18 Page Sociology Paper Topic: Gender Discrimination Against Women In The Workplace

A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? How Women Develop Early

Expectations about Work

SARAH DAMASKE The Pennsylvania State University

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women randomly sampled from New York City, I ask: how do women develop expectations about their future workforce participation? Using an intersectional approach, I find that women’s expectations about workforce participation stem from gendered, classed, and raced ideas of who works full- time. Socioeconomic status, race, gender, and sexuality influenced early expectations about work and the process through which these expectations developed. Women from white and Latino working-class families were evenly divided in their expectations about their future workforce participation, while the vast majority of white, Asian, African American, and Latina middle-class women expected to work continually as adults. Unlike their working-class white and Hispanic peers, all of the working-class Black respondents developed expectations that they would work continuously as adults. The intersections of race, class, and gender play a central role in shaping women’s expectations about their participation in paid work.

Keywords: class/stratification; race; class; gender; work/family

Understanding why some women spend the majority of their adult lives in the paid labor market, while other women perform work largely outside of the paid workforce, as homemakers and caregivers, long has been a central topic of gender scholarship (Blair-Loy 2003; Gerson 1985).

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant, award no. SES-0703212, and a Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. The author thanks Dana Britton and the four anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally helpful and detailed comments and critiques. Additional thanks go to Kathleen Gerson, Richard Arum, Jenifer Bratter, Adrianne Frech, Lynne Haney, Heather Jacobson, Kristen Schultz Lee, and Gretchen Webber for their insightful comments on prior drafts and to John Mollenkopf for his help with the NYC Voter Registration Database. Please direct correspondence to Sarah Damaske at the Pennsylvania State University, Department of Labor Studies and Employment Relations, 003 Keller Building, University Park, PA 16802, [email protected].

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 25 No. 4, August 2011 409-430 DOI: 10.1177/0891243211412050 © 2011 by The Author(s)

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Sociologists have investigated the determinants of paid labor force partici- pation from several perspectives, including opportunities available in the workforce (England 1992; Gerson 1985; Roth 2006), support that women receive at home (Blair-Loy 2003; Hochschild 1989; Stone 2007), and women’s gender ideologies, particularly expectations about work formed during adolescence (Davis and Greenstein 2009; Moen, Erickson, and Dempster-McClain 1997; Risman 1998). Young adulthood is a significant transitional period in women’s work lives and early ideas about working influence future paid workforce participation and potential earnings as well as educational attainment and workforce skills (Goldin 2006; Risman, Atkinson, and Blackwelder 1999; Stickney and Konrad 2007). Since early expectations appear to influence a wide variety of outcomes, this article, using an intersectional approach, returns to the question of how women develop expectations about their future in the workforce.

Intersectional perspectives have greatly shaped the discussion of gender and work in recent years, as scholars criticized earlier research that tended to privilege white middle-class women (Collins 1990; Hansen 2005; Higginbotham 2001). Despite the growing consensus that gender inter- acts with class and race (Glauber 2008; McCall 2011), few studies have explored how race and class shape women’s early work expectations or their experiences with work across the life course (Bettie 2003; Vespa 2009). Since there are lifelong economic consequences to participating in full-time versus part-time work (Spivey 2005) and working-class women, as well as women of color, have greater gaps in full-time employment during their lives than do their white middle-class counterparts, particu- larly at crucial early workforce stages (Alon and Haberfeld 2007; England, Ross, and Garcia-Beaulieu 2004), it is important to understand how gen- der, class, and race intersect in women’s formation of their work expecta- tions.

Using data from 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with women ran- domly sampled from New York City, I build on prior research on women’s workforce participation by focusing on the intersection of gender, race, and class in the formation of women’s early expectations about work. Specifically, I consider how women develop expectations about their future workforce participation. My primary goal is to understand women’s perceptions of the labor market when they were at an age at which they first contemplated entering it, the intersection of gender, race, and class in shaping these per- ceptions, and how early experiences help form women’s expectations of their own workforce participation.

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CLASS AND RACE AND EXPECTATIONS OF WOMEN’S WORK

The women who participated in this study came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when the general public became more accepting of women’s workforce participation (Bolzendahl and Myers 2004; Hochschild 1997). But during the 1980s and 1990s, media coverage of working mothers almost always portrayed them as white middle-class women (Kuperberg and Stone 2008; Smith 2001), often depicted as a woman with a briefcase in one hand and a baby in the other. Working-class white women were almost entirely absent from this picture, and women of color were por- trayed as workers without children or as mothers on welfare (Smith 2001; Collins 1991). While the woman with the baby and briefcase may have been emblematic of women’s hopes to “have it all,” this dream was spe- cific to a particular race and class, as well as a particular type of employ- ment. Although this image was a caricature that did not depict reality even for the women it portrayed, its embeddedness in race, gender, and class shapes both collective and individual expectations about which groups of women might participate in paid labor.

