altogether because they had no access to maternity leave, and they found new jobs when they were ready to return several months to a year later. Several lower-income mothers also quit their jobs when they had children because they had no leave and no daycare solution. The key difference is that these less advantaged women had little savings and greater difficulty finding work again. The decision to leave work and remain unemployed for a period was detrimental to their job prospects, putting them in a precarious position when it came to supporting their families.

A number of moms hoarded their vacation and sick days (which varied between five and fifteen days annually) for several years knowing they would get no paid maternity leave when they decided to have children. Of course, this means women have to work nonstop through their pregnancies, and then after they return to work, new moms are unable to take a paid day off when they find themselves or their children ill, or to enjoy a day of rest or vacation. Women repeatedly told me they used their “vacation” days for children’s dentist and doctor appointments, back-to-school meetings, parent-teacher conferences, and so on. Women who worked part time, in temporary positions, or as freelancers and entrepreneurs received no paid vacation or sick days, so saving these days wasn’t an option. Some mothers even went into the red, borrowing from their future paid days off to stay home with their infants—a labor practice called time banking. Chelsea, the sales manager who felt she lived in “the swirl,” will need to work for two full weeks above her normal working hours, eighty hours total, to get back to zero on her paid time off this year. This tactic is out of the question for the majority of American workers, who lack the job security and occupational prestige to take this additional time.

When discussing their short maternity leave and life with young children, moms in DC talked constantly about sleep.³⁵ Women said things like, “I was kind of like a zombie,” “I was in hell for three months,” “I didn’t sleep for five years,” and, “It was exhausting. I remember getting home [from work] and just falling asleep.” The European mothers I talked to also described being tired when their children were infants, but their exhaustion occurred while they were on paid leave. Unlike Americans, European mothers reported overcoming their most acute exhaustion before returning to work. US moms told me they felt drained, wiped out. They were also sad to have missed key milestones with their children, they felt punished at work, they were unable to take paid vacation or sick days, and some reported being forced to quit their jobs.³⁶

Once women returned to work, their challenges continued. I spent an enormous portion of my interviews talking about mothers’ difficulties breast-feeding and pumping at work. Section 7 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires employers to provide “reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for 1 year after the child’s birth each time such employee has need to express the milk.” Employers are also required to provide “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk.”

Women told me they wanted to breast-feed for a few months up to a year, but most returned to work one to four months after giving birth. Pumping at work usually wasn’t an issue for the European moms I interviewed, who had between five months and three years off work through their leave systems. The European participants hardly ever mentioned pumping breast milk because they weaned their children while on leave before returning to work. Breast-feeding was emotionally fraught for US mothers. Some women cried when talking about it. The intensity and moral weight with which they discussed their own decisions makes sense because the practice of breast-feeding is connected to gendered ideals of good mothering.³⁷

Mothers felt enormous apprehension about pumping in the workplace—worrying about when, where, and how often to pump, and around whom. Women with access to a room at work that was designed for this purpose were effusive in their gratitude for it. Mothers considered a lactation room a “luxury.” Mackenzie, who works at an international financial institution where I interviewed her, told me:

It’s beautiful. I can take you down there. It’s really nice. It’s a separate room with a lock key entry. […] It has lockers, it has I think four individual rooms with curtains, and each of them has a commercial-grade pump in it—those are the ones where you can share safely. […] It has a fridge and a microwave and a sink. It’s a good situation. […] They [the company] make it as easy as it could possibly be. […] You hear a lot of people down there on their computers or their phones.

Mackenzie gave me a tour of the lactation room. Women employees had a fridge designated just for breast milk, separate from where employees kept their bagged lunches.

Just to reiterate, the supports Mackenzie was so grateful for included a room with a curtain, a pump that’s safe to share, and a fridge in which to keep her breast milk. This to me is further evidence of the very low expectations of US mothers. Yet this is much more than the vast majority of American mothers receive at work. The law stipulates only that a space and “reasonable time” be provided for pumping breast milk.

Even for the most privileged participants, pumping at work often proved difficult. Using the lactation room could be so inconvenient and time-intensive that women opted for different solutions (like Samantha’s use of the Freemie). Sometimes the designated places made mothers feel uncomfortable or were unsanitary and inadequate. Women told me they pumped in supply closets, storage rooms, handicapped bathroom stalls, rooms with windows, and their cars. Under these circumstances, mothers usually stopped breast-feeding earlier than they’d hoped.

Women also had uncomfortable experiences with male colleagues and supervisors who didn’t understand exactly what pumping breast milk entailed. Men’s lack of knowledge required additional emotional labor³⁸ when women found themselves in the awkward position of having to maintain a professional persona while explaining pumping to men, or insisting that men not enter their office while they were pumping. The mothers I interviewed were embarrassed at the prospect of colleagues and employers seeing them breast-feed.

Some bosses refused to provide privacy for breast-feeding mothers, occasionally with disastrous consequences. Robin, who works at a prison, was denied a request to install a lock on her office door (a converted prison cell) and decided to pump anyway. After an inmate walked in on her, a lock was installed.

Mothers’ desire to pump in a clean space and unwillingness to pump in restrooms sometimes damaged their standing at work. Gloria, a Hispanic sales director who works 37.5 hours a week, told her boss she was unable to travel for work trips around the country while breast-feeding. So she was instructed to give away her accounts to other colleagues and build a client base back up from scratch.

