 First edition | |
| Author | Anne-Marie Slaughter |
|---|---|
| Published | 2015, Random House |
| ISBN | 9780812984972 |
Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family is a 2015 non-fiction book written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, currently President and CEO of the New America Foundation. [1] [2] It is based on Slaughter's 2012 article Why Women Still Can't Have It All published in The Atlantic . [3] Why Women Still Can't Have It All is one of the most widely read pieces in the Atlantic's history, with over 3 million views. [4]
A look into the challenges of career advancement for professional women with children and the "unfinished business" of the women's movement. [5] Drawing on her own experiences as a mother and State Department official, [6] Slaughter argues for the importance of valuing care: the work to nurture our friends, family and loved ones. [7] Unfinished Business challenges key arguments in Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. [8]
The book argues that a number of challenges remain for the women's movement in the US. It allows her to expands on her position in the article and respond to her critics. In Unfinished Business, she attempts to create a framework to understand the problems faced by all working parents, not just women. She also discusses US public policy and declares that without paid maternity leave, affordable childcare, the right to part-time work, job security for pregnant employees and better enforcement of discriminatory laws both men and women will continue to suffer. [9] Slaughter urges a focus on the value of work being done, not on the traditional gender roles. She states that western notions of masculinity should be challenged before women imprison men to the crippling gender roles women have been fighting to escape from. Slaughter believes that men and women must acknowledge the damaging social system in place hindering their ability to make money while simultaneously caring for their families. When this system is realized they must work together to push the boundaries of traditional gender roles and create an impactful, positive change. [10] Ultimately, Slaughter calls for a change in the workplace policies which affect both men and women. She argues that embracing a parental role, instead of a gendered one is crucial for the success of future families. [9] One step toward gender equity that it advocates is empowering men to re-envision their lives and embrace the roles of engaged fathers, sons and caregivers.
Unfinished Business has been widely reviewed in the US and UK. Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, reviewed the book for the Washington Post, writing, "Slaughter's case for revaluing and better compensating caregiving is compelling. . . . Slaughter makes it a point in her book to speak beyond the elite...she’s right that there is something fundamentally wrong with a society that values managing money so much more than raising children well." [11] The Economist wrote "Ms Slaughter has widened her conceptual lens in response to her critics. Whereas the Atlantic article was written "for my demographic [of] highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place", Unfinished Business is full of voices from outside her social group." [12]
The journal Signs devoted an online feature and the Winter 2017 issue to discussing the book, including nine responses from scholars and thinkers including Joan C Williams and Ai-Jen Poo. "Slaughter’s book is a pleasure to read, as is having her very considerable powers focused on work-family conflict. I fervently hope her focus on building a broad coalition and using a broad range of change levers will help her generation accomplish more than mine did. God knows we need it," Joan Williams wrote in her response. Premilla Nadasen wrote: "Slaughter’s most important contribution is to reclaim care work as valuable. She argues that care is a universal issue that connects people across class and race lines, and that it includes not just child care but care for disabled adults and the elderly. Revaluing care, Slaughter argues, means changing the way we think, transforming our workplaces, and offering both better pay to care workers and government support for family-friendly policies." [13]
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships.
Liberal feminism, also called mainstream feminism, is a main branch of feminism defined by its focus on achieving gender equality through political and legal reform within the framework of liberal democracy and informed by a human rights perspective. It is often considered culturally progressive and economically center-right to center-left. As the oldest of the "Big Three" schools of feminist thought, liberal feminism has its roots in 19th century first-wave feminism seeking recognition of women as equal citizens, focusing particularly on women's suffrage and access to education, the effort associated with 19th century liberalism and progressivism. Liberal feminism "works within the structure of mainstream society to integrate women into that structure." Liberal feminism places great emphasis on the public world, especially laws, political institutions, education and working life, and considers the denial of equal legal and political rights as the main obstacle to equality. As such liberal feminists have worked to bring women into the political mainstream. Liberal feminism is inclusive and socially progressive, while broadly supporting existing institutions of power in liberal democratic societies, and is associated with centrism and reformism. Liberal feminism tends to be adopted by white middle-class women who do not disagree with the current social structure; Zhang and Rios found that liberal feminism with its focus on equality is viewed as the dominant and "default" form of feminism. Liberal feminism actively supports men's involvement in feminism and both women and men have always been active participants in the movement; progressive men had an important role alongside women in the struggle for equal political rights since the movement was launched in the 19th century.
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
A housewife is a woman whose role is running or managing her family's home—housekeeping, which may include caring for her children; cleaning and maintaining the home; making, buying and/or mending clothes for the family; buying, cooking, and storing food for the family; buying goods that the family needs for everyday life; partially or solely managing the family budget—and who is not employed outside the home. The male equivalent is the househusband.
Equality feminism is a subset of the overall feminism movement and more specifically of the liberal feminist tradition that focuses on the basic similarities between men and women, and whose ultimate goal is the equality of both genders in all domains. This includes economic and political equality, equal access within the workplace, freedom from oppressive gender stereotyping, and an androgynous worldview.
