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issue_17_read.docxISSUE 17
Are Professional Women “Opting
Out” of Work by Choice?
YES: Linda Hirshman, from “Homeward Bound,” The American Prospect
Online (November 21, 2005)
NO: Pamela Stone, from “The Rhetoric and Reality of ‘Opting Out’,”
Contexts (Fall 2007)
ISSUE SUMMARY
YES: Scholar Linda Hirshman identifi es as a feminist, but is frustrated
with fi ndings suggesting that successful and well-qualifi ed women
have put themselves in situations where it makes sense to prioritize
parenthood over work.
NO: Sociologist Pamela Stone interviewed a different but also very successful
sample of women who sacrifi ced careers for parenthood and
found that while they perceived themselves to be making a choice,
in fact they were tightly constrained by traditional gender roles and
infl exible workplaces.
In his seminal stage theory of life-span, Erik Erikson identifi ed the primary
challenge of social development during adulthood to be negotiating between
generativity and self-absorption. The concept of generativity has continued to
be useful in the study of adult development: once people have begun careers
and families, how do they think about generating something meaningful for
future generations? Though generativity can take many forms, for many adults
opportunities to generate something meaningful come primarily through work
and through having children. But negotiating between devotion to one’s work
and to one’s children is another common challenge in adulthood, and one that is
particularly constrained by the changing dynamics of gendered social roles.
In recent decades, there has been a dramatic infl ux of women into career
tracks previously reserved for men and a signifi cant increase in two-career families.
And while overall these changes have helped fulfi ll ideals of equal opportunity,
they have also created new challenges in both work and family domains. To
deal with those challenges some professional women on elite career tracks seem
to be choosing family responsibilities over work, leaving scholars with new social
dynamics to consider and interpret.
340
One interpretation of these new social dynamics is that feminism has
given women the power to “choose” family over work, and a surprising number
of well-educated women are availing themselves of this option. This interpretation
was the basic premise of an infl uential and controversial New York Times
article describing an “Opt-Out Revolution” among professional women. Provoked
by that article and related claims that women may not really want to
devote themselves to powerful careers even when given the option, in recent
years scholars interested in adult development have investigated what sociologist
Pamela Stone calls “The Rhetoric and Reality of ‘Opting Out’.” While
there is some agreement that many professional women are prioritizing family
responsibilities over their careers, there is much debate as to the scope of and
rationale for those priorities.
Linda Hirshman in her article “Homeward Bound” thinks “opting out” is a
real phenomenon, but disagrees with popular media suggestions that it indicates
feminism was misguided. In fact, she thinks the problem is that feminism did not go
far enough. Though women have an increased number of professional options, they
still tend to choose less powerful careers than men and still accept that many men
will “opt out” of family responsibilities because they are the primary wage earner.
While Pamela Stone also thinks feminism still has much work to do,
she thinks that work should focus on changing social conditions rather than
women’s choices. The workplace, Stone argues, is still structured to cater to an
imaginary “ideal worker” who devotes him or herself entirely to their career—
and because of lingering gender roles women are more likely to be constrained
by that unhealthy structure.
In terms of adult development, while generativity can take many forms—
through work, or family, or community—it is interesting to consider how much
choice we really have towards that end. While generativity may be a useful
marker of successful adult development, it may not really be up to us.
POINT
• Though feminist movements have fostered
conditions where women are wellqualifi
ed for elite jobs, women are still not
moving into those jobs at the rate of men.
• When asked, many well-educated and
qualifi ed women have neglected their
careers because they feel it is more
important to focus on family.
• Even the most highly qualifi ed women are
deciding to stay home rather than stay in
the workforce, and they do so even when
offered the chance to work part time.
• For women, opting out seems to be
the only choice because they disproportionately
major in the liberal arts,
do not focus on accumulating money
and power to the same degree as men,
and often end up taking on too many
responsibilities within marriages.
COUNTERPOINT
• Any “choices” being made by women
torn between families and careers are
tightly constrained by the nature of
modern workplaces.
• Among high-achieving women, there
is immense social pressure to engage
in very time-intensive forms of
childrearing.
• Though husbands and workplaces often
express support for the responsibilities
of childrearing, in practice they often do
not make realistic accommodations.
• Women often frame their decision to
leave work as a “choice,” but that is
because they do not want to acknowledge
the many subtle ways they are
constrained.
341
Linda Hirshman
Homeward Bound
I. The Truth About Elite Women
Half the wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females in the country stay
home with their babies rather than work in the market economy. When in
September The New York Times featured an article exploring a piece of this
story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,”
the blogosphere went ballistic, countering with anecdotes and sarcasm. Slate’s
Jack Shafer accused the Times of “weasel-words” and of publishing the same
story—essentially, “The Opt-Out Revolution”—every few years, and, recently,
every few weeks. . . . The colleges article provoked such fury that the Times
had to post an explanation of the then–student journalist’s methodology on
its Web site.
There’s only one problem: There is important truth in the dropout story.
Even though it appeared in The New York Times.
I stumbled across the news three years ago when researching a book on
marriage after feminism. I found that among the educated elite, who are the
logical heirs of the agenda of empowering women, feminism has largely failed
in its goals. There are few women in the corridors of power, and marriage
is essentially unchanged. The number of women at universities exceeds the
number of men. But, more than a generation after feminism, the number of
women in elite jobs doesn’t come close.
Why did this happen? The answer I discovered—an answer neither feminist
leaders nor women themselves want to face—is that while the public
world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the
elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home.
Looking back, it seems obvious that the unreconstructed family was
destined to re-emerge after the passage of feminism’s storm of social change.
