An Advocate for the Family

"Q&A" with Professor Ann Bookman

By Jack O'Connell '81

Professor Ann Bookman, director of the College's Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies, is one of the nation's leading experts on family and work issues. From 1993 through 1996, she served as policy and research director of the Women's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor. From 1995 through 1996, she was executive director of Congress's bipartisan Commission on Leave. Bookman is acknowledged as an authority on the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The FMLA requires employers with 50 employees or more to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave a year to eligible employees to care for a newborn, newly adopted or foster child, or a child, spouse or parent with a serious health condition. Bookman recently discussed the FMLA and various other family and labor issues with Jack O'Connell. 

Q: How did you get started working on family issues?  
A: I was trained as a social anthropologist. I did my graduate work at Harvard as a student of John and Beatrice Whiting, authors of the book, Children of Six Cultures. They are really pioneers in the field of cross-cultural child development. I started out doing fieldwork with the Whitings in the western part of Kenya. I lived with a tribe called the Luo, in a polygenous family compound with two wives and one husband and a number of children. And as I looked at mother-child interaction in the Luo household, I began to see a couple of interesting things. One was that the mothers were not spending a tremendous amount of time with young children and other children of seven, eight, nine, and 10 years of age were taking care of infants and toddlers. There was actually a word in the Luo language for child-nurse. So a lot of the childcare was actually being done by other children. Another thing that I noticed early on was that the women who were still subsistence agriculturists-that is that they were working in nearby fields cultivating crops and harvesting crops-were spending a lot more time with their children than women who had recently become market women, which was a fairly new phenomenon when I was there in the 1970s.

Q: How long did you stay in Kenya?  
A: I was there about six months. I was a graduate student and this was research that I was doing for my master's thesis. I began to notice that depending on whether a woman was still doing subsistence agriculture or whether she was involved with the cash economy had tremendous impact on how much time she had with her children and the quality of their interaction. This signaled to me that I really couldn't look at mother-child interaction and attachment-which is the very big issue in child development-without understanding a lot more about women's work roles. I got increasingly interested in trying to understand the lives of the market women as well as the women who stayed working in their fields and homesteads-sort of our version of the working woman and the stay-at-home mom.  

Q: So you were really a pioneer in this area?  
A: I started doing research on work and family issues in the 1970s. I was very interested in work schedules and what kinds of jobs women had and how that impacted family life, looking at relationships between parents and their children, and dynamics and decision-making within marriage. One of the things I found was that the marital decision-making process became much more of a shared enterprise in the marriages where the women had a connection with the market. Over time, I began to look more closely at women's work roles and at how family life was impacted by the structure of the workplace.  

Eventually I did my dissertation research, not in Africa, but in the United States. I brought some of my research questions from post-colonial Africa back to our own culture and studied recent immigrant women workers in the United States. I wanted to understand what the life of an immigrant working mother was like so I got a job for two years as a coil winder at an electronic assembly plant with a very low-paid multi-ethnic workforce. Through some of my work in the electronics industry with working mothers, I became more and more interested in issues of women in the workplace. After I finished my dissertation, I was so fascinated by the challenges of workplace transformation that I made a non-traditional career choice to keep working on these issues. I got a job as a machinist at a large corporation and was very involved in helping organize a Women's Committee in the union there. This was a large industrial workplace that had very few women and very few minorities at the time. The management was used to dealing with white men. The whole idea of accommodating women that had significant family responsibilities was just completely foreign to them. The idea of building a women's committee was really a new idea to both the union and management. We started doing things like surveys of childcare needs and looking at issues of what was then called "maternity leave." And, in fact, I was one of the first women at the company to take a maternity leave when my first child was born in the early '80s.  

Q: How did you get involved with the FMLA Commission?  
A: I came back to the academy in the mid-1980s and was teaching and doing research on work and family issues. In 1986, I was an appointee on a gubernatorial commission that Gov. Dukakis had set up on parental leave. We introduced legislation that established the right for mothers and fathers to be home with children after they were born or adopted. We also realized there was a need to provide some sort of wage replacement and so the governor set up a second commission, which I also served on, to look into the possibility of using the temporary disability insurance system to do that. Ultimately, we weren't successful and the bills we proposed to the Massachusetts State Legislature were defeated. I learned a lot about the difficulties of creating these kinds of public policies when I testified at hearings on Beacon Hill. What happens at a lot of these hearings is that you get mothers and fathers and people with responsibility for young children and for elderly relatives and sick relatives who come before their elected officials with these unbelievably heart-wrenching stories. Then you get the employers who come, particularly small businesspeople, and they say, "We just can't do this. I can't afford to do this." You see a deep conflict that seems almost irresolvable. That was my first encounter with the debates surrounding family leave issues.  

