Salon.com
June 8, 2009

"My grandmother grew up 100 years ago in the rural South, where precious few white people questioned the notion that blacks were an inferior race. It was inconceivable that her family's "mammy," Lucy Forrester, would ever -- if she set foot in their Model T Ford in the first place -- presume to ride in the front seat. And yet Lucy Forrester was so beloved, so deeply connected to the family she worked for that they named my grandmother -- Lucy Crawford -- after her.

Today, in families across America, nannies -- even without such overt or institutionalized racism -- occupy a similar spot, layered with so many shades of gray: They are outsiders and insiders, they are not the children's parents, but they may have an even firmer hand in childrearing. They are not family, but they are part of the family. And that is the tricky terrain writer (and, briefly, former nanny) Tasha Blaine explores in "Just Like Family: Inside the Lives of Nannies, the Parents They Work for and the Children They Love." Her primary sources: nannies.

Blaine interviewed over 100 nannies for her book. But at its core lie the stories of three nannies Blaine followed and interviewed extensively for two years, "in order to portray, for the first time in this level of detail, what a nanny's life is really like and what nannies really think about their jobs," she writes. "If parents wonder what happens all day long, nannies wonder why so few of them bother to ask. By presenting an almost exclusive nanny point of view, it was my hope to give caregivers a voice while also providing a keyhole for parents into a world they never really enter but always speculate about."

Salon.com
June 1, 2009

"Mommy wars, brain drains, opt-out revolutions -- working mothers have been through (or at least been warned about) them all. Now comes "Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success," a new book by Claire Shipman, senior national correspondent for ABC News' "Good Morning America" and mother of two, and Katty Kay, Washington correspondent and anchor for "BBC World News America" and mother of four. In their book, the news veterans call for women to say no to 60-plus-hour work weeks and overly demanding jobs that yank them away from their families. Instead, they urge working women to use their clout in the workplace to demand fewer hours at the office, turn down non-family-friendly assignments, and take control of their time by working from home more, checking e-mail less and avoiding meetings whenever possible.

They call the lifestyle that they themselves have pulled off the "New All" -- defined as "enough professional success, balanced by time and freedom." In impassioned prose, Shipman and Kay lay out their advice for downshifting our careers, which they contend is what an increasing number of us desire deep down but are afraid to ask for. "Women don't usually want that promotion," they write, citing a 2007 Family and Work Institute study that only 28 percent of college-educated women want more responsibility at work, down from 57 percent who said they wanted more in 1992. A second study they cite by the same group found that 34 percent of the top 100 women in 10 top-tier companies said they had, at some point, scaled back their career aspirations. "Why? Not because they weren't up to the job -- but because the sacrifices they would have to make in their personal lives were just too great."

Of course, that could be because, as sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild pointed out in her 1990 book "The Second Shift," which is as apt today as when it was published, the vast majority of the women in dual-career families are still saddled with most of the work at home, and because America's social support system is woefully lacking. But Shipman and Kay, both of whom have high-powered, presumably well-paid husbands, barely acknowledge these issues in their book, and then do so only to dismiss them. "We know the solution isn't longer hours at daycare or hiring more babysitters or asking our husbands to stay home," they write. "Because we're the ones who want more time -- for our children, our parents, our communities, ourselves."

Slate
April 21, 2009

"Oh, how we whinge, we pampered parents of the West, attacked by choices, condemned to strive always to do the right thing, to get it right. We complain about money; we complain about lack of sleep; we complain about our partners, our co-workers, the newspapers, social networking sites, the government. We stamp our feet and shout at the usurers in the banking corporations and the swindlers and avaricious cheats on Wall Street, but most of all we complain about our own children.

The first few months after the birth of the first baby are fairly blissful. Then the competing elements of the artificial constructions that we grandly call our "lives" become locked in mortal combat. We try to "get the balance right" between unenjoyable and enjoyable activities. But we are moaning about the very lives that we have created for ourselves."