A Fight for Her Time: Challenges Facing Mothers who Work in Hospital Medicine

Abstract

Early studies on time and time use focus on the relationship of time to work, and how economic pressures shape people’s responses to time, a well-worn maxim being ‘time is money’ (Moore, 1963; Blyton, 1985). More recently, Adam’s innovative work on the issue of time has highlighted the multiplicities of time that make up our daily lives. Adam (1989, 1995, 1996) argues that in social science analyses it is necessary to understand time in all its multiplicities; personally we are not aware of time as being one-dimensional. For example, when a woman’s working day is over her roles may change from that of worker to being a mother, a friend or someone following a hobby. However, at all times we are all those people; it is just that we become them at differing times, potentially with different people and in various locations. Women are part of the general economic life through their attachment to the labour force; however, the types of dependent-related activities that women carry out ‘are not so much time measured, paid, spent, allocated and controlled as time lived, given and generated’ (Adam, 1996: 157). Adam has developed a concept of ‘timing’, that there is a good or bad time for action which is temporally located in the personal and social history of a person. The ability to ‘time’ appropriately means that control over life-course decisions and their consequences is retained. For many women, however, an increasing level of dependants’ demands over the life-course undermines their ability to retain control.