Gender Ideologies and Expectations about Work

Gender ideologies are sets of beliefs that may guide marital decisions, workforce participation, and family formation; they are not static, but flex- ible and responsive to life changes, such as job opportunities and marital and parenthood status (Fan and Marini 2000; Hochschild 1989; Risman 1998; Vespa 2009). Since gender ideologies change across the life course, there is particular benefit in investigating gender ideologies at crucial transitional periods (Moen, Erickson, and Dempster-McClain 1997; Moen 2001). The transition to young adulthood is one such pivotal moment dur- ing which young adults make decisions (or anticipate making decisions) about “continuation of education, movement into and out of the labor force, entry into marriage, and becoming a parent” (Elder 1995; Fan and Marini 2000, 258).

Prevailing cultural gender schemas can bias people’s expectations about women’s ability to participate in paid work and can negatively influence a woman’s expectations about her own abilities (Ridgeway and Correll 2004, 518). Women’s expectations about the way that they will work may be shaped by the opportunities that they perceive will be available to them (or the constraints they expect to face) and their expectations about their own

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abilities (Baird 2007; Risman, Atkinson, and Blackwelder 1999). Interactions with parents shape gender ideologies to an extent, but institutional context and social experiences appear to play even greater roles (Gerson 1985; Moen, Erickson, and Dempster-McClain 1997; Vespa 2009). Adolescents spend a large portion of their days in school, for example, and their school experiences shape their expectations about future work opportunities (Bettie 2003). This relationship is also reciprocal; adolescent girls who hold more egalitarian gender ideologies are more likely to aspire to higher levels of education and ultimately employment (Davis and Pearce 2007). Understanding experiences at home and in schools may help us see how women form an understanding of their future opportunities at work, particularly since most adolescents have not yet adopted statuses, such as full-time worker, parent, or spouse, that might further influence these expectations.

The Importance of an Intersectional Perspective

For women, the decision to stay at home is only available to those who have another adult in the household who can fulfill the breadwinning role, typically a division of labor found only in heteronormative family formations in which a husband is the primary breadwinner and the wife the primary caregiver (Hansen 2005; Townsend 2002). Historically, gay and lesbian, working-class, and African American or Latino households have had less access to this gendered division of private and public spheres (Collins 1991; Garey 1999; Williams 2010). Lesbians have been excluded from such family forms as they did not have access to legal marriage nor to a male breadwinner wage. More recently, even when leaving work may have been possible, lesbian families have not tended to adopt the breadwinner/caregiver family model (Dunne 2000; Patterson 2000).1 Since the possibility of exit- ing the labor market has been traditionally only available to heterosexual women, asking about women’s orientations towards work is, in itself, a heteronormative question dependent on women’s ability to anticipate leaving the workforce.

Structural inequalities that prevented men from earning family wages excluded many working-class families of all racial groups from this family norm (Hansen 2005; Higginbotham 2001). Historically, class has inter- sected with race in complicated ways to shape women’s expectations of paid work. Since Black men historically earned much less than their white counterparts, African American communities depended on working mothers and never embraced motherhood as an acceptable alternative to full-time paid employment (Collins 1991; Landry 2000). As Black men’s employment

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continues to be less well rewarded than the paid work of white and Latino men (Glauber 2008), deciding to leave work may be a less realistic option for Black women. Although working-class and middle-class Black women may hold different expectations about types of workforce participation, both groups expect to work full-time (Higginbotham 2001). Research consistently finds that Black women grow up expecting to work and to support them- selves through their own employment (Higginbotham 2001; Taylor 2000).

Although many white and Latino working-class families have not had access to the traditional breadwinner/homemaker family (Coontz 1992; Garey 1999), other working-class white and Latino men with unionized or more highly paid jobs were able to earn breadwinning wages for their families (Hansen 2005; Hochschild 1989). Today, working-class white and Latino men are more likely to be viewed by employers as potential breadwinners and working fathers than their Black counterparts (Hamer 2001). Both married whites and Latinos receive a larger wage premium for fatherhood than Blacks; for white and Latino men, only, this fatherhood wage premium is associated with their wives working less (Glauber 2008). While Black women’s overall employment rates have dropped in recent years, they continue to enter the workforce at rates similar to their white counterparts’ (Reid 2002). The historic rates of high employment among Black women compared to whites and Latinas (Reid 2002; Winkler, McBride, and Andrews 2005) may further influence women’s expectations about their own participation.

