Negotiating Careers And Our Biology: The Need For New Narratives For The Working Woman
Since reliable birth control in the 1960s, women have entered the workforce en force, but the narratives on how to negotiate marriage and motherhood with the new role of a career were never articulated, leading to women struggling to figure out how to do it all.
Women working is not new. We have been working since the beginning of time. Women building careers, however, is a newer endeavor since the 1960s. Before that, women worked at home, on the farm, and in the factory, but we mostly enacted the triad of “maiden, mother, matriarch” with relative degrees of success. What happened to shift women into new roles? Reliable birth control, along with changing attitudes and the rise of feminism, launched women into the brave new world of career building. Yet, unlike men, we did not have the narratives established on how to navigate the new role of career women.