Breast-feeding in the US clashes with contemporary employment practices and the architecture of most American workplaces. The difficulties women experienced trying to pump at work highlight how gender inequality is built into the structure of work organizations.³⁹ Modern careers are not organized to be conducive to motherhood. The lack of alignment in mothers’ lifeworlds among federal policies, work organizations, and working mothers’ needs and desires causes tremendous problems for women.

When women did return to work after childbirth, many struggled without access to benefits like flexible schedules, reduced working hours, or the ability to work from home on occasion. Many US mothers told me they’d be thrilled to have a bit more flexibility in their work hours, to telecommute every once in a while, or to work fewer hours a week. However, the majority of women in DC told me that this flexibility wasn’t an option. The rigidity of work schedules and long hours caused a great deal of work-family conflict. By comparison, remember that Swedish parents have the legal right to reduce their normal working hours by up to 25 percent until their child turns eight. In Italy, mothers returning from parental leave were legally entitled to work two fewer hours per day to facilitate breast-feeding. In Germany, white-collar jobs are often available part time.

Again, most mothers didn’t mention their desire for more flexibility as something that could be made available through federal work-family policy. When I brought it up, interviewees thought this policy intervention would be wonderful, but all felt it was unrealistic—even those who were unusually knowledgeable about American public policy. Talia was the most well-informed of my participants about the lack of work-family policies in the US compared to other countries. She and her husband, Michael, sounded like the most egalitarian, feminist couple among the women I spoke with in Washington, DC. She had just returned from maternity leave with their four-month-old daughter, Naomi, and said wistfully with a sarcastic laugh that she wished everyone could work part time: “I definitely think that decreasing the length of the workweek would be a primary place I would start for thinking about how to make work life better in America. For parents and for nonparents.… People are working way too many hours.” Even Talia, who knew a lot about American and European work-family policy, thought it would be unrealistic to increase the availability of part-time work in the US. Only three of the mothers I interviewed were able to work part time (Ashley, Jill, and Layla).

Those who were permitted to show up later, leave earlier, or work from home invoked the gratitude discourse when describing this benefit. Imani, the property manager with the four-hour daily commute, explained,

What’s really been awesome is, my boss has been super-flexible. […] It’s a privilege, not a given. It’s very informal, and I try really hard to respect that privilege, because I don’t want to lose it, because I’m the one with that flexibility and I’d like to be able to use it if I absolutely need it. […] I like to bring myself in to work. I like being where I’m supposed to be.

Some mothers with these benefits stayed at their companies even if they could find higher-paying or more enjoyable jobs elsewhere, because the benefits were so central to improving their work-family lives. Chelsea, as we will see, turned down the same major promotion twice because she valued her flexibility at work so much—even if she still lived in “the swirl.”

Others experienced job penalties for using these flexible policies at work. Jill, a white elementary school teacher and single mother, struggled with depression and was in the midst of a messy divorce when her daughter was one year old. She had been working full time but couldn’t take the stress any longer, so she approached a colleague who had also recently had a child. They devised a job-sharing plan where they would both work part time, splitting one full-time teaching position. The principal reluctantly approved it but said, “This year, no births”—meaning the school couldn’t handle more pregnant teachers. It was the second time in fourteen years anyone had been allowed to job-share with reduced hours. Jill loved this reduced schedule: “It allowed me to breathe and play with [my daughter]. It’s been good.”

Later in our conversation, Jill mentioned off handedly, “I probably won’t even have a job there this fall.” She could tell I was surprised to hear this. “That’s the other thing. As a part-time employee, your contract is year to year. That’s the other thing I gave up.”

Shocked, I replied, “Oh! Your job security went out the window?”

Jill replied with a sad smile, “I don’t have any.”

Jill traded job security for a part-time schedule so she could keep her head above water during her divorce proceedings. Hers is a heartrending example of how mothers often have to trade off employment benefits when life throws them curve balls. Overall, mothers tended to feel that the structure and culture of overwork in the United States was inexorable, and they believed it was up to them to adapt their own behaviors to solve their work-family conflict.

This burden is carried almost entirely by women, in part because paternity leave, paid or otherwise, is rare in the US. For the twenty-four women I interviewed whose partners were men (one interviewee, Rachel, identified as a lesbian; her wife’s name is Danielle), most of their partners took off work only a few days or a week after their children were born. These fathers all worked full time. None took official paternity leave; mothers said it wasn’t offered at any of their partners’ workplaces. Others took two or three weeks off using sick days and vacation days. Kelsey’s and Janet’s husbands took the longest leaves, taking six weeks and twelve weeks off, respectively. Most mothers were home alone with their infants within days of childbirth.

Survey data from the US Department of Labor show that nine in ten fathers take some time off work for the birth or adoption of a child, but these are very short leaves. Seventy percent take ten days or less. In 2015 only 13 percent of men who took leave received pay for any portion of the time away from work, compared with 21 percent for mothers.⁴⁰

Although I asked every mom I interviewed in DC whether her partner took any leave, we spent remarkably little time on the subject. Gail, whose explanation of her two maternity leaves confused me, is Asian and was born and raised in Canada. She is married to Patrick, and they have two children, ages ten and twelve. Gail works over fifty hours a week as a school librarian. I interviewed her in their formal living room while Patrick and their kids hung out in the adjacent kitchen at the back of the house.

I asked Gail, “Did your husband take any time off work when both the kids were born?”

She paused and cast her eyes above my head, thinking hard. “I don’t think so. Maybe a week.”

Given the lengthy accounting of her own maternity leave a few minutes prior, I followed up, “But no official paid paternity leave?”