Working-class white women also live in households in which women are expected to work and to weave workforce participation with caring for family (Garey 1999). Yet women’s paid work often occupies a contradic- tory space in white working-class households, which often consider wives’ workforce participation secondary to their husbands’ (Legerski and Cornwall 2010). In fact, working-class white women often deliberately reduce the significance of their own workforce participation in order to maintain peace in the home, in particular by adhering to more traditional gender divisions (Hochschild 1989; Legerski and Cornwall 2010; Rosen 1987). Moreover, although working-class white women were historically more likely to work than white middle-class women (Garey 1999), this trend has changed in recent years (England, Ross, and Garcia-Beaulieu 2004). Women’s earnings polarized during the 1980s when some women, particularly well-educated women, were able to move into high-end, traditionally “male,” professional jobs and middle-class women are now more likely to be employed than working-class women (Bernhardt, Morris, and Handcock 1995; England 2010). These changing trends may mean that middle-class women have higher

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expectations about the opportunities available to them in the paid workforce and raised occupational aspirations as a result (Baird 2007; Bettie 2003).

Even though there is evidence that work and family experiences differ across race and class, there is a less well developed understanding of how differences in gender ideologies about work emerge. Citing Ronald Burt (1982), Barbara Risman (2004, 432) notes that part of the structural power of gender stems from the fact that “norms develop when actors occupy similar network positions in the social structure and evaluate their own options vis-à-vis the alternatives of similarly situated others.” Because women and men consider themselves different, women are unlikely to wonder why their lives are not more like men’s (Risman 2004). Building an intersectional perspective into this question, we must also ask how working-class women and women of color develop frames to evaluate what their own workforce options will be and whom they consider simi- larly situated others.

METHODS

From 2006 to 2007, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 80 women selected in New York City (NYC) from the NYC Voter Registration database (NYCVRD). The NYCVRD is updated several times a year and includes contact and demographic information, including age, sex, and race. Eighty-seven percent of the eligible population in NYC is registered to vote (Current Population Survey 2006). I used data from the 2000 U.S. Census to identify tracts most similar to the national population in terms of several key factors including race, gender, and women’s workforce par- ticipation. I then used a combined ranking of income and education level to identify the tracts by class quartile, selecting one tract per quartile. Finally, I randomly selected women born between 1966 and 1976 living in the four tracts from the NYCVRD, using an electronic copy available for purchase.

I sent letters describing the study and inviting participation in the study and followed this with a phone call that screened for ineligible participants. I then made appointments with those who agreed to participate; there was a 70 percent response rate and respondents received $50 for their participa- tion. On average, the interviews lasted two to three hours, with the shortest at one hour and the longest at six. The vast majority of the interviews were conducted in the women’s homes, allowing for the collection of some observational data.2 All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed and then entered into the Atlas.ti software package.

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The interview schedule was carefully constructed to facilitate systematic comparisons among the subjects. The schedule contained sections on family history, educational background, work history, current work circumstances, dating and marriage, childbearing and rearing, gender and family ideologies, work–family conflict, household responsibilities, and future plans. Since most women now incorporate both work and family in their lives, I avoided questions that constructed these as diametrically opposed options. There are important consequences to different types of workforce participation, how- ever, and I needed a language to explore women’s expectations about paid work that did not privilege work over family. To distinguish between early expectations about their future workforce participation, I discuss how the women developed expectations about continual or occasional work. Women who anticipated full-time work for the majority of their adult lives held continual work expectations. Women who thought they would work part-time or not work once married with children held occasional work expectations.

The women were a diverse group: nine were African American, nine were Latina, five were Asian, and 57 were white. While 23 percent had never married, just fewer than 10 percent were currently divorced and 68 percent were currently married; 75 percent had at least one child. At the time of the interviews, half of the sample lived in middle-class households and the remaining half lived in working-class households.3 The women ranged in age from 32 to 42 and the average age was 38. Seventy- nine of the 80 participants identified as heterosexual.

