Motherhood vs Career (value system)

[maruf]

Islamic Revival wrote:

Motherhood vs Career
« Reply #1 on: Today at 05:16:15 » <br>
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And on the topic of women, here's a quote I like pertaining to the choice of motherhood over career, taken from "First Things First" by Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill & Rebecca R. Merrill, chapter 6, 'The Balance of Roles', pg 123:

'Rebecca: I'm often troubled by the stigma attached to women who choose to focus their time and effort primarily on motherhood. It is as if society somehow deems it less valuable to raise competent children than to raise the profit on a company's product line.

A women who chooses to focus on motherhood, and does so out of a clear sense of her own personal vision, becomes truly energized in her role. She recognizes the value of her efforts in shaping the characters of future leaders in society. And in the process, she develops competence and character to fulfill other roles. Perhaps a second career or another degree are in the plans, but that doesn't distract from the task at hand. It's not a matter of capacity, but of chosen contribution.

There are women who choose motherhood for a season who don't earn the character and competence because they aren't deeply connected to a vision of the role and don't fully apply their creative energy to it. But those who do are empowered to fulfill other roles with excellence.'


Part I

My response:

Here is a short paper I wrote about a book related to the topic of family. I have edited the original paper. In America and Britain, which are capitalistic societies, the value is put on profit versus any kind of moral, spiritual, or family value. Women in fact are not separated from the value system. Women, particularly kafir women, and I am sure some Muslims too (because we live in these societies and thus are influenced, some to a greater degree than others, nonetheless hardly any not influenced) get their self worth and value from society as well.

Quite a bit of women (not all) feel a greater self worth in working hard at work versus coming home and doing house work that is expected of the woman, thus less appreciated by men or the family. Islaam gives us a different value system in life, our purpose is to get to Jennah by worshiping Allah and to raise healthy Islaamic families and societies. Now of course we need a State system to best accomplish this objective individually and collectively. Muslim women should encourage and understand sacrifices Muslim men should and do make for the Da’wah because she understands they will meet Allah. Muslim men should remind their wives that their reward is in the next life for all the hard work they do at home with the family and sacrificed time with the family and maybe away from the husband. The Muslim home ideally should not be a place of competition and war between the husband and wife, father and son, or mother and daughter. There should not be a feminist battle in Islaam (assuming Islaam is applied as it should be) against men, for Allah produced Islaam not man. The capitalistic system is inherently flawed because it came from the minds of men who are limited and subjective, thus incapable of providing justice to women or men.

Even for those families desiring to better care for their families and live an Islaamic life, it is commonly known that you need a Dual income to support your family in today’s American society. At one point, especially during the 50s period, men were paid a family wage, enough for them to work only and support the family while women to stayed at home and tended to the family, this is not the case any longer, in order to pay the bills and support our consumerism, you need two incomes. Not only this but many of us do not have our extended family here in the west to help care for our children. Many of us have left mothers and fathers back in our native countries or our mothers and fathers work themselves.

The fact that many are influenced by the capitalistic value in society and many have to work to survive, it creates a Time Bind in the lives of families. There is a reason why divorce rates are more that 50 percent in America, and time spent together in a healthy sense, plays a vital role. Many in America do not have the time to enjoy their families and luxuries that they have due to spending so much time at work, some working two to three jobs or lots of overtime. Working hard and long is looked at as a good thing, spending time with the family, is viewed as weak (feminine if you are a male or female), even if it is done by the women in society. This is women’s liberation after all.

Capitalism is simply a crime against humanity and civilization. The West is highly angry with Muslim societies to convert us to their way of life, despite the fact that their way of life is not even working for their people. Does this make sense? It does not, but they do not care, they only care about increasing and maximizes profit, they really do not care about women’s rights, human rights, or any other rights save their right to dominate secular capitalistic ways over our lives.

Islaam is the solution because it comes from Allah, but Islaam must be implemented totally in our lives, not just in ethics or individualistic principles, but with systems that bring values based on Islaam. The political system influences the economic system and vice versa. The economical system influences the social system and vice versa. Ideologies work in this fashion. We in the west live under the corrupt ideology of capitalism and should not simply think it is an economic system only that does not influence how much we work, what we watch on TV, how much time we spend with our families, what we views as important, where we live, what we teach our children, and the list goes on and on. May Allah help the Muslims who are actively working to bring back Islaam as a solution to our and the world’s many problems due to corrupt man made views about life or ideologies.

