Career Track Creating Inner Conflict With Private Life

“When Work Doesn’t Work Anymore” By Elizabeth Perle McKenna (Delacorte Press, $23.95, 304 pp.)

Disillusioned June Cleavers told their daughters to be successful in the work world but showed them how to be successful in the home. You have opportunities I didn’t, they urged as the women’s movement gained momentum. Take them. Succeed. Don’t be forced to depend on a man as I have. Succeed. Your life will be better.

Of course, our fathers were too busy working to tell us their side of the story. So we learned from their examples and absences that work was all-engrossing, all-encompassing, all-defining.

And so the daughters ventured into the corporate world, full of vigor and determination, their destinies propelled by 60-hour work weeks. When the biological clocks sounded their alarm of time awasting, high-powered career women realized they had no life beyond work. That they had invested heavily in the office, and the dividends of personal satisfaction weren’t coming in. That things were out of whack.

This is the conflict between public and private, outer and inner, that Elizabeth Perle McKenna writes about, using her own experiences as a star in publishing for the narrative. Thankfully, hers is not another memoir of a frantic working mother who sees the light and checks out. That would be too easy. Instead, it’s a thoughtful, tormented journey of identity as McKenna relates her decision to leave a prestigious job and redefine success.

Research and insights from other reformed workaholics buttress her point: that we can’t have it all. When we try, as McKenna did, stress and disillusionment with the maledominated corporate world throw our lives inexorably out of balance. We are held hostage by the very thing that was to have freed us. “The search for independence actually lands us in the same power relationship with work that we sought to escape through it,” she writes.

Readers with a low threshold for whining will find McKenna’s approach refreshing. The strength of this book lies not only in its powerful exploration of identity, but in its telling. The writing is engaging, insightful and sprinkled with accessible imagery: “The silence, the petty politics, the macho work habits are the cockroaches of the workplace - they are very, very hard to kill.”

What sets McKenna’s book apart is its strong indictment of the way corporate culture works, not the way women work. Besides lacking humanity, business operates with an obsolete view of the world, she writes - one ruled exclusively by men with homemaker wives supporting them and their careers. Every woman who works - whether she has children (McKenna has a toddler daughter), a husband or only herself to care for - will find resonance here.