“No,” Gail replied. “I think he probably took a week or half days or something. When my daughter was born, we had asked my mom to come help out for a bit, so she was here.”

I wanted to make sure I understood correctly since Gail was being vague. “So he might have taken off work a bit for a week or so, and then he went back to his full-time schedule?”

Gail nodded, “Mm-hmm,” her mouth in a firm line. I heard these brief responses often from American and Italian mothers. My sense was that paternity leave was a foreign concept to US mothers; they had heard of it, but it simply didn’t register on their radar as a possibility for their families, as it did with mothers in former East Germany and especially in Sweden.

Mothers seem to have internalized a gendered version of the liberal discourse of personal responsibility—not that families are responsible for their own well-being, but that mothers are responsible for their families’ well-being. When I asked what sorts of policies could help support them better, two of the thirty-two mothers mentioned that paid paternity leave would help reduce their work-family conflict and enhance equality with their partners. Michelle wished her husband, Christopher, could take a year off work to fully experience the labor involved in caring for their two young children, which she did alone. Talia, the white married mother who had what seemed to be the most gender-egalitarian relationship of any mothers I interviewed in DC, works about forty-five hours a week as an editor. She thought that a “longer” paternity leave of eight weeks would give fathers the practical incentive to learn parenting skills that they wouldn’t bother to learn if they were home for only two weeks. Talia saw leave as a tool to motivate fathers to participate in the care of their children, which would ease mothers’ burdens. Recall that in Sweden the goal both in welfare law and among parents themselves is for fathers to take half the parental leave time—seven months.

For many women, the return to work brings with it the challenge of finding safe, affordable, and high-quality childcare. All my American interviewees reported difficulties doing so. We spent more time discussing childcare than any other topic during my US interviews. Those who found safe, high-quality care credited luck for securing this care. No women found what I would consider affordable care; all discussed at length the expense of childcare. Some reported that it used up to two-thirds of their income, in some cases costing tens of thousands of dollars a year for one child. It was even more expensive for mothers with more than one child. In contrast, the maximum monthly cost for a child in Sweden is around US$160 (US$1,900 a year) for even the wealthiest families, with successively lower costs for more children. This yearly maximum is not meant to exceed 3 percent of a Swedish family’s net income. Swedish families pay roughly 9 percent of the costs of childcare. German families pay 14 percent, while Italians pay, at most, 18 percent of the costs for kids under three to attend childcare; it is free for those ages three to six. These governments subsidize the rest through taxes.⁴¹

Ideals of “good motherhood” were embedded in mothers’ discussions of childcare in all the countries where I conducted research, but American mothers’ comments belied an anxiety that Europeans lacked. In Europe, mothers were concerned with the affordability and quality of childcare, and we also spent substantial time on this topic. But in Germany, Sweden, and Italy public daycare is provided by municipalities and is both heavily subsidized and regulated. These countries also have national standards for caregivers and facilities that the US does not, which meant that the moms I interviewed in Europe didn’t mention any worry about their children’s physical safety while at daycare—something that greatly concerned American mothers.

For those who could afford it, paying for expensive, high-quality childcare helped assure mothers that their children didn’t suffer for their decision to work. This expenditure assuaged mothers’ sense of guilt to a degree (though none seemed free of it), and thereby lessened one source of work-family conflict. Many women described knowing that the daycare facilities where their children spent their time were of questionable quality, but they couldn’t afford different solutions.

US mothers also seemed distressed because no one daycare solution was reliable. These arrangements often shifted without warning. A daycare run informally out of someone’s home could close, a babysitter or nanny could start school or move away, or relatives who agreed to help could suddenly fall ill. Even when women secured space in daycares that they liked and trusted, the inflexible opening and closing hours were a major source of stress. Some, like Makayla’s children’s daycare center, charged up to $10 a minute for late pick-ups. She told me “it’s like white knuckles trying to get there on time.” Makayla, again, is middle class. For a mother earning minimum wage, which was US$9.50 an hour in DC in 2015, the penalty for a ten-minute delay at a center like this would cost a mother more than a full day’s paycheck.⁴² It’s small wonder why low-income mothers experience employment disruptions after having children more often than do middle-class mothers.

Without a universal system, childcare difficulties are inevitable. Families, and primarily the women in them, find individual solutions for their children’s daycare needs, which vary significantly in their levels of safety, cost, and convenience. The lack of universal daycare fuels class inequalities not just for mothers, but also for children.⁴³ Women’s childcare experiences and solutions depended on their level of economic advantage: mothers who had the most financial resources available to dedicate to childcare unsurprisingly tended to be the happiest with the solutions they found. Still, most American women didn’t mention a public daycare system as a potential source of support for their families. All interviewees expressed profound stress and frustration about their difficulties finding childcare, but only a few mentioned socializing daycare as a helpful policy solution. One mother, Michelle, did express indignation with the cultural assumption that children are parents’ responsibility alone. She was the woman who wished her husband, Christopher, could spend a year at home to appreciate just how much work it is to maintain a household:

Here in America we say, “You shouldn’t have children if you can’t afford it.” That’s just like, what do we value in the society? Having nurturing parents and their children to make good citizens down the road? If a child is sick, being understanding of that, supporting that, not having to think of the financial implications is huge. I know parents who will take their [sick] kids to the daycare, because it’s like, “I have to get to work.” Aren’t they running a fever? You shouldn’t have to make that choice. They should support us more in our country.

