Women’s Work and the Societal Discourse of Stress

Abstract

The concept of stress has become an important vehicle for explaining human dilemmas, at least in part because of the variety of social functions it performs. In the United States the contemporary discourse of stress and the metaphors associated with it pervade both academic and popular accounts of women’s stress, emphasizing the stressful nature of working motherhood. The social origins of the tensions in working mothers’ lives are obscured in the rush to help women calm down so that they can defend against assaults on their immune systems. I argue that the feminized, medicalized discourse of stress offers an ultimately unworkable resolution of societal tensions centering around work and family. By means of an aspirational rhetoric related to the achievement of ‘balance’ it reinforces the dominant culture’s historical attachment to the separate spheres, thereby reaffirming women’s natural place in the social order as nurturers and domestic laborers.