Following the original impulse to address everything in the lives of women,
feminism turned its focus to cracking open the doors of the public power structure.
This was no small task. At the beginning, there were male juries and male
Ivy League schools, sex-segregated want ads, discriminatory employers, harassing
colleagues. As a result of feminist efforts—and larger economic trends—the
percentage of women, even of mothers in full- or part-time employment, rose
robustly through the 1980s and early ’90s.
From The American Prospect, November 21, 2005. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted with permission
from Linda Hirshman and The American Prospect, Boston, MA. All rights reserved.
YES
342 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
But then the pace slowed. The census numbers for all working mothers
leveled off around 1990 and have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews,
women with enough money to quit work say they are “choosing” to opt out.
Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible
for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace
feminism. Add to this the good evidence that the upper-class workplace
has become more demanding and then mix in the successful conservative cultural
campaign to reinforce traditional gender roles and you’ve got a perfect
recipe for feminism’s stall.
People who don’t like the message attack the data. . . .
What evidence is good enough? Let’s start with you. Educated and affl uent
reader, if you are a 30- or 40-something woman with children, what are
you doing? Husbands, what are your wives doing? Older readers, what are
your married daughters with children doing? I have asked this question of
scores of women and men. Among the affl uent-educated-married population,
women are letting their careers slide to tend the home fi res. If my interviewees
are working, they work largely part time, and their part-time careers are not
putting them in the executive suite.
Here’s some more evidence: During the ’90s, I taught a course in sexual bargaining
at a very good college. Each year, after the class reviewed the low rewards
for child-care work, I asked how the students anticipated combining work with
child-rearing. At least half the female students described lives of part-time or
home-based work. Guys expected their female partners to care for the children.
When I asked the young men how they reconciled that prospect with the manifest
low regard the market has for child care, they were mystifi ed. Turning to the
women who had spoken before, they said, uniformly, “But she chose it.”
Even Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize–winner in economics in 1991, quotes
the aphorism that “the plural of anecdote is data.” So how many anecdotes
does it take to make data? I—a 1970s member of the National Organization
for Women (NOW), a donor to EMILY’S List, and a professor of women’s
studies—did not set out to fi nd this. I stumbled across the story when, while
planning a book, I happened to watch Sex and the City’s Charlotte agonize
about getting her wedding announcement in the “Sunday Styles” section
of The New York Times. What better sample, I thought, than the brilliantly
educated and accomplished brides of the “Sunday Styles,” circa 1996? At
marriage, they included a vice president of client communication, a gastroenterologist,
a lawyer, an editor, and a marketing executive. In 2003 and
2004, I tracked them down and called them. I interviewed about 80 percent
of the 41 women who announced their weddings over three Sundays in 1996.
Around 40 years old, college graduates with careers: Who was more likely
than they to be reaping feminism’s promise of opportunity? Imagine my
shock when I found almost all the brides from the fi rst Sunday at home with
their children. Statistical anomaly? Nope. Same result for the next Sunday.
And the one after that.
Ninety percent of the brides I found had had babies. Of the 30 with
babies, fi ve were still working full time. Twenty-fi ve, or 85 percent, were not
working full time. Of those not working full time, 10 were working part time
YES / Linda Hirshman 343
but often a long way from their prior career paths. And half the married women
with children were not working at all.
And there is more. In 2000, Harvard Business School professor Myra Hart
surveyed the women of the classes of 1981, 1986, and 1991 and found that
only 38 percent of female Harvard MBAs were working full time. A 2004 survey
by the Center for Work-Life Policy of 2,443 women with a graduate degree or
very prestigious bachelor’s degree revealed that 43 percent of those women
with children had taken a time out, primarily for family reasons. Richard Posner,
federal appeals-court judge and occasional University of Chicago adjunct
professor, reports that “the [Times] article confi rms—what everyone associated
with such institutions [elite law schools] has long known: that a vastly higher
percentage of female than of male students will drop out of the workforce to
take care of their children.”
How many anecdotes to become data? The 2000 census showed a decline
in the percentage of mothers of infants working full time, part time, or seeking
employment. Starting at 31 percent in 1976, the percentage had gone up
almost every year to 1992, hit a high of 58.7 percent in 1998, and then began
to drop—to 55.2 percent in 2000, to 54.6 percent in 2002, to 53.7 percent in
2003. Statistics just released showed further decline to 52.9 percent in 2004.
Even the percentage of working mothers with children who were not infants
declined between 2000 and 2003, from 62.8 percent to 59.8 percent.
Although college-educated women work more than others, the 2002 census
shows that graduate or professional degrees do not increase work-force
participation much more than even one year of college. When their children
are infants (under a year), 54 percent of females with graduate or professional
degrees are not working full time (18 percent are working part time and 36 percent
are not working at all). Even among those who have children who are not
infants, 41 percent are not working full time (18 percent are working part time
and 23 percent are not working at all).
Economists argue about the meaning of the data, even going so far as to
contend that more mothers are working. They explain that the bureau changed
the defi nition of “work” slightly in 2000, the economy went into recession,
and the falloff in women without children was similar. However, even if there
wasn’t a falloff but just a leveling off, this represents not a loss of present value
but a loss of hope for the future—a loss of hope that the role of women in
society will continue to increase.
The arguments still do not explain the absence of women in elite workplaces.
If these women were sticking it out in the business, law, and academic
worlds, now, 30 years after feminism started fi lling the selective schools with
women, the elite workplaces should be proportionately female. They are
not. Law schools have been graduating classes around 40-percent female for
decades— decades during which both schools and fi rms experienced enormous
growth. And, although the legal population will not be 40- percent
female until 2010, in 2003, the major law fi rms had only 16-percent female
partners, according to the American Bar Association. It’s important to
note that elite workplaces like law fi rms grew in size during the very years
that the percentage of female graduates was growing, leading you to expect
344 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
a higher female employment than the pure graduation rate would indicate.