This more structural understanding of work-family conflict was a rarity among my American interviewees, but not for those in Sweden, Germany, and Italy. External assistance in ameliorating their work-family conflict seemed to sit outside most American mothers’ lifeworlds, even when it came to childcare.

Another worry that consumed mothers day in and day out, year after year while their children were growing up was the lack of guaranteed paid sick leave. Some mothers had access to paid sick days through their employers, while others who worked as temps, freelancers, or part-time employees didn’t receive any paid days off work for illness. Moms in DC often went to work sick themselves or sent their children to school sick because they ran out of paid sick days, or they couldn’t afford to or weren’t allowed to take an unpaid day off, risking penalties or job loss if they did. We spent a lot of time during interviews talking about the catastrophe of a sick child for mothers at work.⁴⁴ Mothers’ carefully laid plans for childcare, commuting time, and work schedules unraveled when children fell ill.

The US is also the only OECD country without guaranteed paid sick days. The country’s labor laws don’t require employers to provide short-term paid sick days or longer-term paid sick leave, and they do not protect workers from being fired if they miss work as a result of illness.⁴⁵ Several states—including Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—have legislation that allows eligible workers some amount of paid time off for illness. However, the laws vary widely and have a lot of exemptions.⁴⁶ As of February 2018, eighteen cities and counties had passed paid sick days statutes, most recently Austin, Texas.

On top of worries about sick leave, mothers talked frequently about their paid time off (PTO). Many would forgo time off during certain parts of the year and work overtime to have enough days saved up to take a week-long vacation with their families or to stay at home during the workdays in the recess between Christmas and New Year’s. The US is the only economically developed country in the world that doesn’t guarantee workers paid vacation or paid holidays. The availability of paid days off is distributed unevenly among workers: only 50 percent of low-wage workers (the bottom quartile of earners) receive any paid vacation, compared to 90 percent of high-wage workers (the top quartile of earners).⁴⁷ The average worker in the private sector receives ten days a year. In comparison (as I’ve outlined), Swedes receive a minimum of twenty-five days of paid vacation, Germans receive twenty (with nine to thirteen additional paid holidays, depending on which state they reside in), and Italians receive twenty (alongside ten paid holidays).

A few women suggested more paid vacation or sick days when I asked what could be changed to reduce their work-family conflict, but each one followed this statement with a bitter laugh. This seems to be more evidence that US mothers usually think of workplace policies as unchallengeable.

Generally speaking, the American moms I interviewed seemed frazzled, tired, and overwhelmed with stress. They stood apart from all the women I interviewed in Europe in this regard. The sources of work-family conflict I’ve detailed in this chapter help explain this difference. Although working mothers in Europe also faced prevailing norms about employment and parenting that caused them to feel stress and guilt, they had more material sources of work-family support than American mothers, even if this support varied in usefulness and was sometimes far from perfect (as in Italy). It is this confluence of both normative and material sources of work-family conflict that makes American mothers’ difficulties particularly acute.

Mothers’ Responses to Work-Family Conflict

To minimize their overpowering work-family conflict, some mothers tried to change their work lives. Several of the women I spoke with told me they “leaned out,” found part-time work, or switched jobs.

During our conversations several moms referenced Sheryl Sandberg’s bestselling book Lean In. Sandberg’s book argues that women don’t advance in their careers in part because they unintentionally hold themselves back at work. Sandberg suggests that women should “lean in” and “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals in order to find professional achievement and personal fulfillment. Some felt Lean In spoke to them profoundly while others were more skeptical. One called it “total crap.” Some women adopted the term into their lexicon and used it to explain their own work-family decisions. Chelsea said she was currently “leaning out” at work. She has a prestigious position in sales management, but turned down the same major promotion (to a C-suite position) twice because it required substantial travel and less flexibility. The promotion was attractive, but Chelsea declined it. She said:

I can’t do that. I just can’t do that right now. My husband thought I was a little crazy for passing on it because he’s like, “If the CEO wants you to work for him …” I was like, I just—I can’t do it. I’m going to stick with my current job because I have the flexibility that I need.

Chelsea is primarily responsible for their household and children and thought this promotion was incompatible with her domestic commitments. So, while Chelsea didn’t “lean out” entirely by quitting work, especially since she secured the flexible schedule she wanted, she declined opportunities to “lean in” further: “I need to be leaning more to the family side right now and just maintaining the work side. I can’t lean into the work.”

Mothers also discussed the need to “lean out” at certain points over their career trajectory in order to accommodate their families. Gloria, the advertising sales director who had to give away her clients during maternity leave and explain pumping breast milk to her boss, used this approach herself: “You have to pick when you lean in and when to lean back.” Gloria chose to lean back from work during her thirties to make sure she could have children and spend time with them once she did. She now has a three-year-old and five-year-old and works 37.5 hours a week. She plans to lean back in and work longer hours when her children are a few years older, when she said they’ll rely on her less.

Chelsea’s and Gloria’s explanations for leaning out are rooted in the American cultural ideal of good mothering: they couldn’t dedicate themselves fully to work while their children were small. They also wanted to spend more time with their kids. For mothers who leaned out, some criticized those who remained “all in” at work, indicating that their children suffered. Gloria criticized moms who worked long hours, like lawyers. She positioned herself as someone who made sacrifices for her children’s sake: she decided to forgo law school so she could pick up her children from daycare, conforming to intensive mothering ideals. Leaning out is a gendered tactic mothers used to reduce their own work-family conflict and affirm to themselves that they were good mothers. For some moms, this also involved becoming active agents in the shaming of other mothers who made different decisions.

