Mothers Matter, Caregivers Count: Recommended Reading

The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued
Ann Crittenden, 2001.
Economics journalist Crittenden details how prevailing practices and existing policies undermine the economic well-being of mothers, and proposes progressive solutions.

Flat Broke With Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform
Sharon Hays, 2004
The author conducted a three-year study of "welfare reform" and its impact on the women most likely to be affected by it: caseworkers and welfare recipients. She reveals that so-called welfare reform is not an innovative and effective anti-poverty measure but a "social experiment to legislate the work ethic and family values."

Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men -- and What to Do About It
Evelyn Murphy with E.J. Graff, 2005
The gender wage gap has a profound effect on women's personal lives and the wellbeing of their children. The authors show readers how to add up the personal and social costs of wage discrimination and give ideas for how it can be eliminated.

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values
by Nancy Folbre, 2001
Economist Folbre describes the importance of family care in economic terms and envisions a social system that places equal value on the production of material wealth and caregiving. The author presents her concepts in a very reader-friendly style, with many examples drawn from Folbre’s own experience with caregiving and family.

The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality
Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, 2004.
The author's study of changing trends in working hours in the U.S. led them to propose that some of the most pressing social dilemmas in the U.S. can be framed as a series of overlapping time divides, each of which can be isolated but is ultimately compounded by the others.

What Children Need
Jane Waldfogel, 2006
The author analyzes current studies on child development and child care arrangements and provides a research-based, practical overview of the type of care children need for healthy growth and development and the range of public policies that will help them get it.

The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother?
Miriam Peskowitz, 2005
With great compassion and clarity, Peskowitz analyzes cultural, structural and economic factors that interfere with integrating paid work and family life for both mothers and fathers, the role of the media in fueling social tensions about women, work and family, and why it's time for a "playground revolution."

The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want – and What To Do About It
Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, 2006
Using facts and figures from recent research and real life stories of women who encounter job discrimination because they are mothers or who lack the workplace flexibility, child care or benefits they need to care for their families, the authors discuss the need for more and better family policy in the U.S. and call for a grass roots "motherhood movement."

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Undermines Women
Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, 2004
"Backlash" for moms. Douglas and Michaels use examples of media portrayals of motherhood as the springboard for a lively discussion of the ascendancy of an intensely idealized version of motherhood they dub "the new momism.” The Mommy Myth also links the rise of the new momism to the steady rightward drift of U.S. politics and explores the range of social problems that follow in its wake.

The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream
Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling, 2005
The authors argue that the inflexible clockwork of careers in the U.S. — which transforms the cultural ideal of working hard to get ahead into a "lockstep" progression from education to continuous full-time employment until retirement—is chronically out of synch with the larger social and economic realities of twenty-first century life. This book provides an excellent, accessible overview of recent work-life research.

Unbending Gender: Why Families and Work Conflict and What To Do About It
Joan Williams, 2000
Williams, a legal scholar, explores how and why typical workplace practices interfere with balancing paid work and family care and how this perpetuates the social and economic inequality of mothers. The author includes an overview of the evolution of cultural attitudes about women, work and caregiving.  

The Widening Gap:
Why America’s Working Families Are in Jeopardy and What Can Be Done About It
Jody Heymann, MD, Ph.D, 2000
Heymann uses original research to demonstrate how conflicts between paid employment and caregiving affect the well-being of U.S. children and families across the economic spectrum. The author concludes that our country's resistance to adopting broad-based social policies to support working families places the greatest hardship on women and low-income families.

Unfinished Work: Building Equality and Democracy in an Era of Working Families
Edited by Jody Heymann and Christopher Beem, 2005
This collection from the Work, Family and Democracy Project includes chapters by top work-life researchers on social, economic and cultural conditions affecting the nation's families. One of the best and most comprehensive research anthologies on contemporary family issues and the pressing need for more and better social policy in the U.S.