Working Women and the American Economy
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In today's economy American women must work and, in order to ensure the well-being of the country's children, large companies and government must provide childcare (and, sometimes, elder-care) programs to allow working parents to perform their jobs without being forced to neglect their family responsibilities. In the United States today 60 percent of all women and 75 percent of all men are in the workforce. This is a change in the society that has taken place over the last 30 years. Many women no longer have the choice of remaining at home until their children have grown and so parents are forced to find child-care options. Daycare for pre-school children, after-school services for older children, summer programs for older children, and care for elderly dependents of working men and women are often very expensive, good programs are rare, and, in many cases, they simply do not exist. Young children's development can be harmed by poor care, children who are left on their own are more likely to get into trouble, and the economic and emotional pressures on parents have many adverse effects on worker productivity and health and on family life. Some social conservatives claim that the rise in the number of working mothers in America is the result of feminist ideology that supposedly promotes "a utopianism that envisions a cost-free end to all the encumbrances and limitations of domestic life" (Adelson 54). But while the rise in the number of middle- and upper-middle class m
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ideo games. The lack of sufficient individualized attention in young children and the lack of supervision in older children may eventually have very serious effects as the great majority of American children spend some or all of their youth in the care of programs that do not take these factors into account. The programs that are needed, therefore, are those that allow maximum interaction with trained, caring childcare workers, educational components along the lines of Head Start programs, and, for older children, a range of activities that involve physical and mental activity--thus providing for both play and schoolwork needs.
Elderly dependents of working Americans constitute another growing social problem and many Americans may soon find themselves moving from child-care problems to difficulty in providing for the needs of dependent or semi-dependent elderly relatives. In the 1990s over 5 million Americans over the age of 65 were "chronically disabled and living in private households" and more than a quarter of this group "had difficulties with tasks like shopping and household chores" while many more had more severe difficulties and "needed help with personal-care activities like eating, bathing, and dressing" (Mergenbage
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2632
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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