I mentioned earlier in this chapter that part-time work was hard to come by for the women I talked with, though many wanted it. Only three moms worked part-time schedules, but they told me their reduced hours were central to achieving a greater sense of ease in their work and family lives. Layla is an Arab married mother with a two-year-old and was expecting her second child. She now works as a consultant twenty-five hours a week after being fired from her previous job while pregnant. Layla settled a discrimination lawsuit out of court and decided to work for herself as a political consultant so she could have a part-time schedule. The other two women did not work in prestigious occupations. They work in heavily female-dominated jobs: Jill is a third-grade teacher with a job-sharing arrangement and Ashley is a secretary. These three women told me they felt lucky and grateful to work part time. However, their part-time jobs offered limited benefits, unlike in Germany (see chapters 3 and 4).

In her study of elite women in the finance industry mentioned earlier, Mary Blair-Loy described the women who managed to secure part-time schedules as mavericks “trying to imaginatively redefine what is possible.”⁴⁸ None of the women I interviewed working in white-collar and professional occupations said it would be possible to negotiate a part-time schedule. Perhaps the resources necessary to secure reduced hours at work are more available to the high-income women Blair-Loy interviewed, and are less available to the largely middle-class women I spoke to for this book. It’s also possible that the sense of impossibility prevented mothers from trying to secure part-time accommodations.

Two other women were able to negotiate part-time schedules temporarily when transitioning back from maternity leave before returning to full-time work, and they described it as “the best of both worlds.”⁴⁹ Talia reflected, “While I was working part time I just kept saying, ‘This is the life.’ I wish we could all work part time. It’s such a more humane approach to work life, period. Not just for parents. I think we are all really overworked.” Allie did the same, especially because one of her twins had health problems; she said she would advise women to try out part-time work if they could after becoming mothers. Allie implied this strategy helped her keep her foot in the door and allowed her to maintain a professional identity that gave her validation and satisfaction. Since maternity leave in the United States tends to be quite short, both Talia and Allie found it helpful to work part time for a period after transitioning back. The mothers who worked part time explained their decisions similarly to the German mothers I interviewed, who seemed better able to conform to their country’s ideal of a good mother with a part-time schedule (see chapters 3 and 4).

The US by and large lacks the political, cultural, and organizational support for part-time employment in white-collar occupations. In contrast, part-time work is widespread in low-paying retail and service work. But, again, these jobs come without the benefits, job security, or protections that are available in countries like Germany. Many Americans who are employed part time would prefer to work full time but are given no choice. Thus, women at the middle of the income distribution (like those I interviewed) or at the top often want part-time hours but most can’t have them, while women at the bottom of this hierarchy (concentrated in retail and service jobs) want full-time hours but cannot have them. Sociologists Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson refer to this disparity as the “time divide.”⁵⁰ As we saw, in a place like Berlin policy and cultural supports for a wider range of employment models—alongside support for the unemployed and mandatory overtime compensation—can help remove this form of inequality. Mothers in the United States don’t have this range of options.

Many of my interview participants changed jobs in order to gain access to work-family benefits or stayed in jobs they might otherwise have left because they needed the policies available there. Sometimes women traded one handful of benefits for others when they changed jobs: usually less pay but more flexibility. Changing jobs to secure better policies seemed to eliminate some but not all of mothers’ work-family conflict, suggesting that policies alone are not a panacea for working mothers’ struggles. Many less privileged American mothers don’t have the option to switch companies to secure better work-family benefits. It comes as no surprise that the mothers working in the most prestigious jobs among those I interviewed tended to have the most—and most generous—work-family policies available to them. Regardless of their economic advantage, all the women explained having to devise a set of makeshift solutions to turn to when the going got rough—which, it turns out, was often.

Given the lack of a national public safety net of work-family policy supports, the women I met in Washington, DC, described creating their own private safety nets to reduce their daily stress.⁵¹ These social and financial safety nets helped catch mothers when they stumbled—whether they fell ill, lost a job, felt alone, needed someone to pick up a sick child from daycare when they couldn’t leave work, or unexpectedly found themselves single parents.

Mothers spoke often about their desire to be in touch with relatives, friends, and other working mothers to lessen the feelings of isolation they sometimes felt. The five single mothers I interviewed felt particularly lonely and overwhelmed. They relied on family members and friends to support them day-to-day. One of these single moms, Mary, was much higher income, and she also relied on her parents to help with her twins. She explained how she had joined a “single mothers by choice” group. “Choice moms” are single women who decide to have children through adoption or conception using donor sperm. Mary explained to me that she used this term to prevent people from constantly asking about her husband, which she found irritating and exhausting. The term “single mother by choice” also has race and class connotations. Given the discourse of personal responsibility and the centrality of individualism in the US, it may unconsciously serve as a distancing tactic from the stereotype of poor single mothers who are thought to irresponsibly have children out of wedlock or by accident. Using the phrase “choice moms” indicates that their childbearing and family model are intentional.

Several women told me they had started a working mothers’ support group in their neighborhood or workplace. Natalia started a group called the Mommy Mafia that ballooned to two hundred members. She said mothers were comforted by talking openly about sensitive and often painful parenting topics like trying to have another child. They also discussed parenting approaches and ways to reduce work-family conflict. These conversations seemed to make participants feel more informed about their own decisions and therefore like better mothers. Susan was the only woman, only mother, and only person of color in her high rank at work. Having told me it took “nine years of tears” to stop feeling guilty as a working mom, Susan decided to start a support group in her office after years spent researching the available policies and managing her work-family conflict alone. She said she learned the hard way that going it alone was impossible: “You should have some kind of support network there. This is why I started that group. Find the other working moms. […] Sometimes I look back now and I’m not really sure how I didn’t totally break down sometimes. […] It became a mission for me, and it has been ever since then.”

