2467 Mothers' Day Musing #2

Business Schools are targeting at home Moms according to a Wall St. Journal article on May 10 by Anne Marie Chaker available here in Career Journal. It could cost you anywhere from $5-10,000 for a 2 week tune-up. Such a deal! Those must have been some high paying jobs those mommies left.

There's never been much money in being a librarian, so no one targeted me when I decided to return to the labor force in 1977. I sort of fell into it when my friend Ana Llorenz, the Romance languages librarian at OSU called and told me that there was a listing for a fill-in for Marti Alt who would be out on maternity leave. Yes, in those days, libraries had enough soft money to replace someone who would be gone for a few months. I took the job and that led to a 3+ year position in agricultural economics.

But some years before that, Sandy Boyd who worked in Cataloging, my old department, and I had put together a job sharing plan and tried to shop it to the department head. In the early 70s, during the first wave of the current feminist movement, there was tremendous pressure on women to get into the labor force. I was the spoil sport. I started looking around at child care options (my children were then in about 4 and 5). Even in our nice suburb it seemed grim. One woman was on a busy corner with no fenced yard; someone else had a dog that looked a little dicey to me; the churches that offered child care near the university were not in good neighborhoods. So I backed off for four more years until the children were in third and fourth grade. I never regretted it, and can't see that it made any difference in my career track.

One woman who took advantage of Harvard's New Path program used it to develop her custom cake business. Sweet.