This article focuses on the women’s class of origin, defined as their fam- ily’s class position when they were forming their expectations about paid work at the cusp of adulthood. Other studies have similarly relied on wom- en’s recollections of their early expectations about workforce participa- tion (see Gerson 1985; Stone 2007). The interview schedule was formatted chronologically to reduce the likelihood that respondents would attempt to match their recollections of the past with their current circumstances. The majority of participants, 74 percent of the women, grew up in working-class families. The remaining 26 percent grew up in middle-class families. Throughout this article, when women’s class position is noted it refers to their class of origin.

Using a life history approach, I examined women’s perception of struc- tural constraints and opportunities and the ways that they formed their expec- tations about future workforce participation. This method made it possible to place women’s narratives about their expected future workforce participa- tion in a social context. I coded field notes, interview transcripts, and other

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pieces of data according to categories such as entrance into the workforce, unpaid labor, marital status, and gender ideology. As unexpected patterns emerged, I developed new coding schemas by comparing data across groups and examining unexpected patterns.

EARLY EXPECTATIONS ABOUT WORK

Most women now expect to spend at least some part of their adult lives in the paid workforce (Gerson 2010). This was true for all of the women I interviewed. On the verge of adulthood, 64 percent expected they would work full-time throughout their adult lives, while the remaining 36 percent expected that they would work more occasionally in the paid labor market. Women’s perceptions of the opportunities available to them influenced the development of these early ideas about work. While the factors that moti- vated women to be continual workers were shared across class and race, the factors that motivated women to be occasional workers were far more likely to be found in white and Latino working-class families. African American working-class women were quite distinct from their white and Latino working- class counterparts and developed expectations in a manner that was much more similar to white, Asian and African American middle-class women – they expected to work continuously.

EXPECTING CONTINUAL WORK

Middle-Class Privileges

The white, Asian, African American and Latino women raised in middle- class families almost unanimously reported that their parents promoted the importance of education and future professional employment to their daughters.4 Eighty-one percent of women from middle-class homes expected continual work, including all but one of the six middle-class women of color and 12 of the 15 white women; the only exceptions were three white women and one Asian woman from families with religious objections towards women’s paid work. Women raised in middle-class families are often brought up to achieve excellence in the classroom and the workforce (Goldin 2006; Stone 2007), and often hold high expectations about future labor market participation, regardless of their mothers’ workforce participation (see Moen, Erickson, and Dempster-McClain 1997; Gerson 1985).

Parents’ expectations created an atmosphere in which the middle-class women believed long-term employment was the normative experience for

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all women. Lila,5 an Asian American middle-class woman, recalled that her parents:

Wanted [their children] to get the most education that we possibly could in order to do what we wanted. And, of course, they stressed thing like—what most families would stress—like, try to get into the medical field or go into something that’s going to land you a job that’s going to provide for you, in medical field or engineering.6

Jodi, a white middle-class woman, felt her parents were not explicit about their expectations that she would excel in school and enter the work- force, but this was because they took both steps for granted: “[the expecta- tions] weren’t vocalized, but I was expected to go to school and do well in school. And it was just a given that I would be going to college and then to work. There was nothing more to it than that.” Sheila, a white middle-class woman, agreed: “Oh, it was just—it was without question.”

Middle-class families stressed the connection between paid work and financial independence. Both of Lucille’s white middle-class parents worked outside the home; she explained that for them “the arts wouldn’t be accept- able because you can’t earn money in the arts.” Lucille’s parents high- lighted her need to find a job that would be financially rewarding, not a job that could leave her financially vulnerable. Aisha, a middle-class African American woman, said that not only was continued workforce participation assumed, but success in the workplace was as well: “I think for the most part, success wasn’t an option for me or for any of us, it was more some- thing that we knew was tangible, that we would just work for, that we would get.” Indeed, for most of the middle-class women, there was sim- ply the expectation that they would excel in school, enter the workforce, and work continually.

There were some exceptions to the general focus on continued education and work in middle-class families. The only women from middle-class ori- gins to expect occasional work lived in homes in which their parents held more traditional religious and cultural beliefs. Regina, a white middle-class woman, explained that her Catholic father made it clear that “they were not paying for college” for a daughter. Her parents had helped her older broth- ers, but expected Regina to marry. Gurneet, an Asian middle-class woman, expected to work rarely. Her family’s expectation that she would marry and raise a family were very clear: “No, I was not expected to work, no. Just to get an education, that was the expectation . . . my parents only wanted me to get married. And then it’s your husband’s responsibility.” Strong family objections to workforce participation made it difficult for Gurneet to imagine

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continual work. Both Regina and Gurneet were encouraged to focus on marriage and starting families—an expectation of a traditional family form that depended on their heterosexuality (and ability to find a spouse).