The Harvard Business School has produced classes around 30-percent
female. Yet only 10.6 percent of Wall Street’s corporate offi cers are women,
and a mere nine are Fortune 500 CEOs. Harvard Business School’s dean, who
extolled the virtues of interrupted careers on 60 Minutes, has a 20-percent
female academic faculty.
It is possible that the workplace is discriminatory and hostile to family
life. If fi rms had hired every childless woman lawyer available, that alone
would have been enough to raise the percentage of female law partners above
16 percent in 30 years. It is also possible that women are voluntarily taking
themselves out of the elite job competition for lower status and lower-paying
jobs. Women must take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.
It defi es reason to claim that the falloff from 40 percent of the class at law
school to 16 percent of the partners at all the big law fi rms is unrelated to half
the mothers with graduate and professional degrees leaving full-time work at
childbirth and staying away for several years after that, or possibly bidding
down.
This isn’t only about day care. Half my Times brides quit before the fi rst
baby came. In interviews, at least half of them expressed a hope never to work
again. None had realistic plans to work. More importantly, when they quit,
they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life
of work. One, a female MBA, said she could never fi gure out why the men at
her workplace, which fi red her, were so excited about making deals. “It’s only
money,” she mused. Not surprisingly, even where employers offered them
part-time work, they were not interested in taking it.
II. The Failure of Choice Feminism
What is going on? Most women hope to marry and have babies. If they resist
the traditional female responsibilities of child-rearing and householding, what
Arlie Hochschild called “The Second Shift,” they are fi xing for a fi ght. But elite
women aren’t resisting tradition. None of the stay-at-home brides I interviewed
saw the second shift as unjust; they agree that the household is women’s work.
As one lawyer-bride put it in explaining her decision to quit practicing law after
four years, “I had a wedding to plan.” Another, an Ivy Leaguer with a master’s
degree, described it in management terms: “He’s the CEO and I’m the CFO.
He sees to it that the money rolls in and I decide how to spend it.” It’s their
work, and they must do it perfectly. “We’re all in here making fresh apple pie,”
said one, explaining her reluctance to leave her daughters in order to be interviewed.
The family CFO described her activities at home: “I take my [3-yearold]
daughter to all the major museums. We go to little movement classes.”
Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed”
because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had
to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women
in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t
radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more
importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.
YES / Linda Hirshman 345
The movement did start out radical. Betty Friedan’s original call to arms
compared housework to animal life. In The Feminine Mystique she wrote,
“[V]acuuming the living room fl oor—with or without makeup—is not work
that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity.
. . . Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from
other animals by his mind’s power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the
future to it . . . when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different
from his past, he is a man, a human being.”
Thereafter, however, liberal feminists abandoned the judgmental starting
point of the movement in favor of offering women “choices.” The choice talk
spilled over from people trying to avoid saying “abortion,” and it provided an
irresistible solution to feminists trying to duck the mommy wars. A woman
could work, stay home, have 10 children or one, marry or stay single. It all
counted as “feminist” as long as she chose it. (So dominant has the concept
of choice become that when Charlotte, with a push from her insufferable fi rst
husband, quits her job, the writers at Sex and the City have her screaming, “I
choose my choice! I choose my choice!”)
Only the most radical fringes of feminism took on the issue of gender
relations at home, and they put forth fruitless solutions like socialism and separatism.
We know the story about socialism. Separatism ran right into heterosexuality
and reproduction, to say nothing of the need to earn a living other
than at a feminist bookstore. As feminist historian Alice Echols put it, “Rather
than challenging their subordination in domestic life, the feminists of NOW
committed themselves to fi ghting for women’s integration into public life.”
Great as liberal feminism was, once it retreated to choice the movement
had no language to use on the gendered ideology of the family. Feminists
could not say, “Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not
interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned
to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifi ce of their access to
money, power, and honor.”
The 50 percent of census answerers and the 62 percent of Harvard MBAs
and the 85 percent of my brides of the Times all think they are “choosing”
their gendered lives. They don’t know that feminism, in collusion with traditional
society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose. Even
with all the day care in the world, the personal is still political. Much of the
rest is the opt-out revolution.
III. What Is to Be Done?
Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family—with its
repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks—is a necessary part of life, but it
allows fewer opportunities for full human fl ourishing than public spheres like
the market or the government. This less-fl ourishing sphere is not the natural
or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is
unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as
Mark Twain said, “A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man
who cannot read.”
346 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
The critics are right about one thing: Dopey New York Times stories do
nothing to change the situation. Dowd, who is many things but not a political
philosopher, concludes by wondering if the situation will change by 2030.
Lefties keep hoping the Republicans will enact child-care legislation, which
probably puts us well beyond 2030. In either case, we can’t wait that long. If
women’s fl ourishing does matter, feminists must acknowledge that the family
is to 2005 what the workplace was to 1964 and the vote to 1920. Like the right
to work and the right to vote, the right to have a fl ourishing life that includes
but is not limited to family cannot be addressed with language of choice.
Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good
work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power
need guidance, and they need it early. Step one is simply to begin talking about
fl ourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental
roots. This may anger some, but it should sound the alarm before the next generation
winds up in the same situation. Next, feminists will have to start offering
young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can
enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going
to be easy. It will require rules—rules like those in the widely derided book The
Rules, which was never about dating but about behavior modifi cation.
There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat
work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when
you marry.
