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Maternal Leave: Setting a Research and Policy Agenda |
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For working mothers in this country, maternal leave from a job is not a new concern&emdash; women have been discussing it for a long time&emdash; but it wasn't until the 1990 presidential election that maternal (or parental) leave became a national issue and began to receive the attention it deserves. And because the American labor force contains 38 million women between the ages of sixteen and forty-four, that attention is not likely to diminish. At the forefront of research in this area is Professor Jacqueline Fawcett, an internationally acclaimed scholar in the field of nursing who joined UMass Boston's College of Nursing faculty in September.
As Fawcett points out, "a basic question in any discussion of maternal leave and child care is how long a leave is necessary or desirable." And this is a question, she says, "which cannot be answered without consideration of... how [maternal] recovery is defined and measured, and the...factors affecting recovery."
In collaboration with her colleague Lorraine Tulman, Fawcett, who comes to UMass Boston from the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying these factors since the mid-1980s. Their research notes that childbirth was to be regarded as a "temporary disability" according to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, but that the act did not delineate a specific period of disability. A six-week leave became the norm, Fawcett asserts, dictated by "medical tradition...based on the healing of the reproductive organs rather than on a broader, more health-oriented definition of recovery." Her hope was to craft just such a broad definition, one that would include not only physical healing, but also the readiness to resume customary activities and to take on the new responsibilities of child care. In order to help establish policies that would take this broader definition into account, Fawcett and Tulman undertook to determine just how long recovery requires and what factors are related to it.
The two scholars' findings, published in a 1992 study, indicated that, for many women, though "physiological recovery" from childbirth is usually complete after six weeks, recovery as measured by being able to resume the "performance of usual activities" may take up to 6 months. Nevertheless, 62% (31 out 50) of the women in their study had returned to work by that time. Most returned either because their allotted leave was up or because they needed money. The data in the study suggested that women who return to work part time tended to recover more quickly than those who went immediately back to full-time work.
These findings had clear implications for policy. The data clearly supported several recommendations:
* Minimum leave should last 6 months and perhaps longer in certain cases,
* It should be a paid leave,
* And it should include the option of returning to work on a part-time basis, or before the allotted six months.
"Ultimately," Fawcett concluded in the findings, "the length of leave will be based on political compromise as well as research data." This observation turned out to be prescient when on August 23, 1993, President Clinton signed into law the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)-the first bill he signed as President. The FMLA guarantees that people who work for companies having more than 50 employees can take up to 12 weeks' unpaid leave a year to care for a newborn. Thus it has given millions of working women, and men, the time to care for new babies without fear of losing their jobs or their health insurance. So while the bill didn't embrace all of the research findings generated by the empirical research, it did double the traditional six-week figure and guaranteed the right to this leave without loss of employment or benefits.
Clearly, there is an ongoing and critical need for the research community to establish and maintain links with policy makers so that policy can be informed by research findings in a timely way. Fawcett and her colleague are currently preparing to publish the results of a study of more than 225 women whom they followed throughout pregnancy and for six months after birth to track changes in their activities and the factors associated with the changes. Fawcett expects to continue contributing to this important body of knowledge. Her current plans include the expansion of the research focus to include both childbearing women and their partners.