Working-Class Women Who Look to Full-Time Work

I found the working-class white and Latina women evenly divided in their expectations about work. As table 1 shows, 58 percent of the women from working-class backgrounds expected continual work, including half of the white and Latina women. The African American working-class women, on the other hand, were united in their expectation that they would work continually. Working-class white and Latina women formed hopes for good paid work when their parents encouraged it as the best way to be financially secure. Working-class African American women grew up in households in which women’s work was taken for granted.

Many working-class women’s parents encouraged them to focus on continual workforce participation. Some women from working-class ori- gins were inspired by their mother’s work. Maria, a Latina from a working- class family, felt she should match her mother’s continued workforce participation:

It was nice to see that my mother works. It gave me the inspiration to work myself as a kid. I have always worked because I saw it as important for a woman to work and have their own bank account.

Like half of the working-class Latina women, Maria expected to work continually. Financial insecurity during childhood led some women to focus

TABLE 1: Early Work Expectations by Class of Origin and Race

Continual (%) Occasional (%) Total (n)

Working-class origins 58 42 59 White 50 50 42 Asian 100 0 1 African American 100 0 8 Latina 50 50 8 Middle-class origins 81 19 21 White 80 20 15 Asian 75 25 4 African American 100 0 1 Latina 100 0 1 Total 64 36 80

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on full-time work. Amy grew up the daughter of Asian, working-class immigrants who owned a corner store. There were a lot of “ups and downs” for her family and this financial instability led Amy to want to never “worry about money. To be able to make sure that my kids have everything they needed.” Ambitions for upward mobility may drive women’s expectations of continual work and encourage them to gain greater skills to enter the workforce (Goldin 2006).

Although only half of the white and Latina working-class women I inter- viewed held expectations of continuous work, all of the working-class African American women did. These women described growing up in households in which women worked full-time and in which they were expected to as well. All of the African American women grew up in homes in which their moth- ers and the other mothers that they knew worked full-time. Cameron, an African American woman, was puzzled when I asked her if her mother had ever considered leaving the workforce:

I don’t know, not work at all? I don’t know; that’s sort of complicated. She liked her job. [Might she have wanted to] do something different? I’m not sure; she just said she liked her job because it fit the needs of the family.

Her mother’s job inspired Cameron’s own work pathway: “it influenced me to do what I am now, an occupational therapist, and she works in the rehab department, so that’s how I was introduced to it.” Tina, an African American woman, discussed her mother’s continued workforce participation: “I mean, everyone around me, their parents worked; so it wasn’t like there were people who had stay-home mom’s they were—generally everybody worked. . . . It was normal.”

Partly because there were few Black homemaker mothers, African American women’s continued workforce participation was presumed. Tina, an African American woman from a military family, explained that even though her family moved frequently from base to base following her father’s job, her mother worked “all the time.” Tina felt that her mother enjoyed her work and would not have wanted to do anything else: “she’s always worked . . . she liked working. I mean I don’t think that my mom’s the type of person to stay with something that she doesn’t like to do. She likes what she does.” Not all working-class Black women had mothers who enjoyed their work. Lauren, a working-class Black woman, explained about her mother’s job, “Working in a factory is like a slave job, so I definitely did not want that.” Her mother’s experience led Lauren to recognize that she wanted a better job than her mother had had, but not that she did not want to work. A strong community orientation toward women’s paid work meant that negative

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images of women’s work in the larger culture did not dissuade Black women from expectations of continual work. The normalization of continual work for Black women led their daughters to expect that they, too, would work. Like their African American, white, Asian, and Latino middle-class counter- parts, working-class Black women took continual workforce participation for granted.

The Role of Opportunities in Developing Expectations of Continual Work

Intersectional experiences must be examined along with life experiences to understand the development of gender ideologies (Vespa 2009). Life con- texts shape women’s expectations about work and my research suggests that during adolescence, experiences in schools play a pivotal role in shaping women’s expectations about what awaits them in the labor market. Success in high school—good grades, positive feedback from peers and teachers, integration into school programs—convinced both middle-class and working- class women that they could find success in the workforce and in turn influ- enced their expectations for continual work. Katya, a white middle-class woman, did well in math and the sciences and “knew I wanted to get [a job] like in a technical field.” Norma, a working-class Latina, explained that her enjoyment of school combined with the high expectations that her parents had of her: “I would say that it just made me stronger. I always believed that I would have my career.” Success in the classroom often equates with participation in higher education and continual workforce participation (Grodsky and Riegle-Crumb 2010).

