As a marketing executive, Lyn Flannery was unfazed about putting in 12-hour days. During her stints with Chicago-based companies Interaccess and Peapod, she was riding the technological tidal wave. By all accounts, it was an exciting and rewarding career.
The 1996 birth of her son, Drew, did not diminish her passion for the burgeoning technology industry, but it did curtail her ability to work around the clock.
“All my colleagues at high-tech start-ups worked crazy hours,” said Flannery, 33, who says that thanks to the Internet, she now works from home, three days a week. “I started to feel I was really missing out by not seeing my child enough. Looking back, I didn’t really get to know my first son until he was 2.”
Be it firing off an e-mail to distant colleagues or establishing a home-based dot-com, the Internet is changing the way many working mothers manage their work and home lives. While the decision used to be between staying at home to raise children or securing a day-care provider and heading back to the office, the lines between a professional career and motherhood are blurred in the virtual marketplace.
For female executives like Flannery, the Internet appears to combine a manageable way to balance work and home.
Bolstered by her desire to spend more time with her family, Flannery resigned in 1997 from her position as vice president of marketing and sales for Interaccess, an Internet service provider. Armed with an MBA from the University of Chicago and a decade of experience in the technology industry, Flannery, a Glenview resident, established a consulting firm from her home, carving out an office by placing a desk and computer in a corner of her bedroom.
“People were always coming up to me and asking about how to start their own Internet-based companies,” Flannery said. “I was giving out a lot of free advice, so I decided to turn it into a business.”
After three years of going it alone, in April she set aside her consulting business, accepting what she calls the perfect job offer–working three days a week from her home as a specialist in internal marketing planning for Diamond Technology Partners in Chicago, a management consulting firm.
Though she still needs day care for Drew, who is now 4, and his 9-month-old brother, Michael, so she can meet with with clients and co-workers at the office on occasion, she says her new schedule is nearly perfect.
“I was just telling my husband the other day, it is so nice to work at a tech company where I have made women friends,” Flannery said.
“It might sound corny, but the Internet changed my life, both personally and professionally,” adds Elisa Ast All, the president of Evanston-based iparenting.com. “When I started this company, I was a 27-year-old mother with no friends going through motherhood at the same time I was. The Internet opened up a whole new world of friendships with women with whom I could identify and share experiences.”
A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, All seized upon her background as a reporter and writer to develop an on-line, interactive publication aimed at
women yearning to learn more about pregnancy. All’s first Web site sparked several related sites, and she and her husband, Alvin All, decided to get serious about the fledgling business.
“My husband and I wanted to take the business to the next level, so we found investors and raised money. Now, we have our own office with 17 employees,” said All, the mother of three children under 4.
The on-line magazine Salon, based in the high-tech hotbed of San Francisco, recognized several years ago that the on-line world could be a boon for mothers.
Jennifer Foote Sweeney, a Salon editor, said the site’s popular “Mothers Who Think” section was launched in June 1997 because the editors were convinced that mothers were coming up empty-handed in their search for publications that respect intellectual discourse, including, but not limited to, issues regarding children.
Sweeney and All both agree that many print magazines for mothers don’t offer the kinds of information many women want.
“Most of the other parenting and women-oriented media outlets seemed to think that mothers had no interest in intelligent thought, which is unfortunate,” said Sweeney, referring to the plethora of print and broadcast features focused on topics such as dieting, post-pregnancy work-out tips and fashion. “We made a different assumption and offered an alternative. A person may be a mother, but we don’t tailor the information she can read on our site to just parenting. Our criteria include both literary excellence and news relevance. And our readers have come to expect that.”
Of course, not all women are convinced that the Internet enhances their lives.
Arlington Heights resident Nikki Carso, a Chicago Public
Schools teacher and mother of three, is familiar with Salon magazine only because she purchased the hard copy anthology of essays titled “Mothers Who Think.”
Carso, who gave birth to a son last week, said she has stubbornly refused to submit to the e-mail addictions that have hooked her best friends and sister.
“They think I’m so far behind the 21st Century. I kind of feel like if I start to sit down and e-mail and shop on-line every day, I’ll get sucked in,” said Carso, whose family’s computer is used mostly for accessing educational games for her children.
“Everyone I talk to always asks, `Nikki, are you connected yet?’ But I’m the kind of person who likes to get outside and talk to people face-to-face. Instead of spending more time in my house sitting in front of a computer, I prefer to get out and actually talk to someone with a pulse.”
Sharon Alter, a professor of history and political science at Harper College in Palatine, echoes many of Carso’s concerns about the Internet. Though Alter checks her e-mail religiously, she remains adamant about keeping in touch with her friends and students in person, or at the very least, via the telephone.
“I think that the Internet and e-mail have speeded up the pace of life for men and women at work and home,” said Alter, who teaches a women’s history course at the college that explores how technology has affected women from the Industrial Revolution through the new millennium.
“There is this pressure to be connected, with e-mail, a cell phone, a pager and a palm-held computer. I’m not a psychologist, but I can see this is not always healthy,” she said.
Above all, Alter is worried that the Internet has only further increased the social and political alienation afflicting contemporary society, magnifying the abyss between the “haves and the have-nots.”
“We need to create a social awareness that women who can economically afford their own computer are starting to be more connected than those who can’t,” Alter said.
Despite the criticism leveled against it, the Internet is gaining acceptance with one group that has both time and money to spend–middle and upper-middle-class older women, according to recent reports.
Retiree Cecilia Coleman, 66, says her daughter forced her to sit down and explore the Internet, arguing that learning how to e-mail could lead to drastically reduced phone bills and enhanced communication with her relatives in Hawaii and the Philippines.
Coleman, a former Oakbrook resident who has retired to Burlington, Wis., said her first Internet lesson was fraught with frustration. “I’m a very impatient woman, and I want to get something right away,” explained Coleman, a former chemical engineer who said that even with a technical background, mastering the art of e-mail was no small feat. “It made me feel so dumb . . . I felt like an old person trying to learn something new. I told my daughter, `Just sit down and tell me which buttons to operate.’ “
Today, Coleman recalls her early trepidation toward the technology with a hearty laugh. “Without my e-mail, I’d be dead. Why write letters that take 10 days to get there, or pay the high cost of a phone call when I can send a message in seconds?”
