The wrenching decision facing successful women who must choose between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living. Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.Table of Contents: Introduction 1 The Devotion to Work Schema 2 The Devotion to Family Schema 3 Reinventing Schemas: Creating Part-Time Careers 4 Reinventing Schemas: Family Life among Full-Time Executive Women 5 Turning Points 6 Implications Appendix: Methods and Data Notes References Acknowledgments Index Many professional women intuit that male colleagues whose spouse handle for them the details of everyday life are favored in the workplace. Blair-Loy confirms this intuition and shows us how it happens. She captures how the cultural schemas of "family devotion" and "work devotion" contribute to the reproduction of gender inequality, and how meeting the demands of a husband's job and other people's needs push professional women to progressively abandon their work to take care of others. Her analysis also gives us hope by comparing the fate of pre and post-baby boomers. This is both an important scholarly contribution and a book that will help readers think differently about their lives. It should be required reading for professional women who aspire to maintain multidimensional lives.--Mich'le Lamont, author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and ImmigrationThis is a fascinating book with an important message. Blair-Loy's findings are surprising. She challenges conventional viewpoints. She is on to something really new when she writes about not only the interplay between cultural norms and individual actions (and institutional structures) but on the cultural schemas that evoke deep emotional resonances. An outstanding book.--Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein, author of Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social OrderMary Blair-Loy's book transcends old debates about work and family by examining the women who have beaten the odds and risen to the top. Her detailed examination of careers and strategies perfectly complements her subtle analysis of the schemas and visions these women have for their lives. Blair-Loy has given us not only a splendid view into a little known world, but also a new way of understanding the dynamic interplay of work and family. Looking beyond the static conflict we have studied so much, she shows how creative women put traditional schemas of family and work into a mutual transformation to build for themselves a new and more livable world.--Andrew Abbott, author of Time Matters.

Many young professionals seek egalitarian partnerships in which both partners work for pay and share unpaid housework and childcare. Yet working couples' realities often deviate from this ideal, with women trading off employment for family care. Will contemporary young adults repeat this pattern, or will they come closer to achieving equality in work and family? Equal Partners? seeks to explore this question. Drawing on six years of interviews with the partners in twenty-one different-gender couples, Jaclyn S. Wong documents how supportive workplaces, partners' steadfast gender-egalitarian attitudes, and partners' jointly coordinated actions all need to come together for couples to experience gender equality in work and family. This book offers a compelling study of the dynamics of couples in ambitious partnerships who aspire to equality as they navigate the external pressures that come with life planning.

Walking the tightrope of home and parish life for clergy parents is notoriously difficult in all the mainline Protestant denominations, but most books on ordination and vocation ignore the question of family life. The ordination of women, the prevalence of two-career marriages, the increasing need to care for aging family members, and the recognition of non-traditional families have shed new light on clergy family dynamics within the family and the church. This book uses accounts of experiences gathered through interviews and surveys of clergy and their family members, primarily in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark. Its ultimate goal is to develop a holistic theology of vocation that has implications for the church, the clergy, and all families and nourishes and protects faith and family life. -- Allison Moore

A riveting look at the real reasons Americans feel inadequate in the face of their dreams, and a call to celebrate how we support one another in the service of family and work in our daily life. Jay's days are filled with back-to-back meetings, but he always leaves work in time to pick his daughter up from swimming at 7pm, knowing he'll be back on his laptop later that night. Linda thinks wistfully of the treadmill in her garage as she finishes folding the laundry that's been in the dryer for the last week. Rebecca sits with one child in front of a packet of math homework, while three others clamor for her attention. In Dreams of the Overworked, Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian offer vivid sketches of daily life for nine families, capturing what it means to live, work, and parent in a world of impossible expectations, now amplified unlike ever before by smart devices. We are invited into homes and offices, where we recognize the crushing pressure of unraveling plans, and the healing warmth of being together. Moreover, we witness the constant planning that goes into a "good" day, often with the aid of phones and apps. Yet, as technologies empower us to do more, they also promise limitless availability and connection. Checking email on the weekend, monitoring screen time, and counting steps are all part of the daily routine. The stories in this book challenge the seductive myth of the phone-clad individual, by showing that beneath the plastic veneer of technology is a complex, hidden system of support—our dreams being scaffolded by retired in-laws, friendly neighbors, spouses, and paid help. This book makes a compelling case for celebrating the structures that allow us to strive for our dreams, by supporting public policies and community organizations, challenging workplace norms, reimagining family, and valuing the joy of human connection.

This book develops an integrated hermeneutic that connects the Bible to spiritual formation and the development of Christian virtues. The author shows how the whole Bible can be understood as a wisdom text that directs its readers morally, shapes them in their deepest affections and convictions, and impacts how they look at the world and live in it. Offering an innovative hermeneutical approach, it will serve as an ideal supplement to standard hermeneutics textbooks.

This book presents interdisciplinary empirical studies about the COVID-19 pandemic’s complex influence on the professional, personal, and family lives of mothers in academia or “MotherScholars”. It calls attention to how the COVID-19 pandemic and higher education's responses to it highlight the historical, societal, and cultural inequities between diverse groups of MotherScholars. The volume represents diverse ethnicities (e.g., Black, Pinay, Asian American), an assortment of disciplines (e.g., sociology, education, psychology, Asian American studies, etc.), and a variety of methodologies (e.g., collaborative autoethnography, photovoice, kuwentos, etc.) to share diverse narratives linked through an identity and pursuit of MotherScholarhood. It addresses the wide range of pressures and influences affecting mothers in academia and tackles the additional burdens and prejudices MotherScholars with marginalized cultural and religious identities face. Taken as a whole, the book presents important and complementary findings through different MotherScholar perspectives, which underscore the complexity of their experience and how it was impacted by a global pandemic. MotherScholaring During the COVID-19 Pandemic will be a key resource for researchers and practitioners of education studies, educational research, educational leadership and policy, educational administration, gender studies, and women’s studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education.

"I recommend a book by Professor Williams, it is really worth a read, it's called White Working Class." -- Vice President Joe Biden on Pod Save America An Amazon Best Business and Leadership book of 2017 Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite—journalists, managers, and establishment politicians--are on the outside looking in, left to argue over the reasons. In White Working Class, Joan C. Williams, described as having "something approaching rock star status" by the New York Times, explains why so much of the elite's analysis of the white working class is misguided, rooted in class cluelessness. Williams explains that many people have conflated "working class" with "poor"--but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. They often resent the poor and the professionals alike. But they don't resent the truly rich, nor are they particularly bothered by income inequality. Their dream is not to join the upper middle class, with its different culture, but to stay true to their own values in their own communities--just with more money. While white working-class motivations are often dismissed as racist or xenophobic, Williams shows that they have their own class consciousness. White Working Class is a blunt, bracing narrative that sketches a nuanced portrait of millions of people who have proven to be a potent political force. For anyone stunned by the rise of populist, nationalist movements, wondering why so many would seemingly vote against their own economic interests, or simply feeling like a stranger in their own country, White Working Class will be a convincing primer on how to connect with a crucial set of workers--and voters.