Working-class parents saw education as an opportunity for their children to better themselves. Cameron, a working-class Black woman, recalled, “I don’t remember my mother not talking about education. School was always a priority, always number one, always good grades. It came first; nothing happened until the school work was done [laughs].” Claudia, a working- class Latina woman, had parents who expected her to work continually: “Well, they always stressed that I should continue going to school, especially my dad. He never went to school. So, he always wanted us to go to school,” she said. As a result, she “always expected to work.” Both working- and middle-class women associated long-term workforce participation with educational achievement.

Positive educational experiences in high school did not necessarily lead to college. For many working-class women, it led straight to the workforce. Cynthia, a white working-class woman, looked for other opportunities provided by her high school and found a high school internship program:

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“Through my school, there was a career day. So we just picked up inter- views. Some of the companies came and I interviewed with them.” Molly, a white working-class woman, felt that she would find success at work as she had at school:

I was a very good student. I felt like I could do anything I wanted to do. I had the ability, like, the intelligence to study, you know, what- ever . . . like everything I did I saw myself taken to the top of whatever it was.

Educational successes helped women to find the confidence to believe in future work opportunities and to expect continual work.

DEVELOPING OCCASIONAL EXPECTATIONS

When Work Is Likely To Disappoint

Hopes about work were tempered by the doubts raised by the very real constraints white and Latina working-class women saw around them. Women who saw that their mothers did not have good workforce opportunities did not want these same poor workforce options for themselves. Virginia, a white working-class woman, explained that after her parents divorced, her mother started to work even longer hours: “She was always cleaning . . . she always worked that 4-1 shift.” Virginia’s mother told her what would happen if she didn’t go to college, “‘If you don’t go, well, you are just going to be a cleaner.’ So, it’s like if you go, then you advance or you stay where you are and do what she did.” But since Virginia “didn’t like school,” she feared that full-time work would be in a job like her mother’s. Janice, a white working- class woman, had a mother who worked odds-and-ends jobs part-time. “I think she went back to work when I was maybe five or six—waitressing. It was like off and on—then she had side jobs cleaning apartments or like little here and there—she cleaned a dentist’s office.” This painted a picture of women’s paid work that was unstable and these women developed expec- tations of occasional work for themselves.

Working-class white women described mothers who went back to work to help out the family, but whose work was characterized as secondary. Audra, a white working-class woman, explained: “She went back to work, like I said, when my brother was in junior high school. . . . That’s when you start finding out that everything costs money.” Although her mother stayed in the workforce long after the family’s financial strains were less pronounced, Audra explained that her mother worked to “help out” her

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dad. Working-class mothers’ work was often considered “help” or not real work. Wanda, a white working-class woman, explained:

She never had an actual job . . . she cleaned houses. She was, like, a maid. [For] people in the neighborhood, like, and she made some extra pocket money for herself . . . and she’d go into the beach club because there was a beach club close by, she’d clean their bungalows and cottages.

Although Wanda remembered that her mother cleaned houses and also worked for the local beach club as a maid, she also explained that her mother “never had an actual job.” Paid work that is done in the home is often characterized by poor wages and low status (Folbre 2001), suggesting that such “women’s work” is not particularly worthwhile, or even, as in Wanda’s mother’s case, not recognized as real work.

Perceptions of Constraints to Full-Time Work

Just as perceiving opportunities led women to expect continual work, perceiving constraints could make continual work seem impos- sible to achieve. Women most often faced roadblocks to full-time work in their school experiences. When schools offered few rewards, women turned and saw the tangible emotional and personal rewards that could be found in the home. Some heterosexual women described these rewards as stemming from the personal benefits of motherhood, while others saw marriage and motherhood as a place where they could retreat from the rejections of their schools and, later, the workforce. Heterosexual women working in jobs with poor earnings, few benefits, and little chance of advancement may prefer to retreat from the workforce (Webber and Williams 2008).

