Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

by Brigid Schulte

The premise is simple. Today’s workplace thinks and operates much as it did in the 1950s, when people expected the world to be neatly divided into two separate and unequal worlds: the man in the gray flannel suit who could devote himself entirely to work in one, and, in the other, his homemaker wife, taking care of everything and everyone else. But the worlds of work and caregiving have collided. The lawsuits show the workplace is harshest on those who try to live in both worlds at the same time. “Look, if you design work around someone who starts to work in early adulthood and works full force for forty years straight, who have you just described? Men,” Joan Williams, the legal scholar who helped shape the new theory, told me. “We have organized the workplace around men’s bodies and men’s traditional life pattern. That’s sex discrimination.”