The preparation stage begins with college. It is shocking to think that
girls cut off their options for a public life of work as early as college. But they
do. The fi rst pitfall is the liberal-arts curriculum, which women are good at,
graduating in higher numbers than men. Although many really successful people
start out studying liberal arts, the purpose of a liberal education is not, with
the exception of a miniscule number of academic positions, job preparation.
So the fi rst rule is to use your college education with an eye to career
goals. Feminist organizations should produce each year a survey of the most
common job opportunities for people with college degrees, along with the
average lifetime earnings from each job category and the characteristics such
jobs require. The point here is to help women see that yes, you can study art
history, but only with the realistic understanding that one day soon you will
need to use your arts education to support yourself and your family. The survey
would ask young women to select what they are best suited for and give guidance
on the appropriate course of study. Like the rule about accepting no dates
for Saturday after Wednesday night, the survey would set realistic courses for
women, helping would-be curators who are not artistic geniuses avoid career
frustration and avoid solving their job problems with marriage.
After college comes on-the-job training or further education. Many of
my Times brides—and grooms—did work when they fi nished their educations.
Here’s an anecdote about the difference: One couple, both lawyers,
met at a fi rm. After a few years, the man moved from international business
law into international business. The woman quit working altogether.
“They told me law school could train you for anything,” she told me. “But
it doesn’t prepare you to go into business. I should have gone to business
YES / Linda Hirshman 347
school.” Or rolled over and watched her husband the lawyer using his fi rst
few years of work to prepare to go into a related business. Every Times groom
assumed he had to succeed in business, and was really trying. By contrast, a
common thread among the women I interviewed was a self-important idealism
about the kinds of intellectual, prestigious, socially meaningful, politicsfree
jobs worm their incalculably valuable presence. So the second rule is that
women must treat the fi rst few years after college as an opportunity to lose
their capitalism virginity and prepare for good work, which they will then
treat seriously.
The best way to treat work seriously is to fi nd the money. Money is the
marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it
enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family. Almost without
exception, the brides who opted out graduated with roughly the same degrees
as their husbands. Yet somewhere along the way the women made decisions
in the direction of less money. Part of the problem was idealism; idealism
on the career trail usually leads to volunteer work, or indentured servitude
in social-service jobs, which is nice but doesn’t get you to money. Another
big mistake involved changing jobs excessively. Without exception, the brides
who eventually went home had much more job turnover than the grooms did.
There’s no such thing as a perfect job. Condoleezza Rice actually wanted to be
a pianist, and Gary Graffman didn’t want to give concerts.
If you are good at work you are in a position to address the third undertaking:
the reproductive household. The rule here is to avoid taking on more
than a fair share of the second shift. If this seems coldhearted, consider the
survey by the Center for Work-Life Policy. Fully 40 percent of highly qualifi ed
women with spouses felt that their husbands create more work around the
house than they perform. According to Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling’s
Career Mystique, “When couples marry, the amount of time that a woman
spends doing housework increases by approximately 17 percent, while
a man’s decreases by 33 percent.” Not a single Times groom was a stay-athome
dad. Several of them could hardly wait for Monday morning to come.
None of my Times grooms took even brief paternity leave when his children
were born.
How to avoid this kind of rut? You can either fi nd a spouse with less
social power than you or fi nd one with an ideological commitment to gender
equality. Taking the easier path fi rst, marry down. Don’t think of this as brutally
strategic. If you are devoted to your career goals and would like a man
who will support that, you’re just doing what men throughout the ages have
done: placing a safe bet.
In her 1995 book, Kidding Ourselves: Babies, Breadwinning and Bargaining
Power, Rhona Mahoney recommended fi nding a sharing spouse by marrying
younger or poorer, or someone in a dependent status, like a starving artist.
Because money is such a marker of status and power, it’s hard to persuade
women to marry poorer. So here’s an easier rule: Marry young or marry much
older. Younger men are potential high-status companions. Much older men
are suffi ciently established so that they don’t have to work so hard, and they
often have enough money to provide unlimited household help. By contrast,
348 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
slightly older men with bigger incomes are the most dangerous, but even a
pure counterpart is risky. If you both are going through the elite-job hazing
rituals simultaneously while having children, someone is going to have to
give. Even the most devoted lawyers with the hardest-working nannies are
going to have weeks when no one can get home other than to sleep. The odds
are that when this happens, the woman is going to give up her ambitions and
professional potential.
It is possible that marrying a liberal might be the better course. After all,
conservatives justifi ed the unequal family in two modes: “God ordained it”
and “biology is destiny.” Most men (and most women), including the liberals,
think women are responsible for the home. But at least the liberal men should
feel squeamish about it.
If you have carefully positioned yourself either by marrying down or
fi nding someone untainted by gender ideology, you will be in a position to
resist bearing an unfair share of the family. Even then you must be vigilant.
Bad deals come in two forms: economics and home economics. The economic
temptation is to assign the cost of child care to the woman’s income. If a
woman making $50,000 per year whose husband makes $100,000 decides to
have a baby, and the cost of a full-time nanny is $30,000, the couple reason
that, after paying 40 percent in taxes, she makes $30,000, just enough
to pay the nanny. So she might as well stay home. This totally ignores that
both adults are in the enterprise together and the demonstrable future loss of
income, power, and security for the woman who quits. Instead, calculate that
all parents make a total of $150,000 and take home $90,000. After paying a
full-time nanny, they have $60,000 left to live on.
