I'm a hard worker and love my work. I have felt pulled toward work. And it's a pull I have ferociously had to counter to make room for my family.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
No work-family balance will ever fully take hold if the social conditions that might make it possible - men who are willing to share parenting and housework, communities that value work in the home as highly as work on the job, and policymakers and elected officials who are prepared to demand family-friendly reforms - remain out of reach.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Work-family balance relies on shared responsibilities and supportive social conditions.
This quote emphasizes that achieving a true work-family balance is contingent upon broader societal changes. It highlights the necessity for men to take an active role in parenting and household duties, the importance of valuing domestic work equally with professional work, and the need for policymakers to implement family-friendly reforms. Without these fundamental shifts in societal norms and policies, a sustainable work-family balance will remain unattainable.
Themes
Work-Family BalanceSocial ConditionsParentingHouseworkFamily-Friendly Reforms
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about gender equality, this quote can be used to illustrate the need for shared responsibilities at home.
More from Arlie Russell Hochschild
All quotes →The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
What emotions would we experience if we weren't working ourselves to death? What wishes drive us? What fantasies hitch themselves to our continual busyness? Only when we step away from our frenzy can we know.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
In response to our fast-food culture, a 'slow food' movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
Many women cut back what had to be done at home by redefining what the house, the marriage and, sometimes, what the child needs. One woman described a fairly common pattern: I do my half. I do half of his half, and the rest doesn't get done.
Arlie Russell HochschildRead
Similar quotes
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
Alice SeboldRead
I think my mom and dad both wanted to get across to me that... I obviously grew up with great privilege and was very lucky and was able to afford college and not have student loans, and they would pay for college, but beyond that, it would be up to me to make a living.
Anderson CooperRead
It's important for a parent to learn to take delight in a child whose behavior might seem mystifying. In the case of an extroverted parent with an introverted child, it can be learning to see the inner riches of your child that may not always be expressed on the surface - but are there.
Susan CainRead
Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.
Gabriela MistralRead
What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
John Henrik ClarkeRead