WSTRESS AND THE WORKING WOMAN: THE BENEFITS OF WORKING
Hard as it may be to believe, despite all the stresses associated with working its benefits are enormous. An important antidote to the Female Stress Syndrome is the kind of support system most work environments offer—the network of co-workers. This support system serves many functions on many levels.
Working can provide social contacts and a sense of belonging. Spending almost half your waking life during the week with any group of people is bound to facilitate ties. Spending it sharing goals, hard work, anxieties, and victories can make for very strong ties. Sometimes lifelong friends are made at work. Sometimes the friendships are unique to the work place. Either way, the relationships can be valuable and supportive. Either way, you are part of a team: a department, a company, an industry, or a profession. A fundamental need for belonging is to some degree filled.
Working can provide different points of view. There is never one reality or one view of reality. Talking about problems with your work network can broaden your perspective on any topic. It can help you understand another's behavior in a less personalized way. It can help you reinterpret last night's domestic fight or this morning's news bulletin. It can bring you into conversation with men and women from other backgrounds, generations, and businesses. It can exasperate you and fascinate you and help to make your thinking more flexible.
Working can provide humor. Heard any good jokes lately? If so, and if you work, you probably heard them at the office. Office jokes travel by word of mouth, by phone, and even by photocopies. Cartoons are posted. Gags are pulled. Office war-stories and office histories are shared. Tense tales become comedies in the retelling, and looking at the light side is an important fringe benefit of the working life.
Working can provide resources. Your workmates may have ideas, information, and know-how that you do not, and vice versa. Pooling resources, in fact, has become almost a ritual in many work situations involving women. Sometimes the aim is career information and opportunities; sometimes more personal needs are met. Either way, the more information and knowledge you can gather, the more control you will have. And the more control, the less stress!
Working can provide confidants. Who understands your work frustrations and elations better than someone who is also on the job? Who would be safer to talk to about family problems than someone who is not in the family? In both cases, a workmate can be a valuable ally. Have you noticed that it is sometimes easier to unburden yourself to a semistranger about a personal sorrow than it is to those close to you?
Working can provide cushioning and escape valves for anger. This can work in two different ways. First, work can provide an opportunity to use constructively the adrenaline generated by anger. You can tear into your work, instead of into your mother-in-law. You can beat a deadline instead of a dead issue. You can argue for a proposal, instead of arguing against your husband. You can leave your desk phone instead of your boyfriend.
Second, anger that feels inappropriate at home may be entirely legitimate at the office. You may not feel it is constructive to get angry at a spouse or child for performing poorly, but you can do so constructively and systematically at the office, where grievance and evaluation procedures are formalized.
Working can provide sympathy. The communal expressions of sympathy for sorrow that you get from the office are a unique source of support. Your workmates are a semipublic group, wider than your family yet not as impersonal as strangers or polite neighbors. The larger the group, furthermore, the more likely that you will find others who have experienced the same sorrow. You can see why retirement means far more than separation from work. It means separation from a network, as well.
Working can provide adult conversation and intellectual stimulation. Do you spend most of your time talking with children? Do you spend most of your day hearing Sesame Street and Mister Rogers educating infants? Do you consider the verbal exchange at the gas station the most adult conversation of your day? Then you will understand how important this aspect of working is. Many women take part-time jobs or volunteer their work just to spend at least part of their day with other adults. For most women, who work because they must work, intellectual stimulation is not the aim, but it is always an important fringe benefit.
Working can provide a source of praise and reassurance. Too often, good or extra work at home is taken for granted or goes unnoticed altogether. Although this is possible on the job too, more often you will be told if your work is good. Promotions and paychecks are tangible proof of performance. Even women who enjoyed being homemakers for its own sake are thrilled with their enhanced sense of worth when they return to work in their later years. They enjoy feeling that they can contribute to the family in a financial way. They enjoy the power that accompanies any position. They enjoy putting their many skills on public display.
Working can provide objective feedback. Your own family, appreciative or otherwise, can't really be considered objective. In the work place, you and your work are evaluated often, by many people who have no interest in you other than how effectively you are doing your job. You can base further actions and decisions on impartial data, which increases your sense of identity and control. A great stress reliever!
In the past, the extended family helped to prevent stress buildup by serving all these functions. Now, in a way, we must each create our own extended "families," our networks, our support systems. Whether you work outside the home or not, think about each of the ten network functions mentioned. Are there some that you're not getting through your work, friends, or family associations? If so, actively seek people to add to your support system who can help provide what you need. The quality of your life may depend on it.
The benefits of working go far beyond networking. Entering the marketplace with your skills means negotiating a price tag for your work. For most women, an increase in salary or commission means an increase in self-esteem. A paycheck is a tangible statement of work, a source of pride and some degree of independence.
Raised in an era when girls were taught "you are who you marry," women in their forties and fifties often find that working at a career or profession helps them reaffirm their identity. Women at workshops tell me that working outside the home finally provides them with an answer to that perennial cocktail-party question, "And what do you do?" Many women choose to work as homemakers for many years, then move on to their next commitment. Many others have not yet married or have decided not to marry. For these women, work is even more primary to their identity. For still other women, work and love (with or without marriage) are equally vital. The key is to know yourself and what you want; to be aware of both the problems and the benefits inherent in your choice; and to seek to reduce the stresses in the ways suggested here, as well as in any other ways that work for you.