The home-economics trap involves superior female knowledge and superior
female sanitation. The solutions are ignorance and dust. Never fi gure out
where the butter is. “Where’s the butter?” Nora Ephron’s legendary riff on
marriage begins. In it, a man asks the question when looking directly at the
butter container in the refrigerator. “Where’s the butter?” actually means butter
my toast, buy the butter, remember when we’re out of butter. Next thing
you know you’re quitting your job at the law fi rm because you’re so busy managing
the butter. If women never start playing the household-manager role,
the house will be dirty, but the realities of the physical world will trump the
pull of gender ideology. Either the other adult in the family will take a hand or
the children will grow up with robust immune systems.
If these prescriptions sound less than family-friendly, here’s the last
rule: Have a baby. Just don’t have two. Mothers’ Movement Online’s Judith
Statdman Tucker reports that women who opt out for child-care reasons act
only after the second child arrives. A second kid pressures the mother’s organizational
skills, doubles the demands for appointments, wildly raises the cost of
education and housing, and drives the family to the suburbs. But cities, with
their Chinese carryouts and all, are better for working mothers. It is true that
if you follow this rule, your society will not reproduce itself. But if things get
bad enough, who knows what social consequences will ensue? After all, the
vaunted French child-care regime was actually only a response to the superior
German birth rate.
YES / Linda Hirshman 349
IV. Why Do We Care?
The privileged brides of the Times—and their husbands—seem happy. Why do
we care what they do? After all, most people aren’t rich and white and heterosexual,
and they couldn’t quit working if they wanted to.
We care because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society,
and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the
Times. This last is called the “regime effect,” and it means that even if women
don’t quit their jobs for their families, they think they should and feel guilty
about not doing it. That regime effect created the mystique around The Feminine
Mystique, too.
As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes—the
senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the
policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly
male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefi t males, whether from ignorance
or from indifference. Media surveys reveal that if only one member of a
television show’s creative staff is female, the percentage of women on-screen
goes up from 36 percent to 42 percent. A world of 84-percent male lawyers
and 84-percent female assistants is a different place than one with women in
positions of social authority. Think of a big American city with an 86-percent
white police force. If role models don’t matter, why care about Sandra Day
O’Connor? Even if the falloff from peak numbers is small, the leveling off of
women in power is a loss of hope for more change. Will there never again be
more than one woman on the Supreme Court?
Worse, the behavior tarnishes every female with the knowledge that
she is almost never going to be a ruler. Princeton President Shirley Tilghman
described the elite colleges’ self-image perfectly when she told her freshmen
last year that they would be the nation’s leaders, and she clearly did not have
trophy wives in mind. Why should society spend resources educating women
with only a 50-percent return rate on their stated goals? The American Conservative
Union carried a column in 2004 recommending that employers stay
away from such women or risk going out of business. Good psychological data
show that the more women are treated with respect, the more ambition they
have. And vice versa. The opt-out revolution is really a downward spiral.
Finally, these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for
humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech
and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy
to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than
harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively
educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives. At feminism’s
dawning, two theorists compared gender ideology to a caste system. To borrow
their insight, these daughters of the upper classes will be bearing most
of the burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping
and cleaning bodily waste. Not two weeks after the Yalie fl ap, the Times
ran a story of moms who were toilet training in infancy by vigilantly watching
their babies for signs of excretion 24-7. They have voluntarily become
untouchables.
350 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
When she sounded the blast that revived the feminist movement
40 years after women received the vote, Betty Friedan spoke of lives of purpose
and meaning, better lives and worse lives, and feminism went a long way
toward shattering the glass ceilings that limited their prospects outside the
home. Now the glass ceiling begins at home. Although it is harder to shatter a
ceiling that is also the roof over your head, there is no other choice. . . .
351
Pamela Stone NO
The Rhetoric and Reality of
“Opting Out”
P rofessional women who leave the workforce may have fewer options than it
seems. What does that tell us about work in America today?
As a senior publicist at a well-known media conglomerate, Regina Donofrio
had one of the most coveted, glamorous jobs in New York. A typical workday
might include “riding around Manhattan in limousines with movie stars.” She
loved her job, had worked “a long time,” and felt “comfortable” in it. So when
the time came to return to work after the birth of her fi rst child, Regina did
not hesitate. “I decided I would go back to work, because the job was great,
basically,” she told me.
Before long, Regina found herself “crying on the train,” torn between
wanting to be at home with her baby and wanting to keep up her successful,
exciting career. She started feeling she was never in the right place at the right
time. “When I was at work, I should have been at home. When I was at home, I
felt guilty because I had left work a little early to see the baby, and I had maybe
left some things undone.” Ever resourceful, she devised a detailed job-share
plan with a colleague who was also a fi rst-time mother. But their proposal was
denied. Instead, Regina’s employer offered her more money to stay and work
full time, and Regina left in a huff, incensed that her employer, with whom
she had a great track record, would block her from doing what she wanted to
do—continue with her career and combine it with family.
Despite mainstream media portrayals to the contrary, Regina’s reasons for
quitting are all too typical of what I found in my study of high-achieving, former
professionals who are now at-home moms. While Regina did, in fact, feel a
strong urge to care for her baby, she decided to quit because of an infl exible workplace,
not because of her attraction to home and hearth. She gave up her highpowered
career as a last resort, after agonized soul-searching and exhausting her
options. Her story differs from the popular depiction of similar, high- achieving,
professional women who have headed home. Media stories typically frame these
women’s decisions as choices about family and see them as symptomatic of a
kind of sea-change among the daughters of the feminist revolution, a return to
traditionalism and the resurgence of a new feminine mystique.
The quintessential article in this prevailing story line (and the one that
gave the phenomenon its name) was published in 2003 by the New York
From Contexts, Vol. 6, No. 4, Fall 2007, pp. 14–19. Copyright © 2007 by University of California
Press, Journals Division. Reprinted by permission via the Copyright Clearance Center.
