I'm just experimenting with adding links to posts, so I'm hoping that you can in fact navigate to the following pieces. These articles appeared a couple of weeks ago in the Manchester Guardian newspaper, but I've been mulling them over--such a sad juxtaposition.
The first reports on the ways in which women's careers are derailed by the presence of children in their lives--not the responsibility of the children themselves, but of a society that both demands full-time commitment to work and then fails to provide adequate childcare. The piece sggests that while mothers may well have jobs, it is extremely difficult for them to have careers--that motherhood, in other words, seems to level class differences in an odd way. And a series of brief intervews charts the ways in which many highly qualified women who do return to work after the birth of a child find themselves unable to engage the work world in the ways they had expected to prior to the birth of that child.
See http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2023774,00.html
The second is an essay by Kirsty Gunn that struggles to express the meaning of the world after work as it is commonly understood--that is, paid labor--the world beyond that kind of work for precisely one such highly qualified woman.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2019975,00.html
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