Review by New York Times Review
A MEMORABLE MOMENT in American labor history was the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Mass., when, according to lore, predominantly female workers marched with signs reading, "We want bread, but we want roses, too." The apocryphal slogan, revived in songs recorded in the 1970s and '80s by Judy Collins and John Denver, came to mean, "We need a decent living, but we need a life, too." But that was then and this is now, when the dream of a life with time enough to smell the roses seems farther away than ever. Among professionals, work weeks of 50 hours or more have become commonplace. Among mothers, three-quarters with young children now work outside the home. Working parents combined are putting in about 28 more days of paid work a year than they did in 1970. As in 1912, the people who feel the loss of leisure time the most are mothers. In recent years an endless stream of books have been written about the overworked American Mom. The sheer volume of these books, and the level of dissatisfaction they express, suggest a vast social problem. "Overwhelmed," by Brigid Schulte, a writer for The Washington Post and a married mother of two school-age children, is the latest cri de coeur. Schulte asks whether her "scattered, fragmented and exhausting" life is just her or a byproduct of something bigger - something shared by millions of other time-starved women. Much of the ground she covers on her "journey" to answer this question is as well-trodden as the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, but if anyone still thinks it's just her, Schulte offers an amply documented reminder that it isn't. Schulte reports that the "ideal worker" norm prevails in the American workplace: an individual who has no family obligations, no interests that can compete with work - preferably no private life at all. People who don't measure up to this ideal risk being treated like Kleenex: used up and then tossed aside. She describes the widespread, overt discrimination against people with family responsibilities, and the unconscious bias against caregivers in the job market. One study showed, for example, that mothers seeking entryand mid-level positions received half the number of job offers that childless women with otherwise identical résumés received. Meanwhile, at home, the mystique of the perfect Mom torments middle-class mothers like an inner Savonarola. Grandmothers are amazed at the hyperparenting efforts of their daughters, who rush their little royalty from soccer matches to music and ballet classes to play dates to bedtime readings of the Great Books. No surprise, then, that almost 30 percent of mothers with M.B.A.s no longer work outside the home; many educated mothers in the United States who can afford to drop out of the labor force do so, more than in any other industrialized country. Why have we come to this? And why, after decades of anguish, has so little been done to relieve these extreme pressures? "Overwhelmed" provides several answers. It may surprise some readers that, in the United States, no law limits the hours a worker has to work a week, and no law prevents employers from working salaried professionals unlimited hours without paying overtime. Ironically, just as millions of women have entered the professional and managerial ranks, the average workweek for educated workers has lengthened considerably. At home, men have not picked up much slack. Even mothers who work for pay are still doing twice the amount of housework and child care as fathers. In a 2010 study, partnered female scientists did 54 percent of the cooking, cleaning and laundry, while partnered male scientists carried just 28 percent of the load. In a telling anecdote, Schulte describes her own husband, a fellow journalist, leaving the house one Thanksgiving morning with a six-pack under his arm, headed to a friend's place while leaving her in the kitchen to prepare the holiday feast. This is the same guy who doesn't know where the kids' dentist is or how to keep staples like toilet paper stocked or how to pay the bills on time. We all know him. That's why so many of us write these books. What we're up against is not just the corporations that exploit labor and the men who still feel domestically privileged, but American culture itself: a culture that is still ambivalent about a mother's proper role; that still socializes women to be the ones who care for others; and that has elevated "work" to the status of a religion. A culture that women themselves have in large part bought into. This traditional culture has its fierce defenders. In one of the best sections in the book, Schulte interviews Pat Buchanan, the man who more than anyone else destroyed the prospect of a high-quality universal child care system in the United States. In 1971 Congress passed a bipartisan bill that would have established such a system, to be run by community organizations. Buchanan, whose own Roman Catholic mother stayed home to raise nine kids, conjured up a vision of factory-raised automatons brought up by a soulless state, and the anti-Communist right swung into action. He was a special assistant to President Richard Nixon at the time. "We wanted not only to kill the bill," Buchanan told Schulte, "we wanted to drive a stake right through its heart." Bowing to the pressure, Nixon vetoed the bill and Congress sustained the veto. "That sucker was gone," Buchanan bragged, more than 40 years later. "Gone forever." Universal child care and other policies that make mothers' lives more feasible are commonplace in other countries, including Denmark, which Schulte visits in her search to find a better way. The descendants of Vikings prove that human cultures can change. But the fragile "bright spots" that Schulte unearths in the United States do not encourage us to think that our country is going to change anytime soon. One mark of progress, the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) at Best Buy, which allowed workers flexible schedules as long as they produced results, is enthusiastically