Not Guilty!: The Good News about Working Mothers

Holcomb does a compelling job of weaving statistics, history, and anecdotes to present a clear picture of the many creative ways women deal with kids and work. Her chapter 10 on women's paychecks is a real eye opener. I don't think women realize how much they co-opt themselves regarding their worth. It is a book to make your blood boil and give you hope. I know, I am a single mom.

I am a man with a capital M and I liked the book. Holcomb has balls for laying it all on the table. In this day of Lewinskis and Wonder Bras, it is good to know that feminists aren't hiding.

This book is tight from start to finish. The research isthorough, the conclusions sound, the insights fresh, and the writingprecise. When I first picked up the book I was tempted to read the chapters out of order and, in fact, I did. I jumped right into chapters five and six about pregnancy discrimination and workplace hostility toward mothers with young children. With stories from working mothers, attorneys and court records, Holcomb shows that "women face a fierce and persistent prejudice once they become mothers." These chapters resonated with me, so I decided to start at the beginning and work my way through. What I found was that each chapter reinforces the arguments of the previous chapter and establishes the foundation for the next. While the fourteen chapters draw on many of the same sources to make their points, the book does not feel at all repetitive. As I reached the final chapters I found myself likening Holcomb's approach to the work of a gemologist. After putting the cut gem under the bright light, the gemologist slowly turns it around, examining each facet to learn as much as possible about the condition, history and value of the stone. In the same way, Holcomb considers the working mother, looking at the political, economic and social aspects of her life in order to speak with both authority and compassion about the guilt that working mothers need not feel. As I put the book down, sorry that I had come to the end, I felt there was one more chapter Holcomb could have written. This generation of women is restructuring the workplace, not by moving up the corporate ladder but by kicking it away and rock climbing! Many women, fed up with the slow pace of change in corporations, have confidently ventured out on their own. The National Foundation for Women Business Owners reports that the number of women-owned firms rose by 78 percent between 1987 and 1996, twice the pace of overall business growth. Employment by and revenues from women-owned firms have risen dramatically in the last decade. In 1996, women owned 36 percent of all U.S. businesses. This is also good news about working mothers and needs to be part of the larger analysis.