Working part-time is an appealing alternative for Phyllis, but even if her employer agreed, she and Jerry feel they couldn't afford to sacrifice her income. Joan Breibart, 44, mother of two sons, 7 and 4, shares many of Phyllis's conflicts but has never considered working part-time. Money isn't a problem. Her husband, Doug Bittenbender, 44, is a successful businessman whose income would be enough to support the family.

"To me, working—paying half the bills—is part of my obligation in this marriage," explains Joan. Until recently, she was an executive in a company that runs hair salons, and now she's a consultant to health clubs. "This is a city built around work," adds Joan. "Your whole identity is tied up in it."

Joan gets satisfaction from what she does, and her family lives comfortably in a sprawling apartment overlooking the Hudson. They keep their BMW parked in a nearby garage and drive on weekends to their country home in the Berkshires. Both of the boys attend private schools, and the family has a live-in housekeeper. But even with all this, Joan finds there is much that she gives up.

"It's a treadmill," she says. "Marriage becomes all business, no romance. The only thing you talk about is who's going to pick up the child, who's going to call to get the refrigerator fixed, who's going to make the dentist appointment. At one point, during a very tense period, I realized I hadn't really talked to my husband in two months. We ended up taking a hotel room for two nights, just so we could be alone. I know it's taken a tremendous toll, that the quality of time with the children isn't as good as it should be. But you can't stop, because that would be worse; you'd never be able to catch up. In my mind, I should be able to do it all, so I try. You don't have time to think about the whys."

Indeed, too much introspection can be fatal. "I find that the mothers who feel ambivalent about working versus staying home are deteriorating rapidly," says Susan Weissman, executive director of Park Center for Pre-Schoolers, which operates three private day-care centers in Manhattan. "The parents who do best are those who have a very positive outlook on working, which they impart to their kids. But they also have to become super-organized. Most have a system—putting out clothes at night, a ritual for bedtime, a plan for everything that never varies. If it did, there'd be chaos."

The head of another Manhattan day-care center takes a sharper view. "Many of these parents become robots," says this observer, who requested anonymity. "They bring their kids to school at 8 A.M. and return at 6 P.M. schlepping boxes of diapers. I don't know how they do it, but I understand why they don't get too reflective. They're scared of what they'd find: 'I have these kids, but I hardly see them. I have this job I work very hard at, but what does it really mean? I manage to get it all done, but I never stop running.' Those are scary thoughts."

The scariest thought for many is change. "We're talking about the need for people to make realistic choices," says Felice N. Schwartz, president of Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that works to encourage flexible approaches to career and family. "The problem is that people haven't yet absorbed the necessity for trade-offs," she says. "It's not realistic for women—or for men—to think that they can pursue high-level careers and be primary players in their children's lives and have time for their spouses and themselves and play a role in their communities."

In the past, of course, roles in marriages were more clearly separated—and no one was expected to do it all. At its annual award dinner, in March, for example, Catalyst honored four women who'd excelled in corporations. The male chief executives of the companies—who handed out the awards—had fourteen children among them, each raised by a wife who stayed at home. Among the four women honored, only one was married, and only one had a child. "The explanation is simple," says Schwartz. "These women didn't have wives at home to raise their children. They sacrificed family to have their careers."

The opposite choice is being made by an increasing number of women who spent the past ten or fifteen years building careers—but now find their priorities shifting. Prompted by an unexpectedly powerful desire to spend more time with their children, more and more women who can afford to—and who can convince their employers to go along—are cutting back.

At the Park Center on West 86th Street, for example, nearly all of the sixteen mothers of this year's class for four-year-olds worked full-time before their children were born—and returned to their jobs after brief maternity leaves. Today, fewer than half of these mothers still have full-time jobs. Of the mothers of children at the Park Center on West 82nd Street, 25 percent work part-time. In turn, their children now attend part-time.

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Tony Schwartz
• From the Jul 15, 1985 issue of New York