TEXT

TEXT

Time Bind, When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, is a book by Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild that seeks to examine the balance between work life and family/personal home life in the lives of the men and women she studied at a major corporation in America. Hochschild gave the company a fictional name called Amerco. She chose to study Amerco because it was “reputed to be a national leader in the march toward work-family balance.” (Hochschild 2000:xvii). Hochschild was given access to the entire company. From the CEO to the janitor, she could roam the facility and interview whomever she liked.
Hochschild discovered that despite great family oriented benefits; very few people in Amerco utilized their benefits. She seeks to gain the answer why as she takes us through the lives of the various workers and their families at Amerco. Through the studying of the subjects she comes to find out that work has become home and home has become work in the sense of defining home as some where you feel comfortable and work where one might feel forced and less pleasing. For many of the subjects, the places had become reversed.

TEXT


Home is work and Work is home
As the subtitle suggests, Hochschild explains that because home life can be so stressful with children, housework, and personal relationships, which seem less appreciated and rewarded than our lives at work, which are respected and rewarded, home can become work and work can become home in the sense that work is where we feel more relaxed and appreciated.
In one of her first interviews with a lady named Linda (fictional name to protect identity), she discovers that Linda sought to work more to get away from the stress of here home life. Linda’s husband did not help out with the housework and she had two children (a baby and older daughter) that demanded her time as soon as she came in from work, so the stress started for her when she came home, not at work. At work, Linda was a supervisor and was appreciated by her co-workers. This was the trend response she got from many of the workers at Amerco. Hochschild (1997) states here:
In this new model of family and work life, a tired parent flees a world of unresolved quarrels and unwashed laundry for the reliable orderliness, harmony, and managed cheer of work. (p.44)

Overall, this “reversal” was a predominant pattern in about a fifth of the Amerco families, and an important them in over half of them. (p.45)

Workers like Linda, in fact, had become “Father” and “Mother” figures to the people they managed or supervised at work due to the company’s culture and values. The roles where being transferred, in a sense from home to work, for quite a few.

[maruf]

Part II

Value System

Another major theme throughout the book was that society at large and the Amerco specifically put a value on work and production. Hochschild (1997) gives us an example of this value system from the company’s handbook: “Time spent on the job is an indication of commitment. Work more hours… More hours indicates you are paying your dues” (p.19). Supervisors indicated that time could be made for the families of their workers, but at the cost of the worker. One supervisor indicated that worker could take time for his family, but that he still would be responsible for getting the job done. Workers at Amerco teased fathers who took time off to spend with their families for various reasons. It was a general rule that the male was suppose to work, while the woman was responsible for caring for the family, even in emergencies and pregnancies. Hochschild (1997) makes the point here about the family man’s role:

Traditionally, “family man” meant a good provider, one who demonstrated his love of wife and children by toiling hard at the office or factory. In the modern workplace, however, “family man” has taken on negative overtones, designating a worker who isn’t a serious player. The term now tacitly but powerfully calls into question a worker’s masculinity. (p.132)

We see here that to working long hours is equated to being a real man or hard worker.

Supervisors felt that there was no way for a worker to succeed part time or less time than was expected. A worker Eileen who wanted to work part time due to family reasons was told this, “Eileen, I don’t know how to do part time. My experience is that people who put in the hours are the ones who succeed.” (Hochschild 1997: p.92) Working long hours was given a value of having ambition, succeeding, while anything less was seen as the opposite. Hochschild (1997) states here, “..part time was associated only with the idea of permanently renounced ambition” (p.98).
So we see that working long hours as expected by the company meant you were ambitious, productive, and “real man.” These values served as a deterrent to workers taking advantage of family time policies because they contradicted them.

