We interviewed two samples of career women: fifteen businesswomen in the corporate-financial world, and fifteen faculty members at several colleges and universities. Corporate and academic careers are highly demanding and require strong personal commitment, but they offer the promise of great personal satisfaction. Both careers are situated in institutions largely populated and controlled by men. At the same time, they differ from one another in several major respects. An academic career, compared with a corporate career, requires a longer period of post-college education. Its culture is somewhat less hypermasculine, offering women slightly more opportunity to advance beyond entry-level positions. It is financially less rewarding, but it provides women with a little more support for combining career and family. How these similarities and differences are reflected in the lives of individual women is one subject of our inquiry.
In the following chapters I shall explore the commonalities among the career women generally, the differences between the two career samples, and the similarities and differences between the career women and the homemakers. Perhaps the most general findings are these:
(1) All three samples have certain features in common, features that underlie the variations in personality and life circumstances among them. All forty-five women go through the same sequence of periods in life structure development, albeit in different ways. Likewise, all forty-five must deal—again in their individual ways—with the same basic issues of gender: maintaining or modifying the gender splitting in society and in self; maintaining or modifying the Traditional Marriage Enterprise; forming the internal Traditional Homemaker Figure and the internal Anti-Traditional Figure, and dealing with the conflict between them.
(2) Women with corporate or academic careers have much in common that differentiates them from the homemakers. They traverse the developmental periods in somewhat different ways. They make a stronger effort to overcome the splitting of feminine and masculine. They form a more developed internal Anti-Traditional Figure who plays an increasingly important part in their lives. They attempt (with various degrees of success and failure) to achieve a more even balance of occupation and family. They develop a greater variety of alternatives to the Traditional Marriage Enterprise.
(3) The businesswomen provide the greatest contrast to the homemakers. The academics are intermediate: when they differ from the businesswomen, it is usually in the direction of the homemakers.
(4) Finally, and perhaps most important, is the diversity of individual lives. Along with the common themes, there are remarkable individual variations within each sample and across the entire spectrum. “Homemakers,” “businesswomen,” and “faculty members” are not unitary categories with no internal variation. Likewise, “female” and “male” are not unitary categories. The differences between male and female are important, but so are the similarities—and so, too, is the tremendous variety of individual lives, female as well as male. Even when a theme is characteristic of a particular group, there are still individual variations—as shown by the case vignettes—that enrich our collective lives.
The career sample was diverse in social background and early life circumstances. Two businesswomen were Catholic, ten were Protestant, and three were Jewish. Fourteen women were white; one was African-American. Three faculty women were Catholic, eight were Protestant, and four were Jewish. All fifteen faculty women were white, as no African-American faculty women volunteered to be in the study.
One faculty member withdrew from the study after she had been interviewed. We have used her case in data analysis, but we have not quoted her directly in this book.