The Maternal Wall

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

America's ruminations about women and work are so politically loaded these days -- there are breakthroughs and backlashes, mommy tracks and mommy wars, glass ceilings and pink-collar ghettos -- that it is often hard to get at the truth. Consider the mixed message from Women and the Work/Family Dilemma by Deborah Swiss and Judith Walker, a much touted book to be published this month. Based on a survey of 902 female graduates of Harvard's law, medical and business schools, the book makes the woman-and-work story more complicated than ever -- if only by suggesting that on this subject what women say is not always what they mean.

On the one hand, 85% of the Harvard professionals who responded to the survey said they had been "successful" at combining career and family. Here, quite explicitly, was the message that companies across America were implicitly handing down last week on Take Our Daughters to Work Day as they invited thousands of young girls to crawl down manholes, up telephone poles, into trading pits and office cubicles. But the survey also delivered more pessimistic news: this uppermost tier of American professional women, those who have secretaries to help organize birthday parties, big salaries to afford customized child care and private offices from which to call the pediatrician, discovered that the workplace often turned hostile when they became mothers.

This apparent contradiction may reflect the fact that women will instinctively offer an official let's-buck-it-up line even if, with more prodding, they are prepared to paint a gloomier anecdotal picture of their office life. What is clear, however, is that Swiss and Walker were cured of one presumption -- that change always comes from the top down. "We thought that if we surveyed the best-credentialed women in the country, we would uncover creative solutions to balancing work and family," says Swiss. ! "Instead, what we found was incredible anger and frustration about the difficulty of being a working mother."

On the down side, the survey offered two startling statistics: 53% of the women who responded said they had changed their jobs or specialties as a result of their family obligations, and 25% of those surveyed with M.B.A. degrees from Harvard had left the workplace completely. The conclusion, according to Swiss, is that "if these women are having a hard time, it's frightening to think of what is happening to working mothers who do not have the advantage of a Harvard education and a senior professional position."

Of course, the opposite could be true. The majority of mothers, who fall in the working and middle classes, could take after Roseanne, the prime-time television character who is too busy, too gutsy and too existential to worry about how to strike a perfect balance between her waitressing obligations and her housecleaning ones. After all, the problem of these Harvard women could simply be the yuppie, baby-boomer hubris that says this generation of upscale Americans is going to make easy what their parents found hard. Or it could be just plain Harvard hubris. "In the Harvard community," says Suzanne Braun Levine, a Radcliffe graduate and editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, "there is such a historic sense of people with a need to overachieve and with a streak of self-criticism. A lot of people feel that they didn't achieve everything they could."

The survey is selective in another way: only 55% of the Harvard women approached -- 902 out of 1,644 -- agreed to return the questionnaire. Still, the anecdotal evidence gathered in 902 personal interviews with women mostly between the ages of 32 and 45 suggests that Hillary Rodham Clinton's peers often face punishment on the job for daring to get pregnant, taking a few weeks of maternity leave and shortening their workweek. Swiss and Walker call it "the maternal wall."

The authors cite the examples of a woman whose clients were reassigned to others only because she announced she was having a baby and another who was told by a male mentor, "Take my advice. Don't take your whole maternity leave. Not if you want to keep your job." Several women had their babies on Friday and returned to work on Monday for fear their standing at work would be jeopardized. One lawyer who took four months off was greeted upon her return with a monthly billing report highlighting a $40,000 loss in income because of her absence. An obstetrician said she was asked to be assistant chief of her hospital department, but the offer was withdrawn when she announced she was pregnant.

One high-tech computer executive overheard her boss ask the training department why it was sending her to a conference when "she won't want to come back to us when the baby is born." When she did return to work after a three-week maternity leave, her boss asked, "Why aren't you going after that new job in that department? Has your ambition gone away now that you have two children?"

In part because of such insults, some of the women surveyed said they had learned to disguise the hundreds of tiny ways they attempt to accommodate the demands of home and office. "I sometimes lie about where I am when my babysitter is off," says one M.B.A. A Boston attorney admits, "My son has been sent to school with a slight temperature because there was no other solution . . . I have gone to work sick to save sick days for when my son is sick."

These experiences have left some of the women surveyed with a sense of fatalism about their choices. A law partner who put in 350 work hours during her three-month maternity leave is convinced that her time off diminished her chances of advancement; but the advice she gives, echoed by a majority of women in the survey, is, "Do not defer your personal life. Men don't, and you shouldn't. You will be discriminated against as a woman whether or not you have a personal life." An unmarried Boston law partner offers another practical tip: "Have your children at one job and your career at another."

Many of the women reacted at one extreme or the other when the subject of their husbands came up. Says Swiss: "They either talked about how their marriages were in distress because their husbands didn't help them at home, or how support from their husbands was absolutely critical since they received so little in the office."

At the latter extreme, there was the occasional tale of a real-life partnership, like that of Sharon and Paul Tisher. She's a lawyer and works four days a week; he's a psychiatrist and works three. They have no nanny, and they each assume the child-care and household duties on the days they are at home. "In the beginning, when I first found myself with a six-month-old baby, it was frightening," Paul says. But he also argues that his apprenticeship was possible only because his wife was willing to relinquish her power in the . home. "It's something a man really can't do when a wife is at home," he says. "You have to be thrown into the deep end."

With this and the rest of the survey in mind, perhaps it is time to rethink Take Our Daughters to Work Day: it may make more sense to let sons follow their mothers to work and witness their treatment, while daughters and fathers stay at home for the day to reinvent the politics of parenthood.

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York