Women: work and family

In the chilly late-afternoon drizzle, the light inside the Deli delite is one of the few signs of warmth on the main street of this Oregon lumber town. Inside , Shirley Lindberg sells a pastry to a customer as her daughter Brooke dries dishes.

Shirley has owned the delicatessen for four years now.

''I stayed home 18 years before going to work,'' she says. She married straight out of high school and started a family right away. ''The kids were all in school, and I had already run the art-class-and-volunteer gamut. I started the deli because I needed more to do.''

With 13-year-old Brook helping out at the deli after school, mother and daughter see more of each other now than they did when Shirley was a housewife.

Shirley has found an answer to the dilemma faced by millions of women today: how to plunge into a demanding career without sacrificing family.

Emmerentia and Bryan Guthrie are both professional foresters in Jackson, Ohio , a small town in the foothills of Appalachia. They celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary this year, and have a 21-month-old daughter named Emmy Jo.

Emmerentia took off a couple of months to have her baby, then returned to her job selecting hardwoods for a paper mill. At first, she and Bryan had a woman come in to care for Emmy Jo, and Emmerentia came home at lunch to breastfeed Emmy. Now the child spends her days in a nearby day-care center.

Emmerentia's hasty return to work was only because they couldn't afford to stay home. They would have had to sell their house, and even then their budget would have been tight.

Before a recent job change that gave her more responsibility, Emmerentia really wanted a part-time job. Now she's even planning to start a master's of business administration program in the fall - which means she will drive an hour each way to Columbus to spend all day every Saturday for two academic years. She says she has to sit down with Bryan to plan things so that one of them will always be able to pick up Emmy Jo from the day-care center. They will have to share more of the child care responsibilities now, she says.

There's less time now to spend getting ahead at work.

''The long hours and the socializing don't necessarily mean success,'' Emmerentia says, but she adds that being at the right functions with the right people helps. Still, she turns down most company social commitments, which she would probably attend if she were single.

But something has to give, she says. ''The faster track requires longer hours and more outside commitments. Are demanding careers worth it?'' she sometimes wonders. She says men as well as women are asking that question.

A recent study of women in management shows that many of the barriers blocking women's careere - extensive travel, unusual hours, frequent transfers - are beginning to affect more men's careers as well, especially men whose wives also have careers. The report says that corporations are not geared to meet needs of either working women or men married to working women: workers who are less mobile, who have other demands on their time than work - who are not willing to make work their entire lives. Since companies remain geared for the ladder-climber with a wife at home to take care of the rest of his life, says this report, the result is that many workers are underutilized.

It's been 20 years since the publication of ''The Feminine Mystique,'' by Betty Friedan, the book that set women questing for more than husband and family , But it's only been three years since the publication of Ms. Friedan's second major work, ''The Second Stage,'' a book that questiond the course being steered by the women's movement. Her focus in intergrating career with relationships and family in the more recent work angered many hard-core feminists, who accused her of ''selling out.'' But other women who had been alienated by what they saw as feminist bitterness wlcomed the new direction: working with men instead of batteling against them.

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