Kathie Lingle's Work-Life Blog

Is Work-Life Really History?

Dec. 6, 2007 - I have recently realized that I am reading (and/or paying rapt attention to) several entirely new sources of information. One of these is the Chronicle of Higher Education , which captured my attention in the fall, when we hosted a Workplace Flexibility Retreat in Utah that united work-life practitioners from private industry with their counterparts in some of the larger research universities across the country.

At first I was startled, then frankly annoyed that my new subscription resulted in the influx of a daily report from the Chronicle that threatened to strangle my e-mail inbox. I'm now thankful that I resisted the impulse to pull the plug, because I'm finding some of the articles most thought-provoking.

Just a few days ago, an article by Alice Kessler-Harris , entitled "Do We Still Need Women's History?" has me pondering the similarity to a familiar angst expressed by many work-life leaders - is the "mainstreaming" of work-life into HR practice altogether a good thing, or will some collateral damage inevitably result? Dr. Kessler-Harris's description of the gradual absorption of a focus on women into more generalized studies about gender is worth noting; she points out that it has resulted in a current reality were the topic "women" is frequently discounted as too narrow and has actually become a career-limiting area of expertise in academic circles. She also ponders a potential connection between the "recent attack against feminism, both in academe and in the wider society" and the "deligitimizing" of women's history after several decades of ascendance as a legitimate specialty.

I'm not naïve or knowledgeable enough to claim exact parallels, but I am acutely aware that the work-life field has also ceded ground over time, yielding first to the pressure to de-emphasize "family" in favor of the more nebulous (and impossible to define) concept of "life," and later incorporating a robust insistence that our work does not center (nor depend on?) women. Mere coincidence, or does our own history absorb some larger cultural tendency to de-emphasize the significance of the complex role of women?

What do you think?

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of WorldatWork and its affiliate, Alliance for Work-Life Progress (AWLP).