Susan argued that no one could understand the plight of working moms unless they were one—not even working dads. She was the youngest senior staff member by at least twenty-five years and started informally meeting with other moms in her office to “have lunch and support each other.” The support group was such a success that her workplace formalized it. Moms in Europe never mentioned starting their own grassroots support groups. I suspect Italy’s strong familialist culture meant that women had ample interpersonal support. In Germany and Sweden, these groups are widely institutionalized at the municipal, state, and sometimes federal levels and are often run as public entities.

In addition to weaving together a social safety net of other working moms they could rely on, women told me they felt responsible for creating a family financial safety net. Given the rise in families’ economic insecurity and shrinking national safety nets over the past several decades, sociologist Marianne Cooper found in her 2014 study of American families that regardless of their position along the socioeconomic spectrum, all families feel anxious about finances.⁵² Cooper learned that mothers tend to be the “designated worriers” about their families’ financial security. I found this to be true for the mothers I interviewed as well, another aspect of the uneven division of household labor described earlier.

During our conversations American mothers talked about money far more often than the moms in Europe did. They worried about the high cost of childcare and health insurance, and the higher earners told me they worried about saving for retirement and their children’s college. While some European mothers also complained about the cost of childcare and health care, these were heavily subsidized in Germany, Sweden, and Italy, and college in these countries is free or low cost. Single mothers in all four countries mentioned financial worries more often than partnered women did. But federal governments provide financial safety nets for citizens and single mothers in Europe (though these vary widely) that are largely unavailable in the United States. Many American mothers reported that their employment decisions were tied to achieving financial security. They explained that they had in their mind a certain level of financial security that was necessary to provide a “good childhood.”

Mothers who were better off financially outsourced some of their childcare and housework to help ease their workload, often to women who were immigrants, racial/ethnic minorities, or both. While Italian mothers also relied on outsourcing care and cleaning, American mothers were notably effusive in their gratitude for this help. Michelle, the white, married mother of two who works remotely as an engineer thirty-five hours a week, employed an African American nanny named Jessica. I got the chance to meet her when I showed up for our interview on a particularly cold weekday morning. After inviting me inside her home, Michelle waved me to follow her into the kitchen where Jessica was zipping up the two-year-old’s coat while talking softly to the six-month-old girl waiting in a baby carrier by her feet. Michelle introduced me to Jessica and we shook hands. Michelle said they were just leaving for the park. Her gaze darting back and forth between Jessica and me like she was watching a fast-paced tennis match, she explained that Jessica was a student, and that I was also a student who wanted to learn about her work-family balance. She smiled at Jessica, laughing and saying she was their family’s “lifesaver.” Michelle thanked her and confirmed when they would be returning, and then Jessica ushered the two children out the door. This experience contrasted sharply with those I had in Italy, where mothers didn’t acknowledge the presence of domestic workers or introduce me to them. Michelle seemed eager to show Jessica and me how much she appreciated and valued her caring labor. Because US culture prides itself on a model of equality regardless of race, gender, or class, she may have been uncomfortable with the display of privilege and unequal race and class dynamics in this relationship, and was eager to compensate by performing gratitude that the Italian mothers felt no need for.

Several mothers told me they worked hard to squeeze the cost of domestic workers like Jessica into their budgets. My participants explained that they were making a financial sacrifice in favor of greatly reduced stress. Mothers who employed domestic workers explained to me with wide eyes and raised shoulders, shaking their heads, that they literally didn’t know how they would manage to keep their household functioning without this help. American mothers paid childcare facilities, nannies, and housekeepers to try and resolve their work-family conflict. As I mentioned earlier, the more privileged women I spoke to were able to work outside the home because they relied on the caring labor of much lower-paid women workers.⁵³

Mothers also tried to resolve their work-family conflicts by changing their own outlook or their approach to juggling work and family responsibilities. This solution implies that the source of mothers’ work-family conflict in their lifeworlds is not the structure of the workplace, oppressive cultural norms, or gender inequality, but mothers themselves. I observed three tactics that moms used to shift their own perspectives.

First, mothers tried to educate themselves about parenting and work-family conflict. US mothers often thought they hadn’t yet adopted the right parenting approach, weren’t spending enough or the right kind of time with their children, or weren’t knowledgeable enough about their needs. As a result, American moms often consulted books, articles, Facebook and blog posts, podcasts, and classes about parenting and work-family conflict to try and resolve these dilemmas. Although European mothers mentioned these resources occasionally, American moms talked about them more often and in greater detail. They seemed to spend a fair amount of time reading about, listening to, and attending classes on these topics. Enrolling in courses and reading parenting books made mothers feel that they were working to fulfill their duties and improve their abilities as mothers, which they believed had the twofold benefit of alleviating their stress and helping their children.

Middle- and upper-class American moms often turn to expert advice to inform their child-rearing decisions.⁵⁴ But this expert advice is fraught. Sociologist Orit Avishai argues that complying with these mothering standards requires immense time, energy, and self-discipline.⁵⁵ For my interviewees, doing motherhood right meant performing a professionalized version of motherhood that involved continual research. Their partners didn’t do this work, according to moms in our conversations. I asked women in DC how they defined good mothering, and on several occasions they replied by saying, “I read this really interesting article about this,” and then explained the article’s take on good parenting without giving me their personal definition, as if the article’s explanation stood in for theirs.