A glass ceiling is a metaphor usually applied to women, used to represent an invisible barrier that prevents a given demographic from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy. The metaphor was first used by feminists in reference to barriers in the careers of high-achieving women. It was coined by Marilyn Loden during a speech in 1978.
Transfeminism, or trans feminism, is a branch of feminism focused on transgender women and informed by transgender studies. Transfeminism focuses on the effects of transmisogyny and patriarchy on trans women. It is related to the broader field of queer theory. The term was popularized by Emi Koyama in The Transfeminist Manifesto.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is an American international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, political scientist, and public commentator. From 2002 to 2009, she was the dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 university professor of politics and international affairs. Slaughter was the first woman to serve as the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011 under U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She is a former president of the American Society of International Law and the current president and CEO of New America.
The ethics of care is a normative ethical theory that holds that moral action centers on interpersonal relationships and care or benevolence as a virtue. EoC is one of a cluster of normative ethical theories that were developed by some feminists and environmentalists since the 1980s. While consequentialist and deontological ethical theories emphasize generalizable standards and impartiality, ethics of care emphasize the importance of response to the individual. The distinction between the general and the individual is reflected in their different moral questions: "what is just?" versus "how to respond?" Carol Gilligan, who is considered the originator of the ethics of care, criticized the application of generalized standards as "morally problematic, since it breeds moral blindness or indifference".
Joan Wallach Scott is an American historian of France with contributions in gender history. She is a professor emerita in the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Scott is known for her work in feminist history and gender theory, engaging post-structural theory on these topics. Geographically, her work focuses primarily on France, and thematically she deals with how power works, the relation between language and experience, and the role and practice of historians. Her work grapples with theory's application to historical and current events, focusing on how terms are defined and how positions and identities are articulated.
Since the 19th century, men have taken part in significant cultural and political responses to feminism within each "wave" of the movement. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in a range of social relations, generally done through a "strategic leveraging" of male privilege. Feminist men have also argued alongside writers like bell hooks, however, that men's liberation from the socio-cultural constraints of sexism and gender roles is a necessary part of feminist activism and scholarship.
Patriarchy is a social system in which men typically hold authority and responsibility. In anthropology, it refers to a family or clan structure where the father or eldest male holds supremacy within the family, while in feminist theory, it encompasses a broader social structure where men collectively dominate societal norms and institutions.
Unpaid labor or unpaid work is defined as labor or work that does not receive any direct remuneration. This is a form of non-market work which can fall into one of two categories: (1) unpaid work that is placed within the production boundary of the System of National Accounts (SNA), such as gross domestic product (GDP); and (2) unpaid work that falls outside of the production boundary, such as domestic labor that occurs inside households for their consumption. Unpaid labor is visible in many forms and is not limited to activities within a household. Other types of unpaid labor activities include volunteering as a form of charity work and interning as a form of unpaid employment. In a lot of countries, unpaid domestic work in the household is typically performed by women, due to gender inequality and gender norms, which can result in high-stress levels in women attempting to balance unpaid work and paid employment. In poorer countries, this work is sometimes performed by children.
Kathleen Gerson is an American sociologist. She is considered as an authority on such subjects as gender equality particularly within relationships and marriages, changing gender roles, family housework patterns, travel patterns, finances and how they affect household formation, and other aspects of changing family life. Her research is often based on qualitative interviews. She is a tenured professor at New York University.
Sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between the male and female members of a species. Among human hunter-gatherer societies, males and females are responsible for the acquisition of different types of foods and shared them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit. In some species, males and females eat slightly different foods, while in other species, males and females will routinely share food; but only in humans are these two attributes combined. The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as evolutionary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labour. Many studies on the sexual division of labour have been conducted on hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania. In modern day society, sex differences in occupation is seen across cultures, with the tendency that men do technical work and women tend to do work related to care.
Ailsa McKay was a Scottish economist, government policy adviser, a leading feminist economist and Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University.
The Finkbeiner test, named for the science journalist Ann Finkbeiner, is a checklist to help science journalists avoid gender bias in articles about women in science. It asks writers to avoid describing women scientists in terms of stereotypically feminine traits, such as their family arrangements.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a 2013 book encouraging women to assert themselves at work and at home, co-written by business executive Sheryl Sandberg and media writer Nell Scovell.
Joan C. Williams is an American feminist legal scholar whose work focuses on issues faced by women in the workplace. She currently serves as the Founding Director at the Center for WorkLife Law. Williams is also a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings School Law. Williams also contributes to the Harvard Business Review blog, the Huffington Post, and the Psychology Today blog.
LeanIn.Org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded by then present Chief Operating Officer of Meta Platforms Sheryl Sandberg in 2013 dedicated "to offering women the ongoing inspiration and support to help them achieve their goals." The organization desires to support women in three main ways: community, education, and circles, or small, coordinated peer groups that meet to share their experiences and learn together. Launched after the release of Sandberg's bestselling book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, the organization views itself as the next step in an effort to change "the conversation from what we can’t do to what we can do." Since its launch, over 380,000 women and men have joined the Lean In community, creating 34,000 Lean In Circles in over 157 countries to date.