352 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
Times’s work-life columnist, Lisa Belkin, titled “The Opt-Out Revolution.”
“Opting out” is redolent with overtones of lifestyle preference and discretion,
but Regina’s experience counters this characterization; her decision to quit was
not a lifestyle preference, nor a change in aspirations, nor a desire to return to
the 1950s family. Regina did not “opt out” of the workplace because she chose
to, but for precisely the opposite reason: because she had no real options and
no choice.
High-achieving women’s reasons for heading home are multilayered and
complex, and generally counter the common view that they quit because of
babies and family. This is what I found when I spoke to scores of women like
Regina: highly educated, affl uent, mostly white, married women with children
who had previously worked as professionals or managers and whose husbands
could support their being at home. Although many of these women speak
the language of choice and privilege, their stories reveal a choice gap—the
disjuncture between the rhetoric of choice and the reality of constraints like
those Regina encountered. The choice gap refl ects the extent to which highachieving
women like Regina are caught in a double bind: spiraling parenting
(read “mothering”) demands on the homefront collide with the increasing
pace of work in the gilded cages of elite professions.
Some Skepticism
I approached these interviews with skepticism tempered by a recognition that
there might be some truth to the popular image of the “new traditionalist.”
But to get beyond the predictable “family” explanation and the media drumbeat
of choice, I thought it was important to interview women in some depth
and to study women who, at least theoretically, could exercise choice. I also
gave women full anonymity, creating fi ctitious names for them so they would
speak to me as candidly as possible. The women I interviewed had outstanding
educational credentials; more than half had graduate degrees in business, law,
medicine, and other professions, and had once had thriving careers in which
they had worked about a decade. By any measure, these were work-committed
women, with strong reasons to continue with the careers in which they had
invested so much. Moreover, they were in high-status fi elds where they had
more control over their jobs and enjoyed (at least relative to workers in other
fi elds) more family-friendly benefi ts.
While these women had compelling reasons to stay on the job, they also
had the option not to, by virtue of their own past earnings and because their
husbands were also high earners. To counter the potential criticism that they
were quitting or being let go because they were not competent or up to the
job, I expressly chose to study women with impeccable educational credentials,
women who had navigated elite environments with competitive entry
requirements. To ensure a diversity of perspectives, I conducted extensive, indepth
interviews with 54 women in a variety of professions—law, medicine,
business, publishing, management consulting, nonprofi t administration, and
the like—living in major metropolitan areas across the country, roughly half
of them in their 30s, half in their 40s.
NO / Pamela Stone 353
To be sure, at-home moms are a distinct minority. Despite the many
articles proclaiming a trend of women going home, among the demographic
of media scrutiny—white, college-educated women, 30–54 years old—fully
84 percent are now in the workforce, up from 82 percent 20 years ago. And the
much-discussed dip in the labor-force participation of mothers of young children,
while real, appears to be largely a function of an economic downturn,
which depresses employment for all workers.
Nevertheless, these women are important to study. Elite, educated, highachieving
women have historically been cultural arbiters, defi ning what is
acceptable for all women in their work and family roles. This group’s entrance
into high-status, formerly male professions has been crucial to advancing gender
parity and narrowing the wage gap, which stubbornly persists to this day.
At home, moreover, they are rendered silent and invisible, so that it is easy to
project and speculate about them. We can see in them whatever we want to,
and perhaps that is why they have been the subject of endless speculation—
about mommy wars, a return to traditionalism, and the like. While they do
not represent all women, elite women’s experiences provide a glimpse into the
work-family negotiations that all women face. And their stories lead us to ask,
“If the most privileged women of society cannot successfully combine work
and family, who can?”
Motherhood Pulls
When Regina initially went back to work, she had “no clue” that she would feel
so torn. She advises women not to set “too much in stone,” because “you just
don’t know, when a human being comes out of your body, how you’re going to
feel.” For some women, the pull of children was immediate and strong. Lauren
Quattrone, a lawyer, found herself “absolutely besotted with this baby. . . .
I realized that I just couldn’t bear to leave him.” Women such as Lauren tended
to quit fairly soon after their fi rst child was born. For others, like Diane Childs,
formerly a nonprofi t executive, the desire to be home with the kids came later.
“I felt that it was easy to leave a baby for twelve hours a day. That I could do.
But to leave a six-year-old, I just thought, was a whole different thing.”
But none of these women made their decisions to quit in a vacuum.
In fact, they did so during a cultural moment when norms and practices for
parents—mothers—are very demanding. These women realized they would
rear children very differently from the way their own mothers raised them,
feeling an external, almost competitive pressure to do so. Middle- and uppermiddle-
class women tend to be particularly mindful of expert advice, and these
women were acutely aware of a well-documented intensifi cation in raising
children, which sociologist Sharon Hays calls an “ideology of intensive mothering.”
This cultural imperative, felt by women of all kinds, “advises mothers
to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their
children.”
A corollary is what Annette Lareau terms “concerted cultivation,” a nonstop
pace of organized activities scheduled by parents for school-age children.
Among the women I spoke to, some, like Diane, felt the urgency of “concerted
354 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
cultivation” and reevaluated their childcare as the more sophisticated needs of
their older children superseded the simpler, more straightforward babysitting
and physical care required for younger children. Marina Isherwood, a former
executive in the health care industry, with children in the second and fourth
grades, became convinced that caregivers could not replace her own parental
infl uence:
There isn’t a substitute, no matter how good the child-care. When
they’re little, the fact that someone else is doing the stuff with them
is fi ne. It wasn’t the part that I loved anyway. But when they start asking
you questions about values, you don’t want your babysitter telling
them. . . . Our children come home, and they have all this homework
to do, and piano lessons and this and this, and it’s all a complicated
schedule. And, yes, you could get an au pair to do that, to balance it
all, but they’re not going to necessarily teach you how to think about
math. Or help you come up with mnemonic devices to memorize all of
the countries in Spain or whatever.