described, and three pages later we learn simply that it was ended by a new chief executive, Hubert Joly, who called it "fundamentally flawed." IN HER QUEST to find something upbeat to tell us, Schulte ultimately falls back on the fallacy that a systemic problem can be addressed if we, as individuals, just try harder to fix ourselves. After almost 300 pages documenting mothers' overscheduled, exhausting lives - and reporting on the damage this does to family life, to productivity and to our very brains - Schulte ends her "journey to understand time" at a meditation center in Washington, where she discovers "how to master the ceaseless clatter of your own contaminated mind." She advises us to "chunk" our time and work in shorter, concentrated blocks; to check our email less frequently; to take a moment to play; and to consider going to a "self-efficacy boot camp." Mostly good suggestions. But like all self-help advice, they don't measure up against the entrenched forces that are indifferent if not hostile to the emotional well-being of a majority of Americans. Schulte is fighting SEAL Team Six with a pair of fingernail scissors. That's something Pat Buchanan would understand. ANN CRITTENDEN is the author of "The Price of Motherhood" and has one grown child.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 6, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Journalist Schulte manages to take a fairly pedestrian topic, the value of leisure in modern American society, and turn it into a compelling narrative on work, play, and personal achievement. Liberally peppered with her own experiences as a wife, mother, and Washington Post reporter, this artful blend of memoir and cultural exploration asks hard questions about how to create a well-lived life. Is leisure a waste of time, or the only time to live fully present? Are we more concerned about a purpose-driven experience, or bogged down in banal busyness? Schulte, juggling the demands of children and work while facing conflicts with her spouse over familial responsibilities, realizes that she is mired in busyness. Her discussions with a wide range of experts clarify her concerns and open her mind to the manufactured madness of a competitive culture and the false promise of the ruthlessly dedicated ideal worker. Schulte follows every lead to uncover why Americans are so determined to exhaust themselves for work and what has been lost in the process. For Lean In (2013) fans, and everyone who feels overwhelmed.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
On her quest to turn her "time confetti" into "time serenity," journalist Schulte finds that, while it's worse for women and hits working mothers the hardest, what she calls the "Overwhelm" cuts across gender, income, and nationality to contaminate time, shrink brains, impair productivity, and reduce happiness. Investigating the "great speed-up" of modern life, Schulte surveys the "time cages" of the American workplace, the "stalled gender revolution" in the home, and the documented necessity for play, and discovers that the "aimless whirl" of American life runs on a conspiracy of "invisible forces": outdated notions of the Ideal Worker; the cult of motherhood; antiquated national family policies; and the "high status of busyness." The result is our communal "time sickness." Schulte takes a purely practical and secular approach to a question that philosophers and spiritual teachers have debated for centuries-how to find meaningful work, connection, and joy-but her research is thorough and her conclusions fascinating, her personal narrative is charmingly honest, and the stakes are high: the "good life" pays off in "sustainable living, healthy populations, happy families, good business, [and] sound economies." While the final insights stretch thin, Schulte unearths the attitudes and "powerful cultural expectations" responsible for our hectic lives, documents European alternatives to the work/family balance, and handily summarizes her solutions in an appendix. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An examination of how to change how you use your time. "You can't manage time. Time never changes," writes Washington Post journalist Schulte. "There will always and ever be 168 hours in a week." So the question remains: How do we manage time so the sense of being overworked, of dealing with never-ending responsibilities and the endless need to check the flood of information constantly available doesn't swamp us? Through careful, extensive research, the author explores the multiple levels where humans waste time and offers concrete advice on how to reclaim those lost moments. Today's workplace is still built around the outdated notion of the "ideal worker"usually a man who can devote concentrated hours to the task at handand doesn't take into account the millions of women now juggling a full-time career with family life. Schulte advocates for a new system that provides flexibility in hours, paid maternal and paternal leave, and consideration of the desire for more freedom and leisure time. Women constantly multitask, coping with the multiple demands of housework, cooking and child care, which often leaves them feeling fragmented, exhausted, and with little or no time for themselves. This arena must become more balanced, writes the author, with both parents assuming equal responsibilities in all departments. Regarding leisure, Schulte looks to the Danes, who have one of the best ratios of work-to-vacation time in the world; they average a 37-hour workweek and six weeks of paid vacation, and long hours at the office are actually frowned upon. Backed by numerous examples, Schulte's effective time-management ideas will be helpful in stamping out ambivalence and will empower readers to reclaim wasted moments, so life becomes a joyful experience rather than a mad dash from one task to the next. An eye-opening analysis of today's hectic lifestyles coupled with valuable practical advice on how to make better use of each day.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