School failures made some women fear that they would not be good workers. Angela, a white working-class woman, struggled to fit in at school, felt discouraged about her skill sets, and gave up on her schoolwork. “But starting around fourth, fifth grade, I got a little insecure. . . . So, I think I started to get very intimidated and I don’t think I put my whole self into it,” she said. Her school experiences led Angela to believe that she would not be successful as a professional and to believe that, as a result, she should marry, have kids, and work only occasionally rather than attempt to become a “major career woman.” Christy, a white working-class woman, did not see the point in investing in the school system. She thought her classes were boring and her teachers uninterested in her: “I didn’t go an awful lot. . . . I would go and meet my friends and leave.” Christy hoped to work only

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occasionally, because she expected to “find somebody who would support me and take care of me and my family.” Christy’s plans were dependent upon her finding a husband who could fulfill the breadwinning role, an explicit acknowledgement of the way that her heterosexuality shaped her options.

Negative school experiences suggested to some women that they would not find good work, leading them to anticipate withdrawing from work once they had found a breadwinning spouse. Darla, a white working-class woman, did not expect that she would be a full-time worker. She explained that those workers went to college. “In my brain I was not going to college. I didn’t need all the academics. You know your reading, writing, and your math . . . it was like useless to me,” she said. Like Christy, Darla turned to occasional work, “I was always more family oriented than career oriented. So, I was going to be the housewife.” Both marital and parental status influence adults’ gender ideologies (Vespa 2009) and some heterosexual women described anticipating these status changes as young women, particularly when they felt discouraged about their potential at work.

When parents and authority figures appeared disinterested in women’s schooling, this lack of interest encouraged some women to distance them- selves from their own education. This almost always led to a subsequent disinterest in long-term work. Kathy, a white working-class woman, described an environment at home and school in which school and work were not emphasized: “In my lower years, we had to study, do our home- work, not as much now as then. Now, we go over our kids’ homework. They didn’t do that.” Isabel, a working-class Latina woman, was the oldest of ten and her parents were unable to give much support to each individual child: “It’s always so hard to have to be so poor—and we were too many kids, we had not enough attention to each one.” In the face of such challenges, some women dropped out of high school and expected the workplace sta- bility would not be attainable.

Some also faced discouragement in school explicitly because of their gender. Growing up in a working-class neighborhood, Linda, a white working- class woman, knew lots of women who worked, but as “helpers” not bread- winners. Her guidance counselor discouraged her continual workforce participation:

My senior year, my guidance counselor said, “What do you want to be a doctor for?” And I graduated number one in my class in high school. And she told me “Ha. You’re going to grow up, get married, have kids. What do you want to be a doctor for? That’s just going to hold you back.” And I changed my [plans] . . . But I wanted to be a doctor.

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Linda’s parents had little interest in her education and the formal advice that she received in school was to focus on a career that would allow her to balance her work and family obligations.

CONCLUSION

Although research suggests that participation in paid work is gendered (Blair-Loy 2003), classed (Garey 1999; Johnson 2002), raced (Collins 1991; Higginbotham 2001; McCall 2011), and tied to sexuality (Dunne 2000; Patterson 2000), there has been little intersectional work on women’s expectations about work in recent years and very few studies using meth- ods that would allow for comparisons across race and class. This article shows how women’s class and race intersects with gender to influence the processes through which women form opinions about their future work. The majority of white, Asian, African American, and Latina middle-class women described a process in which expectations that they would enter the workforce were so strong that they gave little consideration to other options. Similarly, African American working-class women described growing up in communities in which women’s continual work was taken for granted. On the other hand, the vast majority of white and Latina working-class women described a process in which they considered the possibility of working full- time or part-time and half expected to work occasionally while the other half expected to work continually.

The women who grew up in white, Asian, African American, and Latina middle-class families, with very rare exceptions, were focused on contin- ual workforce participation from a young age, regardless of whether their mothers worked. As norms have changed about women’s work, women’s attitudes about work have changed, too, and, regardless of their own work- force participation levels, mothers hold different expectations for their daughters than they did for themselves (Moen, Erickson, and Dempster- McClain 1997). Annette Lareau’s (2003) research on the parenting styles of middle- and working-class families suggests that middle-class parents treat their sons and daughters similarly and prepare both for entrance into higher education and professional employment. My findings extend this by suggesting that middle-class families are better positioned to help their daughters take advantage of the cultural shifts that have made women’s workforce participation more acceptable. The middle-class women I inter- viewed were able to delay the consideration of work–family conflict and form early expectations of continual workforce participation, which led them to gain important work skills.

