Felice N Schwartz

Here are some excerpts from "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," an essay written by Felice N. Schwartz for the Harvard Business Review. Career-primary women, those who put careers above all else, must "remain single or at least childless" or be satisfied to have others raise their children. "Some 90% of executive men but only 35% of executive women have children by the age of 40."

Considering that a typical woman makes 66 cents to a man's dollar and that the inequity exists despite Felice N. Schwartz's 31-year effort to erase it, the author is in pretty good spirits. Schwartz, 68, is making her farewell trip to Southern California, lecturing this week at Fluor Corp., Unocal Corp., Avery Dennison Corp., Times Mirror Co. and other corporations.

Considering that a typical woman makes 66 cents to a man's dollar and that the inequity exists despite Felice N. Schwartz's 31-year effort to erase it, the author is in pretty good spirits. Schwartz, 68, is making her farewell trip to Southern California, lecturing this week at Fluor Corp., Unocal Corp., Avery Dennison Corp., Times Mirror Co. and other corporations.

After nearly three decades of bushwhacking trails for women in the male-dominated workplace, Felice N. Schwartz has spent much of the past year fighting accusations she is a traitor. She hasn't capitulated. On the contrary, the dispute with some influential feminists seems to have sharpened. Schwartz is the founder of a prominent corporate consulting firm in Manhattan called Catalyst, which promotes sexual equality at work and which was spawned during the feminist movement of the early 1960s.

A coalition of 44 national women's groups Wednesday denounced a controversial Harvard Business Review article that advocated the idea that career women with children should be treated differently by employers than their childless counterparts, calling it a "Mommy Trap" instead of a "Mommy Track."

After nearly three decades of bushwhacking trails for women in the male-dominated workplace, Felice N. Schwartz has spent much of the past year fighting accusations she is a traitor. She hasn't capitulated. On the contrary, the dispute with some influential feminists seems to have sharpened. Schwartz is the founder of a prominent corporate consulting firm in Manhattan called Catalyst, which promotes sexual equality at work and which was spawned during the feminist movement of the early 1960s.

Felice N. Schwartz, a veteran of the working womens' battlefield, quietly published an essay, "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," in the Harvard Business Review in the first week in January. For two months, "I had a great many letters from men and women in the corporate community, really enormously positive," she recalled. "They said this is a turning point . . . It's going to open a whole new era." Then on March 8, her work received its first media attention in the New York Times.

Regarding the March 19 Viewpoints roundup, "Women at Work: A New Debate is Born--The 'Mommy Track' Has Authorities Arguing About Women's Roles": In the column, Richard Lewis, chairman of Corporate Annual Reports, said, "If you have some (women) who are identified as not going to drop out (of the work force to have children), you can give them more responsibility and training and keep them going up. It is a positive if you can identify those few that will go straight up." This attitude points out the fundamental problem and danger of the approach by Felice N. Schwartz (author of the Harvard Business Review article that triggered the debate over the proposed "mommy track" for some women in the work force)

For a few years back in the '60s, we had a maid. Eloise drove her black Oldsmobile to our house every day. She cleaned, looked after the kids when we came home from school and prepared dinner while our parents worked at their clothing store. Once in a while, Eloise would bring her son to our house. He was my age, or a little younger. We played together, but we didn't talk much. I'm not sure if I wondered, back then, who took care of Eloise's son while she was taking care of us. It would have been--and is--a good question.

It is disturbing to see the attention being paid to the "mommy track," the catch phrase for the career route of working mothers described in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. The catch phrase was never used by the article's author, consultant Felice N. Schwartz, but her discussion of "career-primary women" and "career-and-family women" does reinforce gender stereotyping.

A coalition of 44 national women's groups Wednesday denounced a controversial Harvard Business Review article that advocated the idea that career women with children should be treated differently by employers than their childless counterparts, calling it a "Mommy Trap" instead of a "Mommy Track."

Felice N. Schwartz, a veteran of the working womens' battlefield, quietly published an essay, "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," in the Harvard Business Review in the first week in January. For two months, "I had a great many letters from men and women in the corporate community, really enormously positive," she recalled. "They said this is a turning point . . . It's going to open a whole new era." Then on March 8, her work received its first media attention in the New York Times.

Here are some excerpts from "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," an essay written by Felice N. Schwartz for the Harvard Business Review. Career-primary women, those who put careers above all else, must "remain single or at least childless" or be satisfied to have others raise their children. "Some 90% of executive men but only 35% of executive women have children by the age of 40."

Florence Wald has watched enough terminally ill patients die during her nursing career to know that people choose strikingly varied ways in which to spend the end of their lives. "Some would not want to give up any kind of therapy that still could have the possibility of cure," she said. "But what happens now is patients who don't want to go through those treatments anymore have an alternative." Wald, 81, introduced America to the hospice tradition, with the 1974 opening in New Haven, Conn.

The glass ceiling--the term often used to describe the barrier that blocks women from top management--is nothing new to accountants Joan Deniken and Dolores Lara. They have experienced a few barriers of their own. But, numbers are their stock in trade, and they decided to try to quantify just how bad the problem is in Orange County.