For many women who work, the workplace no longer offers the satisfaction and challenge it once did. Committed to careers they frequently have spent years building -- careers that generally go to the very core of their self-definitions -- these women find that they are becoming less fulfilled and more exhausted. Their lives are out of balance; a happy mix of personal and professional, spiritual and material eludes them. In an era that celebrates women "having it all" they are finding that they don't -- and, sadly, coming to the conclusion that they are somehow at fault. The fact is, there is nothing wrong with today's working women. There is something wrong with today's work culture. Immersed in a structure designed for a different generation of men who had wives at home to take care of life outside the office, today's working woman struggles to meet two opposing sets of demands and expectations -- professional and personal -- and two opposing equations for success -- as a feminine woman and as a valued worker. In truth, she can't win. The result of her attempts to do so is a crisis of values, not lifestyles: the question is not one of work vs. home, but, rather, what price are women paying to "fit in" with a culture that does not share their values or respond to their needs. Enter Elizabeth Perle McKenna. In her groundbreaking and timely new book When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work, and Identity, McKenna draws on interviews with hundreds of women--from housewives to CEOs to such familiar and respected women as Gloria Steinem, Anna Quindlen, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin--to illustrate the deep rift in the lives of many of today's working women, and the critical need for a new professional culture. McKenna shatters the myth of having it all, and shows that a life out of balance is never a path to success, but a profoundly dissatisfying route to unhappiness, self-doubt, and isolation. She knows from whence she speaks. McKenna spent eighteen years in the publishing profession, working her way up from the ground floor to the top of her field as associate publisher at Bantam and publisher at Prentice-Hall, Addison-Wesley, and William Morrow/Avon Books. At the height of her success, she realized her work wasn't working for her anymore. The cost of success to the rest of her life was steep. She was miserable. Feeling she had to make a choice between her life and her work, she left Morrow and, without her work identity, everything fell apart. Through her own and hundreds of other women's experience, McKenna shows that women "stopped the revolution too soon." They may have approached parity in the work world but they've stopped short of changing a culture utterly at odds with the realities of their lives. When Work Doesn't Work Anymore examines women's complex relationships with their work--both through their need and desire to work, and the cost to their lives of doing so--and urges them to bring their values of home and family, friendship, community, and meaning to the workplace. Wise and provocative, McKenna encourages women to reassess and change a work culture that has never fully embraced the way they live, to seek a balance between professional and private spheres, and to strive for more integrated lives by recognizing the importance of building lives around personal value systems. With wit, insight, and fierce intellect, Elizabeth Perle McKenna has written an enormously important book that will pave the way for transforming the workplace into one where women can lead more satisfying lives -- and be happier, more productive employees.

When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work and Identity

McKenna, Elizabeth Perle

Self-Help

DELACORTE PRESS

When Work Doesn't Work Anymore

For every worn out, emotionally depleted female professional who has ever sighed, "there has got to be a better way!", here is a groundbreaking audiobook by Elizabeth Perle McKenna--a former publishing executive--that explores women's relationship with work.For decades, women have succeeded at traditional male jobs, but now, deep in the second stage of the feminist movement, they want lives that are integrated and whole. Based on original research and containing hundreds of interviews with prominent working women, this audiobook exposes the inherent conflict between the way work is traditionally structured and rewarded, and what women desire and value in their lives. More important, it suggests new ways for women to identify their values, reclaim their identities, and define success on their own terms. Any woman who has been working for more than a few years will identify strongly with the issues raised here, and will be rewarded by the insights she will glean from this insightful work.

Business & Money

Random House Audio |

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Simon Schuster Ltd

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