Blair-LoyMary. Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives (Harvard University Press, 2003). Argues for a cultural, less materialist, understanding of contemporary work-family conflict among high-achieving working women.
2.
HaysSharon. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (Yale University Press, 1995). Describes the historical emergence and contemporary internalization of motherhood norms that are at odds with the realities of women's changing lives, with powerful theorizing as to why.
3.
HochschildArlie. The Second Shift (Viking, 1989). Still the defining classic of the work-family field, identifying in women's work at home another problem that had no name.
4.
JacobsJerry A.GersonKathleen. The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2004). Makes the case for time as the newly emerging basis of gender and class inequality, with lots of hard-to-find facts and good policy prescriptions.
5.
MoenPhyllisRoehlingPatricia. The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). A masterful exploration of the creation, maintenance, and consequences of the high-demand, all-consuming workplace, whose title consciously echoes Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.