The solution

It was difficult to accept how these parents hesitated when their children were sick to leave work. How they seemed so tied to work rather than their families. What values did they have? My value system indicates to me that my family comes first. I see my child not as a burden, but as a blessing from God not a willingly accept and appreciate. So, if my son or wife were sick in the hospital, I would have to tell my supervisor, this was a priority more important than walking the company line. This was something I could not see myself feeling ashamed but proud that I was taking on this role. This of course is due to my Islaamic values.

I think the solution would be for the American Society to place a higher value on their children and family life versus their work or production life. The American institutions would need to re-think its concepts about life and production. What does it mean to be productive if you lose your family and marriage? How much time must be put into personal relationships we value? Can you ever put a time limit on your family? The man would not be defined only by how long he worked or how much he mad financially.

The roles that parents play in their perspective families would have to be qualified as well. Does the father have role in caring of his sick child? Why is it that this is not respected enough in society versus working 10 hours a day in corporations? Why is it that American families have such high divorce rates? Is the value that we place in our jobs greater than we place on our role as husbands, wives, and parents? If so how can we change this? What is the basis of any marriage or family? Meaning why do we marry in the first place? If we have a clear vision of marriage and our role in it, then I feel this would be the right start. Once this is clear, what outside forces hinder our roles in our families? We would have to take a critical look at Capitalism and its institutions to see the role they play in our lives, and seek to change this structurally.
In summary, if our value and role in our families are in the right place along with a culture that fosters this versus contradicts this; this would solve the time bind in my opinion. The capitalist value in society plays a role in the time bind problem. Hochschild (2000) states here:
Capitalism is not just an economic system but a highly inventive cultural system, and at the present it is in the process of inventing a zero-drag version of work-life balance. Zero –drag companies often take wonder care of their professional workers. But with long hours, they do not enable workers to take wonder care of their children, elderly parents, or other members of their communities. (p.xxiv)

Despite the fact that Bush and the Capitalists want to bring Democracy and Capitalism to the East, the American people need to have Islaam brought to free them up from Capitalism and its products as indicated by the many problems existing in the American society.

Was-salaam,

Ma’ruf

[maruf]

Masha Allah for the number of people who have viewed this thread.

I want to apologize for the typing errors contained in my response!

Any questions or comments/suggestions please feel free to join the board and engage with us.

was-salaam

Ma'ruf

[maruf]

As-salaamu'alaykum!



Contrary to what this article might be trying to say...this is not a positive thing for the family. Men, and especially Muslim men understand it is their role to provide for the Family. This is typical of families and peoples who are oppressed that Men would find it harder in the society that oppresses them versus the women. Look at the inner cities of America and you will find this same scenario where the Women is really the only option for the family because the man is either dead, on drugs, lacking in educational skills, or in prison. This further challenges their manhood and meaning of what it is to be a Man.

Many women and men are in the work force in America, but the ones who are harmed are the children, who need all the time one can muster up and more for their health developement.




Many women hit the work force because they have to, not because of adventure and creativity, that goes for the East as well as the West.





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4:34 Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all).


was-salaam



from the August 05, 2004 edition - www.csmonitor.com/2004/0805/p01s03-wome.html

Women step forward in West Bank
As strife constrains men, women venture into jobs and activism.
By Joshua Mitnick | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

KUFR KHALIL, WEST BANK - The village women who assembled in this hillside hamlet to talk politics came in conservative, drab gowns and head scarves that left only their faces exposed.

But their comments about the approaching municipal elections were anything but traditional. Two said they aspired to become the first female members of their village council. Others, like Nivineh Amr, insisted that only a female candidate would understand the importance of bringing day-care centers and running water to this West Bank town of 3,500.

Amid the devastation wrought by nearly four years of conflict with Israel, a subtle but significant transformation is under way in the lives of many Palestinian women. Normally confined to domestic chores and child care, they're now playing central roles in the survival of families in which husbands have found themselves without work.

The crisis has emboldened women to assert themselves in new realms, from finding part-time work and taking control of family finances to political involvement. The newfound freedoms are even bucking the rising influence of fundamentalist Islam in the public lives of Palestinians.

"Before the intifada," says Mrs. Amr, a mother of seven, "our husbands would come to us and say, 'Vote for this one or vote for that one,' and we weren't concerned with their qualifications or what that person stood for.''

