The Re-Entry Problem

Frances Loughran was restless. At 42 she had everything that many women desire: a devoted husband, eight dutiful children and a 13-room house in the leafy suburb of Pelham Manor, N.Y. She also had a master's degree in psychology and a lively intelligence that was not being challenged by her activities as church volunteer worker and Cub Scout den mother. "When my youngest child was five and could cross the street alone, I saw the handwriting on the wall," she recalls. "I knew I had to do something."

So she got a job. At first it was a boring round of house-to-house opinion-research interviews. But eventually she was hired by an educational testing service to run psychological tests for elementary school pupils. "I'm a new person," she says.

Frances Loughran's experience is shared by a growing number of women in their 30s and 40s. After working full-time for years raising children, they are put on part-time status as a mother and later laid off completely.

Partly as a result, half of all women with school-age children have taken jobs. Displaced mothers are one of the fastest-growing components of the nation's work force. The question that more and more such women are asking is "How do I find a job?'"

Younger women have it easier. Those under 30 increasingly look upon childbearing as a temporary leave of absence from the work force; they have often prepared for quick re-entry by choosing and studying for a career while still in college and keeping up with their fields after marriage. The older generation, however, was brought up to believe that motherhood was in itself a satisfactory career goal. Today, when they try to enter the labor market at mid-life after a decade or two of absence--or after never having worked at all--they find that employers consider them qualified for only the lowest jobs. The skills and knowledge that they acquired in college or in a few years of work before marriage have become obsolete. Among college-educated women, the problem is particularly difficult for female liberal arts graduates (sometimes known as FLAGS), who often have little in the way of easily marketable skills. After years of confident supremacy in the kitchen, they find themselves in a new and often hostile world, like a nun who has recently left the convent.

To help women with re-entry problems, several books have recently appeared with titles such as Have You Had It in the Kitchen? (Grosset & Dunlap) and The Back to Work Handbook for Housewives (Collier Books). This spring Simon & Schuster will publish one with a title that tells it all: How to Go to Work When Your Husband Is Against It, Your Children Aren't Old Enough and There's Nothing You Can Do Anyhow.

False Teeth. Scores of private organizations are focusing their efforts on employment counseling for women over 30. Chicago-based Altrusa, a kind of female Rotary Club, offers grants of up to $350 each to help women acquire new job skills and buy typewriters, stenotype machines or hair dryers to start their own small businesses. Sometimes the club even buys hearing aids and false teeth for older women so that they will be at their best in job interviews. Washington Opportunities for Women has helped 10,000 capital-area women return to work since 1965.

Manhattan-based Catalyst counsels educated women in their 30s and older and lobbies with employers to hire more women part-time. In one program. Catalyst officers persuaded the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare to hire 50 women as part-time caseworkers. The department discovered that the women accomplished nearly as much as the full-time caseworkers. Because the part-timers worked only five hours a day, they could keep up a level of effort and energy that full-time caseworkers found hard to sustain for eight hours. In addition, the turnover rate among the part-timers was only one-third that of their full-time colleagues.

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