For Makayla and her husband, William, their impatience and exhaustion with their three-year-old’s stubbornness led them to sign up for a “parenting boot camp” at their friend’s recommendation. This class reminded them that their son Jamal was, in her words, “no different from any other kid,” affirming that nothing was wrong with him and that they simply needed to refine their approach. Makayla’s voice changed when she started discussing their new approach to disciplining Jamal, almost as if she had memorized a pamphlet from the course on this topic and was repeating it to me when I asked her what it meant to be a good mother. Avishai calls this invisible labor of staying up-to-date on expert advice a “contemporary mothering project […] [and] a burden of mothering in late capitalist America.”⁵⁶ Trying to become better parents—ones who were more organized, more calm, better at multitasking and dealing with temper tantrums, and so forth—was one more way mothers took responsibility for solving their work-family conflict by themselves, whether by reading, listening to podcasts, or taking classes.

Second, American mothers talked constantly about their efforts to improve their efficiency and organization as a way to reduce stress. Mary, the attorney and white single mother of twins, said: “I’m very grateful, even if I occasionally get stressed out. But it’s such an inefficient state of being to be stressed out. […] It’s usually something that can be resolved with a little bit of extra work. It’s not an unsolvable problem.” Mary implied that she could choose to resolve it on her own if she just applied herself.

Women explained that they were continually refining a system for managing what felt like a hectic, packed schedule. Imani, the Hispanic/African American mother with the four-hour daily commute as a property manager, reflected with exasperation, “One of my goals for this year, hello!”—she threw her hands up in frustration—“ten years later, almost eleven, is to try to get to a place where we can organize and come up with a little bit of a better system.” Imani explained, “I think we could stop flying by the seat of our pants. That’s what I feel like our life has been like.” She rolled her eyes, shaking her head, and continued:

Very hectic. […] I wish I could tell you that I cooked all the meals on Sunday, and on Monday and Tuesday we had this and that. That’s also a very idealist way I would love to live, but on Saturday and Sunday I’m exhausted. And not to mention, my son has sports, and my daughter’s getting ready to have activities. That’s going to blow our world up. We have to have a schedule of some sort. […] We decided that for spring break we wouldn’t go anywhere this year, and that we would focus on trying to get our house in a functional, organized manner so that we can have a slightly better life.

Imani expressed a common refrain: if she could create a good schedule, or reorganize her house, or plan out their weekly meals, or reduce her commute, or carve out an extra hour in her day, her life would feel less chaotic. I heard some iteration of this thinking from every American mother I interviewed, whether she worked full time or part time, whether she had an understanding boss or not, whether she worked from home or had a long commute. Mothers held high standards for what they felt they should be able to accomplish in a given day or week; many thought meals should be planned out and children should participate in several after-school activities, for example.⁵⁷ Regardless of their circumstances, all the mothers I interviewed seemed to think that one key to better work-life “balance” lay in working harder to squeeze more time out of their days.

US interviewees had the sense that good mothers were hyper-organized, and yet no one in my sample felt they met this high standard. Makayla explained,

Figuring out a way to do better planning for yourself, not only time for you to have for yourself, but also, I don’t do as good of a job as I know that I should in terms of planning out meals, planning out trips to go shopping. Organization is gonna be your best friend. […] Organizing for you so that you’re not constantly—you’re never catching up, you’re always busy. […] I feel like I’m constantly busy.

My field notes from Washington, DC, are full of references to time: Stressed. Busy. Exhausted. Rushed. Out of time. American mothers talked obsessively about time: not enough time, how to get more time, how to carve out time, how to squeeze in time. In a field note from DC I wrote: “These are extremely capable, hard-working women, and they can’t make it work. It’s too much. These are superheroes barely staying afloat.” Mothers’ explanations of their approaches to balancing their work and family commitments made me feel physically anxious while listening to them. I got the sense that one small and unexpected change to their schedules (a nanny arriving ten minutes late, a traffic jam on the way to work, etc.) would cause their carefully laid plans to crumble and throw their day into chaos.

One way mothers increased their efficiency and reduced their stress was to find technological solutions to the tasks that ate up their time. European mothers rarely mentioned technology. I discussed Samantha’s discovery of the Freemie (the hands-free breast pump) in the introduction to this chapter. Wealthier mothers used grocery delivery services, online shopping, housekeeper and babysitter finding services, smartphone apps, and shared calendars to manage their family’s complex schedules and to-do lists. Chelsea breast-fed her son during our interview on her living room couch with one arm and showed me an app on her phone that tracked her son’s breast-feeding schedule with the other hand. This was far easier than keeping a notebook, she explained. US mothers often answered calls, emails, and texts during our interviews, or stopped to open an app and type something into their phones before they forgot it.

The third way mothers tried to resolve their work-family conflict was to redefine what it meant to succeed, which often entailed lowering their expectations for themselves, their careers, and their family lives. Chelsea said she felt much less stressed once she decided she could accept doing an A or B job rather than an A+ job at work. Ashley, one of the few mothers who secured part-time work as a secretary, explained:

They talk about mommy track type jobs. I think in a way, that’s not a bad thing. You can’t do it all, at least that first year or two. […] Working and mothering were first, and everything else just went way down. I think in some ways cutting back your hours, cutting back your ambitions temporarily is not such a bad thing. […] The only way you can have it all, something’s got to give somewhere.

