Getting By on the Minimum by Jennifer Johnson

Author:Jennifer Johnson [Johnson, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Women's Studies, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781135298951
Google: AEIYAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-15T04:55:19+00:00

Putting It Off

Middle- and working-class women who put off going to work, like women who worked off and on, had adopted a similar combination of work and family. The women themselves, however, were very different. Among the working-class women who adopted this solution were some of the poorest women in the study—and among the middle-class women were some of the richest.

Many of the working-class women had dropped out of school because they were pregnant and others had married very soon after high school graduation. Several were in their first job ever, most had very few skills, and many were poor as children as well as adults. By contrast, middle-class women who put off working were usually married to highly paid professionals and lived an upper-middle-class life. They gave up their jobs when they had children, with little real financial sacrifice, because their husbands' earnings were much higher than their own. Usually, they had completed a college degree and worked for a year or two before giving birth to their first child, then returned to work only when their children were old enough to be fairly independent. Denise, for example, was married while she was still a graduate student at Vassar, and she and her husband had decided to start a family right away. She became very involved in volunteer activities for a number of years, but when her son was preparing to leave for college, she decided she'd had “all of the growth” she needed from “the volunteer sector” and wanted to go to work. She described herself as very bonded to her son and she “wanted to be prepared for a whole new stage of life before it hit me over the head.” She went to a career counseling service where they helped her develop a résumé, then she spent the spring and the summer of her son's graduation year job hunting. She was offered a job after her first interview, but turned it down because she had not yet decided whether to work full- or part-time. Several months later the executive director of the organization she now worked for as a volunteer coordinator called her, and she had worked there ever since.

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