Because academic credentials were so important to these women’s (and
their husband’s) career opportunities, formal schooling was a critical factor
in their decisions to quit. For some, the premium they placed on education
and values widened the gap between themselves and their less educated
caregivers.
Depending on the woman, motherhood played a larger or smaller role
in her decision whether and when to quit. Children were the main focus of
women’s caregiving, but other family members needed care as well, for which
women felt responsible. About 10 percent of the women spoke of signifi cant
elder-care responsibilities, the need for which was especially unpredictable.
This type of caregiving and mothering made up half of the family/career double
bind. More important, though, motherhood infl uenced women’s decision
to quit as they came to see the rhythms and values of the workplace as antagonistic
to family life.
Workplace Pushes
On top of their demanding mothering regime, these women received mixed
messages from both their husbands and their employers. Husbands offered
emotional support to wives who were juggling career and family. Emily Mitchell,
an accountant, described her marriage to a CPA as “a pretty equal relationship,”
but when his career became more demanding, requiring long hours and
Saturdays at work, he saw the downside of egalitarianism:
I think he never minded taking my daughter to the sitter, that was
never an issue, and when he would come home, we have a pretty equal
relationship on that stuff. But getting her up, getting her ready, getting
himself ready to go into work, me coming home, getting her, getting
her to bed, getting unwound from work, and then he would come
home, we’d try to do something for dinner, and then there was always
NO / Pamela Stone 355
something else to do—laundry, cleaning, whatever—I think he was
feeling too much on a treadmill.
But husbands did little to share family responsibilities, instead maintaining
their own demanding careers full-speed ahead.
Similarly, many workplaces claimed to be “family friendly” and offered a
variety of supports. But for women who could take advantage of them, fl exible
work schedules (which usually meant working part-time) carried signifi cant
penalties. Women who shifted to part-time work typically saw their jobs gutted
of signifi cant responsibilities and their once-fl ourishing careers derailed.
Worse, part-time hours often crept up to the equivalent of full time. When
Diane Childs had children, she scaled back to part time and began to feel the
pointlessness of continuing:
And I’m never going to get anywhere—you have the feeling that
you just plateaued professionally because you can’t take on the extra
projects; you can’t travel at a moment’s notice; you can’t stay late;
you’re not fl exible on the Friday thing because that could mean fi nding
someone to take your kids. You really plateau for a much longer period
of time than you ever realize when you fi rst have a baby. It’s like you’re
going to be plateaued for thirteen to fi fteen years.
Lynn Hamilton, an M.D., met her husband at Princeton, where they were
both undergraduates. Her story illustrates how family pulls and workplace
pushes (from both her career and her husband’s) interacted in a marriage that
was founded on professional equality but then devolved to the detriment of
her career:
We met when we were 19 years old, and so, there I was, so naive, I
thought, well, here we are, we have virtually identical credentials and
comparable income earnings. That’s an opportunity. And, in fact,
I think our incomes were identical at the time I quit. To the extent
to which we have articulated it, it was always understood, well, with
both of us working, neither of us would have to be working these killer
jobs. So, what was happening was, instead, we were both working these
killer jobs. And I kept saying, “We need to reconfi gure this.” And what
I realized was, he wasn’t going to.
Meanwhile, her young daughter was having behavioral problems at school,
and her job as a medical director for a biomedical start-up company had “the
fax machine going, the three phone lines upstairs, they were going.” Lynn
slowly realized that the only reconfi guration possible, in the face of her husband’s
absence, was for her to quit.
Over half (60 percent) of the women I spoke to mentioned their husbands
as one of the key reasons why they quit. That not all women talked about
their husbands’ involvement, or lack thereof, reveals the degree to which they
perceived the work-family balancing act to be their responsibility alone. But
women seldom mentioned their husbands for another reason: they were, quite
literally, absent.
356 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
Helena Norton, an educational administrator who characterized her husband
as a “workaholic,” poignantly described a scenario that many others took
for granted and which illustrates a pattern typical of many of these women’s
lives: “He was leaving early mornings; 6:00 or 6:30 before anyone was up, and
then he was coming home late at night. So I felt this real emptiness, getting up
in the morning to, not necessarily an empty house, because my children were
there, but I did, I felt empty, and then going to bed, and he wasn’t there.”
In not being there to pick up the slack, many husbands had an important
indirect impact on their wives’ decisions to quit. Deferring to their husbands’
careers and exempting them from household chores, these women tended to
accept this situation. Indeed, privileging their husbands’ careers was a pervasive,
almost tacit undercurrent of their stories.
When talking about their husbands, women said the same things: variations
on “he’s supportive,” and that he gave them a “choice.” But this hands-off
approach revealed husbands to be bystanders, not participants, in the workfamily
bind. “It’s your choice” was code for “it’s your problem.” And husbands’
absences, a direct result of their own high-powered careers, put a great deal of
pressure on women to do it all, thus undermining the façade of egalitarianism.
Family pulls—from children and, as a result of their own long work hours,
their husbands—exacerbated workplace pushes; and all but seven women cited
features of their jobs—the long hours, the travel—as another major motivation
in quitting. Marketing executive Nathalie Everett spoke for many women when
she remarked that her full-time workweek was “really 60 hours, not 40. Nobody
works nine-to-fi ve anymore.”