As Israel's military has clamped down on cities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it has choked off Palestinian activity and sent unemployment soaring. Jobless rates in the West Bank have risen as high as 40 percent. In Gaza, unemployment has surpassed 60 percent.

"Because of the closures, women had to find ways of producing food without going to a market,'' says Subhiyeh Hamdan, a social worker who facilitates the women's support group in Kufr Khalil. As a result, she says, "women have gone back to sewing. Any job that was available they took.''

Hanging above the entrance of the building where the group meets are faded posters of men brandishing machine guns - ubiquitous images of the uprising's martyred heroes. In a bare room up two flights of an unfinished stairwell, the women sit in a seminar-sized semicircle and discuss their struggles at home.

Cradling a 10-month old infant, Karine Oded told of an ill-fated chicken-farm venture that left her husband demoralized. That forced her to get support from charity organizations and open a small shop.

"The men are distracted because they are unemployed, and because of the political situation,'' she says. "All this leads to difficult relations in the family, and women have to deal with it.''

The past few years have also seen a membership surge in women's savings and loan cooperatives. By contributing 10 Jordanian dinars ($13.50) a month into the fund, members become eligible for loans as much as 30 times as big to help finance small businesses, tuition, or emergency needs. In the West Bank city of Ramallah, savings funds subsidized by the Working Women's Society count more than 500 members and $85,000 in assets.

Similar entrepreneurship can be found in the Gaza Strip. In Khan Yunis, wives of fishermen are rejuvenating businesses that have been paralyzed by Israeli blockades preventing the seamen from reaching the coast, says Majeda Alsaqa, a local field worker with the Culture and Free Thought Association in Khan Yunis. The women raised money through nongovernment organizations to refurbish their husbands' boats and are employing Gazans who do have access to the sea to captain the vessels.

"Women are oppressed in our society. So when they have a small space to solve a problem, they will go and do it," she says. "It's the first time you are freeing a woman, and telling her, 'Go and find a job and be creative.' "

UN data show that Palestinian women attend high school and university in roughly the same numbers as men. But instead of starting careers, women get married and remain at home. According to Palestinian Bureau of Statistics, the work force is only 14 percent female.

In some respects, Palestinian society appears to be growing more conservative, influenced by the growing prestige of fundamentalist groups like Hamas, which have persuaded Palestinians to adopt a stricter brand of Islam. Their influence can be seen in towns of the southern Gaza Strip, where women are seldom uncovered, Alsaqa says. But some observers suggest that the dress is a poor indicator of political or religious. "It's mostly a passport out of the house for women,'' says Randa Nasser, a sociologist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. "A lot of women find it easier to go get work, to go get an education, if they put on that dress.''

To be sure, there is no lack of resistance to the changes. Mrs. Hamdan says many men in the village have discouraged her from gathering women to discuss the vote as the Palestinian legislature mulls local elections. Other women's activists have said that men in villages have told their wives that they don't have the right to vote.

Still, interest is on the rise. The Working Women's Society - a sponsor of the women's groups - says it knows of 120 women in the West Bank interested in running. Back in Kufr Khalil, Amr offered an explanation.

"Hard times makes you assess the good from the bad,'' she says . "These hard times make us realize that we should have a role in this assessment.''


My Comments:


As-salaamu'alaykum!



Contrary to what this article might be trying to say...this is not a positive thing for the family. Men, and especially Muslim men, understand it is their role to provide for the Family. This is typical of families and peoples who are oppressed that Men would find it harder in the society that oppresses them versus the women. Look at the inner cities of America and you will find this same scenario where the Women are really the only option for the family because the man is either dead, on drugs, lacking in educational skills, or in prison. This further challenges their manhood and meaning of what it is to be a Man. The Women in fact are the Head of the Household.

Many women and MEN are in the work force in America, but the ones who are harmed are the children in the family, who need all the time one can muster up and more for their healthy development.


Besides this point, many women hit the work force because they have to, not because of the love of adventure and creativity, but because someone must put bread on the table, if the men are "missing in action," the women are forced to step up.

So we should not get this confused or twisted, this is not a victory; it is a symptom of oppression of a people.


was-salaam

Ma'ruf




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4:34 Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all).