Juggling the Image of Working Mothers : Books: Forget guilt, says Faye Crosby, author and social psychologist. Women are balancing jobs and family quite well. It’s society that has problems.

Faye J. Crosby is hitting the talk show circuit with a message for working mothers: Don’t feel guilty.

“Women all around the country are feeling inadequate, trying to balance responsibilities between home and work,” says Crosby, a social psychologist specializing in gender issues. “No one feels like they have enough time. And almost unanimously, they’re worried over what they are doing to their children by not staying home with them.”

Such self-doubts are reinforced by media messages that depict working mothers as bedraggled jugglers, frantically scurrying through their roles as parent, wife and worker.

But Crosby isn’t buying the message. After a decade of research, she has reached the conclusion that women feel stressed, but the problem is not with them, it’s in society itself.

“I’m very suspicious of the view of the bedraggled juggler,” says Crosby. “Why? Because jugglers who cope well are happy people. In fact, my research shows if you want a happy home life, you need a significant involvement away from home.

“Men have always known this,” says Crosby, who is advocating the same for women in her new book, “Juggling: The Unexpected Advantages of Balancing Career and Home for Women and Their Families.” “Men have always had work life and a home/family life and no one ever thought it was a problem for them.”

To document her thesis that people with partners, children and jobs have the happiest lives, Crosby, chair of the psychology department at Smith College, combines her own research with an overview of the available literature. The result is a book that is receiving praise as a fresh perspective for the two-job couple of the ‘90s.

The juggling metaphor, Crosby notes, was introduced in the inaugural issue of Ms. magazine in 1972. The cover depicted a woman with eight arms juggling multiple responsibilities.

Crosby finds it significant that 20 years later, with women making up almost half the work force, the stressed-out juggler is still a favorite media image, although the message is more subtle.

“The forces of the status quo find it very much in their interest to put forward and reiterate the image of the bedraggled woman,” insists Crosby, who cites a recent story in the Wall Street Journal saluting the accomplishments of women executives who combine careers with home lives. “On the face, this is a sympathetic story, but the underlying text to employers is this: ‘Watch out. Women who are trying to have a family life away from work are going to cause you trouble.’ ”

To focus on the combination of the two roles is a safe strategy, she maintains, because it ignores the real problems, such as the need for comprehensive day care and flextime policies.

For instance, she notes, in study after study, America’s working mothers have identified adequate child care as the factor most important to their peace of mind, yet the number of companies that offer child care remains tiny.

“We are working with an outdated family ideal--the American woman as being very home-centered and assuming sole responsibility for the welfare of her children,” Crosby says. The foot-dragging, she maintains, represents a larger conflict--the backlash of conservatism in the face of uncomfortable change.

Writes Crosby: “Today the majority of women are employed, and they are not remaining single. Few people today would object overtly or directly to their participation in the labor force. Lip service is given to gender equality throughout the United States. Yet old habits of thought persist. People are still searching for proof why women should not, after all, seek to combine paid employment with domestic responsibility.”

It is this contradictory blend of superwoman, mommy-track, having-it-all and New Traditionalist that makes life stressful for women today, whatever their roles, says Crosby.

“I’ve seen a lot of change in women, and undergone a lot myself,” Crosby says. She and her husband, Travis Crosby, a history professor, have two sons, Tim, 11, and Matthew, 18. Reflections on her own family-career juggling are interwoven into her book, which combines a range of first-person experiences with a decade’s scholarship by hundreds of investigators.

She concludes: “There is still a large portion of the country that feels uneasy about women’s ambitions--that doesn’t want women to be high-flyers in their careers and have children, too. There is a presumption that women should be available to other people, and a discomfort when they are not.”

Irene Natividad, chair of Washington’s National Commission on Working Women, agrees:

“We are still carriers of old messages--women and men both locked into a time warp,” she says. “It is not right to leave your children, it is not right to enjoy your work, it is not right to stay at work one extra hour.

“I think Crosby is basically right. Problems in meshing work and family responsibility have less to do with our inability to juggle than the rigidity of systems that are outmoded.” She ticks them off:

* The rigidities of a 9-to-5 work schedule.

* The rigidity of an education system based on 9-to-3 school hours.

* The rigidity of corporations reluctant to provide child care.

“A few new models are starting to emerge,” Natividad says. “Farsighted businesses are realizing the advantages.”

Crosby has been tracking the subject since 1980. While teaching at Yale University, she did a study on gender and job characteristics. Her findings showed that women with jobs liked their home life better than women who stayed home; and at the workplace, women and men who had families liked their jobs better than men and women who were single.

She has pursued the topic since, writing several scholarly books and articles for the “relatively safe world of academics and researchers.”

Now she has headed into the real world, promoting her book and hoping to reach a popular audience among the nation’s 22 million working mothers--”all those women who feel guilty because they aren’t coping well.”

She is also prepared for criticism. “In my first radio appearance last week, I was pitted against another expert who claimed that if women work outside the home for more than 20 hours she is harming the children--not just babies, but school kids.”

Crosby doesn’t want to do battle. “I don’t want women to be at war with each other,” she says. “I think that a woman who chooses to stay home with her children is a valid person. But I think she should realize there are limitations--she’s stuck there.”

Not only has the research turned up surprisingly little evidence that jugglers experience more stress than other women, she says, a sizable amount of research shows that women who juggle different life roles are less depressed than other women.

“The jugglers also rate higher, on average, in self-esteem and happiness,” she says, quoting a sample respondent in a sociological study saying that “even though my job right now is not very rewarding, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of knowing that I can support myself and my daughter.” Such self-esteem also benefits the children, Crosby says in a lengthy chapter reviewing the experience of children whose mothers work.

“If we confine ourselves to one life role, no matter how pleasant it seems at first, we starve emotionally and psychologically,” says Crosby, who sees very little of this reality reflected in the popular culture.

“I’m suspicious at the silence at women’s coping,” she told a group of journalists recently. “I’m suspicious at the silence at women’s joy--the fun in being competent in their work life, in having different arenas in life, in being fulfilled and vigorous.

“Everybody needs different sets of people in their lives,” says Crosby. “For a sense of wholeness as a human being, you need different parts. The juggler image says that if you have all these parts you will feel fragmented. The truth is that you need all these parts to feel whole.”