Work Matters

More than half of America's wage earners are women, but their role as workers is hotly debated in politics, the press, and most eloquently, among themselves. Everyone has a fixed idea of what a working woman is, and what she wants - or should want. The commandments and the myths pile up: She should be assertive, but not aggressive; and it's her own problem if she can't find a way to have it all - work, family, a personal life. In this timely and powerful book, sixty-five women tell their own stories, the ones hidden behind the hype. Sara Ann Friedman spent five years traveling throughout the United States to speak with all kinds of women, working every imaginable job. She tells about a Latina sewer worker who found handling dangerous machinery easier than batling harassment from the men who work under her, and a nurse who tapped hidden strength as the picket captain of a thirty-nine-day strike. A biologist describes the terrors of isolated field work, and a mother explains why her goat farming business meshes perfectly with raising children. Here are thirty-year-olds making six figures, as well as women who earn less than the cost of day care. They struggle with the anxiety that comes from their own success and power; they ponder the best way to support and promote other women; they fight the pressure to be everything to everyone. Most of all, they strive to find their own space in an institution designed by and for men: the workplace itself. Though their lives and desires vary, these women share a common bond. Work matters to them. It's vital to their sense of self, and not something they do simply to bring in a paycheck. Through their voices - uncensored, pungent, and alive - thisbook speaks of the delicate balancing act between work and family, of the passion to do something of lasting value, and of the far-reaching changes women are making in the once impenetrable masculine domain of work in America.