Ashley thought she couldn’t work full time and still be the sort of mother she wanted, so she switched jobs and justified to herself that the mommy track is “not a bad thing” because “you can’t do it all.” She said, “This sounds so small-minded, but I think you have to scale back your ideas of what success means.” But Ashley expressed some ambivalence about this decision:

Here in DC, I’ve taken myself out of that circle, but there’s a large group of very accomplished women, and it can give you an inferiority complex if you choose. […] You can feel like, “What have I accomplished?” And they have kids, too. […] Making cocktail small talk sometimes can be real ego-puncturing.

As she spoke, I felt an underlying sense of dissatisfaction from Ashley. She seemed to feel uncertain about this approach even though she had chosen it herself.

Moms admitted feeling guilty and even lowered their voices to a whisper when explaining their sense that elite career advancement was incompatible with good mothering. Scaling back and redefining success was their way of adhering to ideologies of intensive mothering. Janet, a white banker who is married and works forty-five hours a week, occupied a prestigious position at her firm. But she explained that it was only possible because she climbed the career ladder, then got married, and then adopted a child when she couldn’t have one of her own. Her son was four years old when we spoke—I saw photos of him once she ushered me through the glass lobby of her office building and up into her well-appointed office. These large photos filled the wall by her desk. I asked whether mothers could advance to the top of their careers, and Janet paused and whispered, “I don’t know. Honestly, I feel guilty, and I don’t work very hard at this point. It takes a unique woman to be able to rise to the very top and still have a work-life balance, where you still see your child enough.” I asked, “What are the qualities of a woman who is capable of doing that?” She paused again, clearly hesitant, and answered, “I don’t know if it’s possible. […] It might not exist, and it might not be someone I would like. And that’s mean of me to say of other women, but at some point, you have to choose your full-force-ahead career or your family.”

Evident in Janet’s comments (and Gloria’s earlier) is the “mommy wars” discourse that good mothers can’t advance to the top of the career ladder because they wouldn’t be able to see their children enough. In this regard, American mothers sounded like the German women I interviewed who worried about being called raven mothers. Yet most German women who criticized the “go-getter” moms had sought part-time work, which is much more widely available in Germany than in the United States.

Even women I interviewed who held high-status positions, like Chelsea and Janet, thought scaling back was important in order to reduce their work-family conflict. The ER doctor Lauren confessed similarly, “You can’t expect to be perfect in everything. Something’s got to give. […] I have lowered my expectations for both [laughs] to make it manageable for myself. That doesn’t mean that I’m not feeling badly about one or the other at various times.” This sense of inevitable disappointment was palpable for most of the moms I talked with. Moms felt resigned to the fact that they would never feel guilt-free about both their jobs and their family life at the same time. This sentiment echoed western German and Italian mothers’ comments, though scaling back for German mothers meant working part time. Both ideal worker and intensive mothering norms require such high levels of commitment and energy that it’s logical that mothers never feel they’ve succeeded in both realms. Mothers always thought they had fallen short.

I felt low as I left Washington, DC, when my fieldwork came to an end. After hearing heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story, I was drained and pessimistic. Witnessing a sliver of the stress American mothers endured in their day-to-day lives wore me down and, honestly, made me feel apprehensive.

Women in DC believed it was their own fault that they couldn’t manage their feelings of guilt and work-family conflict. They created intricate webs of support for their families and an array of creative solutions to meet their needs, but mothers still felt pulled to their wits’ end each day. And the mothers I spoke with were the ones who still worked for pay outside the home. When faced with the impossibility of juggling competing demands at home and work, many American mothers of all social classes simply quit, though with very different consequences depending on their socioeconomic status.⁵⁸

The US was the last country in which I conducted interviews. I had spent the four previous summers speaking with German, Swedish, and Italian mothers about their work-family conflict. I learned that mothers everywhere experience stress and hardship. But the differences in policy supports were laid bare to me in meeting women face-to-face in these different field sites and seeing such drastically different options available to them to combine paid work with motherhood. American mothers had strikingly little in the way of support, but they didn’t realize it. They took personal responsibility for problems that European mothers recognized as having external causes.

At the end of my interviews with European mothers, they often asked me what it was like in the US for working moms, and their jaws dropped as I began to explain the lack of policy provisions. Similarly, American women sometimes inquired when our interviews had finished about the policies available in Europe. I felt myself hesitating to tell them about Sweden’s year-long leave paid at 80 percent of women’s salaries, the universally available, full-day childcare open for all children in the former East Germany, or Italian women’s right to return to the same position after their paid leave. I felt bad giving women concrete examples of how far behind the US is in supporting mothers and families—mostly because I thought it would only make them feel worse. But I told mothers anyway, and my explanations were usually met with looks of vague surprise, but mostly resignation. I could have been talking about policies on another planet, given how little it seemed to impact them.

From the perspectives of American mothers, shouldering the load for their work-family conflict was inevitable, even if mothers in other countries had more support. Like Allie said, simply altering work hours “would be like turning around the Titanic.” It felt like an impossibility to the women I interviewed, and I understand why. They worked doggedly to remedy their own struggles and felt grateful for even small amounts of help. In the United States, the family continues to operate as a gendered institution that privatizes social costs that are conceptualized in other nations as public responsibilities.⁵⁹

The liberal welfare state is perpetuated through the discourse that mothers’ work-family conflict is both their own fault and their own problem to solve. This discourse of personal responsibility disguises the social and structural causes of mothers’ difficulties in trying to work for pay while raising children. And it exacts high economic, emotional, and physical costs on working mothers.