I came to Holy Cross in the early 1990s and was very happily settling into my new job at CISS. And, out of the blue, in the spring of 1993, I got a call inviting me to be a presidential appointee in the first term of the Clinton administration. I was asked specifically to become the Research and Policy Director of the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor. The Women's Bureau is a very old agency within the labor department. It was founded in 1920 and is the only place in the whole federal government where the issues of working women are particularly highlighted and given focused attention. While I was at the Women's Bureau I was asked to serve as executive director of a bipartisan commission set up by Congress to evaluate the first three years of the FMLA. Heading up the commission enabled me to get deeply involved in family policy issues.  

Q: What have been some of your policy goals?  
A: Part of what I have been involved in is trying to come up with public policies that really serve the interests of children and families and, at the same time, don't defeat our businesses. Nobody who is for families is against economic prosperity in the United States. We need policies that recognize how difficult it is to be both a worker and a parent. Many working parents I meet are saying, "I am so stretched. I am so incredibly tired." When I first went to the Women's Bureau I was asked to conduct a national survey of working women and we asked lots of questions about their pay and their benefits and their family lives and how they juggle everything. One of the things I remember scrawled in the margins of one of the questionnaires was from a woman who wrote I'm so tired I don't know if I have the time or energy to answer your questionnaire even though I feel these questions are so important.  

I think it is really important for both business people and public policy makers to understand the very precarious situation that we are putting young children in when we don't give families choices about how much time they spend with each other. I feel my work is about trying to give families real choices that respect diverse types of families and a diverse range of approaches to child rearing, and that also acknowledge the economic needs and pressures of businesses, especially small businesses. Putting the growth and development of young children first is the primary goal. If we do not begin, as a society, to do a better job of nurturing and educating our children, I think we will pay a heavy price in terms of the quality of the workforce and the vitality of our civic institutions in the 21st century.  

Q: The FMLA went before five Congresses, was subjected to 17 hearings, and was voted on 13 times before it became law. Did your experience with the Commission make you cynical about the process of legislating pro-family acts in general?  
A: No, I think not. You just have to keep your "eyes on the prize" and commit yourself to a long-term struggle. The FMLA was the first piece of legislation that President Clinton signed. I think that the length of the battle speaks to the depth of cultural contradictions in our society about the value of children and the value of care giving. We say that family is the most important thing-if you stop the man or woman on the street and ask "What's more important, your family or your job?", most people will say their family. Yet if you look at people's practice, if you look at the choices that people make, you find that people are putting much, much more time into trying to prove to their employers that they're loyal, that they're committed, that they're hard-working than they put into their families. And, given the attitudes of some employers and the threat of losing your job as many companies downsize, I think that's understandable. But, as a society, we really need to sit back and ask ourselves what we are doing when we ask a young mother or a young father to separate themselves from a newly adopted child or infant who is only three months old to recommit themselves to the workplace. Does this really make sense? I have to say, as somebody who began her training studying child development, that I feel strongly that child development literature speaks loud and clear about the need for infants and toddlers to have consistent nurturing contact with a primary caregiver. And I am not saying that I think that caregiver has to be the mother. I think that one of the great advances that we've made since the 1970s is the understanding the caregiver can be the mother, the father, the grandmother, the uncle. The critical thing is for every young child to have access to consistent high quality care-either at home or in a childcare center or in a family day care home. This is a need that leaves no room for compromise. Again, I think the key issue is giving families good choices, making it possible for parents to either stay home for a significant period of time or have access to quality, affordable childcare. Right now, most parents cannot afford to take unpaid leaves. The leaves are too short and there's not enough high quality childcare from well-trained providers. This is a key public policy challenge to private sector employees as well. The solution is going to take funds and creative thinking from multiple sectors. We really need a partnership between families, government, and employers to give children the kinds of environments they need to thrive and learn.  

Q: You've said that the FMLA should be looked at as a minimum standard in our country. How would you like to see the Act expanded? What more do you feel we should be doing for our families?  
A: There are three ways in which I think the FMLA should be expanded. First is the basic issue of access. Right now, only 55 percent of the workforce is covered by FMLA. That's not good enough. I think we should move toward universal access, and, in the meantime, we could at least drop the employer threshold to 25 employees or more. That would give another 13 million workers access. Second, I think we should expand the reasons for leave. It is not enough to support families just at times of crisis like a serious illness. We need to make it possible for families to be more involved in their children's education. For example, I support a bill called "The Time Out for School Act" that allows leave to attend parent-teacher conferences, etc. Eventually, I would like to see parents get leaves for community service to institutions that help them to raise their children and care for their elders. Third, I think we need paid leave. Right now, only middle class and affluent families with savings and assets can afford to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave. If we are serious about supporting families, and encouraging more fathers to get involved with kids, we need to pay people who are on leave. This is what every other industrialized country does. Why can't the richest country in the world do the same? I think an expanded FMLA would send a strong message to parents that caring for children and elders is important work that is valued by our society. This is the kind of message we need to build a vibrant, family-friendly culture in the United States.