 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]
Misandry is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men or boys in general. Misandry may be manifested in numerous ways, including social exclusion, sexism, hostility, gynocentrism, mockery, belittling of men, violence against men, and sexual objectification.
Feminist economics is the critical study of economics and economies, with a focus on gender-aware and inclusive economic inquiry and policy analysis. Feminist economic researchers include academics, activists, policy theorists, and practitioners. Much feminist economic research focuses on topics that have been neglected in the field, such as care work, intimate partner violence, or on economic theories which could be improved through better incorporation of gendered effects and interactions, such as between paid and unpaid sectors of economies. Other feminist scholars have engaged in new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach. Feminist economics is oriented towards the goal of "enhancing the well-being of children, women, and men in local, national, and transnational communities."
Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships and certain subject-object problems in ethics.
Carol J. Adams is an American writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate. She is the author of several books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) and The Pornography of Meat (2004), focusing in particular on what she argues are the links between the oppression of women and that of non-human animals. She was inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2011.
Olympe de Gouges was a French playwright and political activist whose writings on women's rights and abolitionism reached a large audience in various countries. She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension rose in France, Olympe de Gouges became increasingly politically engaged. She became an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies in 1788. At the same time, she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early women's rights advocate who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists.
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.
Equality feminism is a subset of the overall feminism movement that focuses on the basic similarities between men and women, and whose ultimate goal is the equality of the sexes 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 used to represent an invisible barrier that prevents a given demographic from rising beyond a certain level in a hierarchy.
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 Woodrow Wilson 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.
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Department of History, and by courtesy the d-school, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. An international authority on the theory, practice, and history of gender in science, she is currently Director of Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Schiebinger received honorary doctorates from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2013), from the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and from Universitat de València, Spain (2018). She serves on the international advisory board of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Gender binary is the classification of gender into two distinct, opposite forms of masculine and feminine, whether by social system or cultural belief. Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders.
Unfinished Business may refer to:
Protofeminism is a concept that anticipates modern feminism in eras when the feminist concept as such was still unknown. This refers particularly to times before the 20th century, although the precise usage is disputed, as 18th-century feminism and 19th-century feminism are often subsumed into "feminism". The usefulness of the term protofeminist has been questioned by some modern scholars, as has the term postfeminist.
Nancy Folbre is an American feminist economist who focuses on economics and the family, non-market work and the economics of care. She is Professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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.
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.
Care work is a sub-category of work that includes all tasks that directly involve care processes done in service of others. It is often differentiated from other forms of work because it is considered to be intrinsically motivated, meaning that people are motivated to pursue care work for reasons other than financial compensation. Another factor that is often used to differentiate caring labor from other types of work is the motivating factor. This perspective defines care labor as labor undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of immediate pecuniary reward. Regardless of motivation, care work includes care activities done for pay as well as those done without remuneration.
Ailsa McKay was a Scottish economist, government policy adviser, a leading feminist economist and Professor of Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a 2013 book written by Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, and Nell Scovell, TV and magazine writer.
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.