BOOK MARK : Those Who Care Must Put the Life Back Into Lifestyle : <i> Women are present in ever-increasing numbers in the workplace but, says the author of “Prisoners of Men’s Dreams,” they have not transformed that workplace as feminists pledged to do. An excerpt.</i>

Although Mary Jane Gibson, an 11-year veteran of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, has been trying to improve women’s lives for decades, she says that progressive legislators often find themselves fighting alone because so many women have abdicated their civic responsibilities. An initiator of legislation that would give working parents parental leave with some form of wage replacement, as well as many other programs that would help women and men with their care-giving needs, Gibson has nonetheless become increasingly discouraged when facing the anti-government sentiment so prevalent in the nation today.

In this climate, people who would benefit most from reforms are the least active in the political process. “Young working women who are married and feel a sense of responsibility to their families don’t feel they have the energy to organize collectively or even to contact their legislators individually,” she says.

“Or, if they could make the time, they’re often unaware of the importance of doing so. They aren’t making enough demands, either at their workplaces or on their political representatives.”

The results of this inaction are palpably evident. “As legislators, we simply aren’t asked by either individuals or organizations to make family issues a first priority. We don’t get letters and phone calls from young families. Young families are not our campaign workers or our financial contributors. And so the people who we hear from are the people who oppose the bills that would benefit the majority of citizens. We get letters and phone calls from the business community. And their first priority is definitely to kill these care-related bills.”

Because women have been drawn into this business-oriented society that does not know how to care, our liberation has been redefined. Many of us now reproduce the values of a society that denies the reality and importance of care.

Care is life. It is through caring, connection, and community--not in spite of it--that we achieve and create. Care is an integral part of our world, but in our society we have diminished and subverted it. In our lives and our work, we have radically overvalued competition, independence, self-reliance and aggression, making of them the only organizing principles around which we construct our politics and policies, our morality and, increasingly today, even our personal and social relationships.

But no society, no individual, can function without care. That is why, in so many respects, our lives no longer work; why so many of us find our lives so unfulfilled at work and at home. And why we complain that the people we depend on for gentleness and generosity, empathy and concern no longer seem to have the time or energy to care.

Our society has tried to entrap us all in the seductive masculine dream that we can deny care and simultaneously be cared for. We have been programmed to believe there is no higher purpose than the relentless individual climb up the ladder of traditional American success.

As a result, we have children other people care for, friends we have no time to socialize with, spouses about whom we complain but with whom we have no time to struggle to create more fulfilling relationships.

As individuals and in groups, we can, however, begin to struggle in our communities, workplaces and in the political arena for nothing less than a radical restructuring of our communal and corporate values. Working must be infused with caring, and caring is work. They are life’s partners who have been forcibly divorced by a “masculine” marketplace concerned only with profit. They demand a second chance.

The promise of feminism within our advanced technological world is not just the liberation of women but of the human capacity to care, create and be responsible for ourselves, the world we produce and the other human beings with whom we share it.

Millions of Americans are already fighting for such goals. Feminists, for example, are working for what’s become known as the family agenda--a set of demands that include unpaid (and, in some versions, paid) parental and medical leave, increased public support for child care and more family-oriented workplace arrangements like job-sharing, part-time work, and flex-time.

But we need far more than a family agenda; we need a National Care Agenda--a platform that weaves together our needs over a lifetime. We must demand the recognition that we, as human beings, are entitled to the time to care for ourselves and others.

And it is time itself that is, perhaps, the central component of this National Care Agenda. Our nation must return to the 40-hour week as its basic standard. As we become a nation of work addicts and moonlighters, we are creating a culture where work is viewed as the most important human activity, and we are depriving ourselves of the non-work time necessary for child rearing and other family or leisure activities--in other words, the time required to live a rich and varied life.

Men and women who work between 48 and 80 hours a week have no time to be more than survivors, careerists and consumers. In this context, alternative work arrangements like part-time work, flex-time and job-sharing do little more than rearrange an unacceptable status quo.

If we retain the fiction that the eight-hour day, 40-hour week is still our standard, in today’s world women are, in fact, working more than the second shift. When you add commuting time to a 10- to 14-hour day for professionals, or consider that many working-class and lower-income women are, in fact, working two jobs, housework and child rearing constitute a third--graveyard--shift that’s squeezed in at nights and on weekends.

And men who work nights and weekends are, in fact, working two shifts. How can we persuade them to share more of the work of any shift when their homes are little more than hotel rooms or boardinghouses? As for children, the main victims of a society that believes it is far more important to work than to care, we leave them undefended because the adults upon whom they depend for affection and protection are too often imprisoned in a world of work without end.

The 40-hour week is not an option. It is a necessity. It is not an end point but a new beginning.

1991 by Suzanne Gordon. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

BOOK REVIEW: “Prisoners of Men’s Dreams: Striking Out for a New Feminine Future,” by Suzanne Gordon, is reviewed on Page 10 of today’s Book Review section.