The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream. Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling

The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream. Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 2004. 289 pp. ISBN 0-7425-2861-8. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-7425-2862-6. $22.95 (paperback). Many have criticized the structure of jobs and careers, which require the degree of devotion incompatible with family responsibilities. In The Career Mystique, Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling extend this argument by approaching it from a gendered life course perspective. They argue that "the issue is not how employees can balance their personal lives with the demands of their jobs, but how the career mystique and the regime of policies and practices built up around it constrain women's and men's options at every stage of their lives" (p. 22). Whereas Betty Friedan developed the idea of the "feminine mystique" to problematize the fulfillment stemming from domestic life, Moen and Roehling develop the complementary concept of the "career mystique" to problematize the rewards of all-encompassing paid labor. They challenge the belief that long hours of hard work bring job security and upward mobility to either the majority of men or the majority of women. Nevertheless, as they show, this myth still shapes not only individuals' expectations and values but also governmental policies and corporate regulations, creating a "career regime" that is out of sync with the lives of contemporary workers. Moen and Roehling argue that the career mystique and feminine mystique have emerged in tandem as the two gendered components of the American Dream. When the feminist movement challenged the expectations of the feminine mystique, however, it failed to challenge the career mystique. Designed to coexist with the feminine mystique, career mystique now reigns supreme for both women and men, either ignoring the work of social reproduction that was glorified by feminine mystique or promoting an image of the "superwoman" who combines a career with being primarily responsible for childrearing and other unpaid work. As a result, career mystique both creates a care deficit and perpetuates the gender divide. Further, career mystique assumes a lockstep career progressing from full-time education to full-time employment to the full-time leisure of retirement. Even though such lockstep careers were always unattainable for a substantial part of the workforce, a large portion of employees in the 1950s did have them. As the job market changed and as more women climbed on the career mystique bandwagon, however, this American Dream increasingly became a myth for the majority of the labor force. On the one hand, job requirements remained essentially the same as they were when only men were expected to follow the career mystique: Individuals are still expected to work long hours and put their jobs and careers above all else. On the other hand, employment rewards have drastically changed: Even for White, middle-class men, their incomes are no longer sufficient to meet family needs and require dual earner arrangements; hard work and loyalty no longer guarantee job security; and the link between seniority and higher income is frequently disrupted by layoffs. Indeed, "the Faustian bargain of trading a lifetime of paid work for a lifetime of income security is probably gone forever" (p. 9). After the introductory chapter's discussion of the concept of career mystique, the book takes the reader through the gendered life course and uses a variety of quantitative and qualitative data to examine women's and men's experiences with jobs and families and to document the influence of career mystique on their lives. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the occupational aspirations of children and young women and men, demonstrating that they learn the myth of career success early in life. …