Sarah Damaske / A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? 425

Unlike their middle-class peers, women from white and Latina working- class homes grew up with conflicting pictures of their potential workforce participation. The structural pushes and pulls of workforce opportunities and constraints and the continuing prevalence of the traditional division of work and family spheres was much more present in their lives. Many had parents who emphasized long-term workforce participation as the key to economic success and independence. On the other hand, their mothers’ paid work was often classified as “help” and not crucial income for the family. Some white and Latina working-class mothers worked in low-status, low- paying jobs that they found unsatisfactory. These contradictions left white and Latina women who grew up in working-class homes more divided about their future workforce possibilities than their middle-class peers and their African American working-class contemporaries.

Class and race influenced not only women’s expectations about paid work but also the process through which these expectations developed. The vast majority of women from middle-class origins, regardless of race, did not question their desire to be continual workers. In fact, when I asked them about this, many of the women from middle-class homes seemed puzzled that there could have been an alternative to continual work. Just as white, Asian, Latina and African American middle-class women rarely questioned the possibility that they would work continually, African American working-class women similarly believed that they would work continually throughout their adult lives. On the other hand, the majority of white and Latina working-class felt that at a young age, they needed to choose whether or not they would work continually as adults. The women who articulated a conscious calculation of continual versus occasional work were white and Latina working-class women.

Historically, Black women have had less of an opportunity to withdraw from the workforce than their contemporaries. Because Black women grew up with a uniquely strong communal expectation of women’s paid work, they appeared to be not dissuaded from full-time work by expectations of constraints, unlike some of their white and Latina working-class counter- parts. The experiences of Black women suggest that potential workforce opportunities and constraints only influence women’s expectations about workforce participation when they believe that withdrawing from the work- force is a possibility.

There are some limitations to this study. Using the NYC Voter Registration database has some drawbacks, primarily the exclusion of noncitizens and of the 12.5 percent of the population not registered to vote. The exclusion of noncitizens and nonregistered voters may have depressed the inclusion of some of the most disadvantaged members of our society. Although the

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sampling strategy may mitigate this problem, it cannot eliminate it. Once divided by race and class, there were particularly small groups of working- class Asians and middle-class Blacks. Further research will be needed on the experiences of the women in these groups.

As I was only able to interview one woman who identified as a lesbian, I am unable to fully explore the ways that sexual orientation intersects with race, gender, and class in shaping expectations for paid work. For lesbians, the question of whether to work is a heteronormative one; certainly they lack access to a man’s breadwinner wage and marital rights in most states. Sallie, a white working-class woman, was the only lesbian respondent in my sample. She believed full-time work was her only option, as it would not be possible for her to rely on a husband’s success: “I think subcon- sciously I knew that for me [marriage and kids] was never really going to be the road that I went down.” As a result, Sallie expected early on that her sexuality would preclude her from participating in a traditional gender division of labor. While prior research suggests that lesbians’ family forms are more diverse than heterosexual ideal types (see Dunne 2000), future research would benefit from a larger sample size of lesbians to more clearly understand how sexuality intersects with race, class, and gender to shape women’s work expectations.

Since the 1970s, women have made great strides in the labor market, but these changes have been incomplete, leaving many working-class women on the margins of the labor market and in some of the most vulnerable social positions. Although prior research suggests that early expectations are par- ticularly influential for skill building and early work entrances (Goldin 2006; Risman 1998; Stickney and Konrad 2007), it is necessary to investigate the intersections between early expectations, race, gender, and class, and subse- quent workforce participation. At the turn of the 21st century, much social progress has been made in advancing women’s rights. Yet gendered, raced, and classed cultural norms about work remain resilient as well.

NOTES

1. Although lesbian couples may adopt more traditional divisions of labor at home in which the biological mother performs more caregiving tasks (see Moore 2008), research suggests that lesbian couples prefer more egalitarian workforce participation (Patterson 2000).

2. The phone was used as a last resort in three cases outside of the tri-state area. 3. This paper considers the family the unit of class analysis, using a joint clas-

sification of the interviewed woman’s and her partner’s occupational class, which

Sarah Damaske / A “MAJOR CAREER WOMAN”? 427

I measured using highest occupational status in household (see Heath and Britten 1984). While Heath and Britten (1984) refer specifically to a husband and wife, I used this classification for all domestic partners, regardless of marital status or gender.

4. Four of the five Asian Americans in the study were from middle-class backgrounds, as was one Latin American respondent and one African American.

5. All names are pseudonyms. 6. Author’s emphasis.

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Sarah Damaske is an assistant professor of labor studies and employment relations at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on how intersections of gender, class and race shape work–family transitions. Her book, For the Family? How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.