Surprisingly, the women I interviewed, like Nathalie, neither questioned
nor showed much resentment toward the features of their jobs that kept them
from fully integrating work and family. They routinely described their jobs as
“all or nothing” and appeared to internalize what sociologists call the “ideal
worker” model of a (typically male) worker unencumbered by family demands.
This model was so infl uential that those working part time or in other fl exible
arrangements often felt stigmatized. Christine Thomas, a marketing executive
and job-sharer, used imagery reminiscent of The Scarlet Letter to describe her
experience: “When you job share, you have ‘MOMMY’ stamped in huge letters
on your forehead.”
While some women’s decisions could be attributed to their unquestioning
acceptance of the status quo or a lack of imagination, the unsuccessful attempts
of others who tried to make it work by pursuing alternatives to full-time, like
Diane, serve as cautionary tales. Women who made arrangements with bosses
felt like they were being given special favors. Their part-time schedules were privately
negotiated, hence fragile and unstable, and were especially vulnerable in
the context of any kind of organizational restructuring such as mergers.
The Choice Gap
Given the incongruity of these women’s experiences—they felt supported by
“supportive” yet passive husbands and pushed out by workplaces that once
prized their expertise—how did these women understand their situation? How
NO / Pamela Stone 357
did they make sense of professions that, on the one hand, gave them considerable
status and rewards, and, on the other hand, seemed to marginalize them
and force them to compromise their identity as mothers?
The overwhelming majority felt the same way as Melissa Wyatt, the
34-year-old who gave up a job as a fund-raiser: “I think today it’s all about
choices, and the choices we want to make. And I think that’s great. I think it
just depends where you want to spend your time.” But a few shared the outlook
of Olivia Pastore, a 42-year-old ex-lawyer:
I’ve had a lot of women say to me, “Boy, if I had the choice of, if I could
balance, if I could work part-time, if I could keep doing it.” And there
are some women who are going to stay home full-time no matter what
and that’s fi ne. But there are a number of women, I think, who are home
because they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. . . . There’s a lot
of talk about the individual decisions of individual women. “Is it good? Is
it bad? She gave it up. She couldn’t hack it,” . . . And there’s not enough
blame, if you will, being laid at the feet of the culture, the jobs, society.
My fi ndings show that Olivia’s comments—about the disjuncture
between the rhetoric of choice and the reality of constraint that shapes women’s
decisions to go home—are closer to the mark. Between trying to be the
ideal mother (in an era of intensive mothering) and the ideal worker (a model
based on a man with a stay-at-home wife), these high-fl ying women faced a
double bind. Indeed, their options were much more limited than they seemed.
Fundamentally, they faced a “choice gap”: the difference between the decisions
women could have made about their careers if they were not mothers
or caregivers and the decisions they had to make in their circumstances as
mothers married to high-octane husbands in ultimately unyielding professions.
This choice gap obscures individual preferences, and thus reveals the
things Olivia railed against—culture, jobs, society—the kinds of things sociologists
call “structure.”
Overall, women based their decisions on mutually reinforcing and interlocking
factors. They confronted, for instance, two sets of trade-offs: kids versus
careers, and their own careers versus those of their husbands. For many,
circumstances beyond their control strongly infl uenced their decision to quit.
On the family side of the equation, for example, women had to deal with caregiving
for sick children and elderly parents, children’s developmental problems,
and special care needs. Such reasons fi gured in one-third of the sample.
On the work side, women were denied part-time arrangements, a couple were
laid off, and some had to relocate for their own careers or their husbands’.
A total of 30 women, a little more than half the sample, mentioned at least one
forced-choice consideration.
But even before women had children, the prospect of pregnancy loomed
in the background, making women feel that they were perceived as fl ight
risks. In her fi rst day on the job as a marketing executive, for example, Patricia
Lambert’s boss asked her: “So, are you going to have kids?” And once women
did get pregnant, they reported that they were often the fi rst in their offi ce,
which made them feel more like outsiders. Some remarked that a dearth of
358 ISSUE 17 / Are Professional Women “Opting Out” of Work . . . ?
role models created an atmosphere unsympathetic to work-family needs. And
as these women navigated pregnancy and their lives beyond, their stories
revealed a latent bias against mothers in their workplaces. What some women
took from this was that pregnancy was a dirty little secret not to be openly discussed.
The private nature of pregnancy thus complicated women’s decisions
regarding their careers once they became mothers, which is why they often
waited until the last minute to fi gure out their next steps. Their experiences
contrasted with the formal policies of their workplaces, which touted themselves
as “family friendly.”
The Rhetoric of Choice
Given the indisputable obstacles—hostile workplaces and absentee husbands—
that stymied a full integration of work and family, it was ironic that most
of the women invoked “choice” when relating the events surrounding their
decision to exit their careers. Why were there not more women like Olivia,
railing against the tyranny of an outmoded workplace that favored a 1950s-era
employee or bemoaning their husbands’ drive for achievement at the expense
of their own?
I found that these women tended to use the rhetoric of choice in the service
of their exceptionality. Women associated choice with privilege, feminism,
and personal agency, and internalized it as a refl ection of their own perfectionism.
This was an attractive combination that played to their drive for achievement
and also served to compensate for their loss of the careers they loved and
the professional identities they valued. Some of these women bought into the
media message that being an at-home mom was a status symbol, promoted by
such cultural arbiters as New York Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Their
ability to go home refl ected their husbands’ career success, in which they and
their children basked. Living out the traditional lifestyle, male breadwinner
and stay-at-home-mom, which they were fortunate to be able to choose, they
saw themselves as realizing the dreams of third-wave feminism. The goals of
earlier, second-wave feminism, economic independence and gender equality,
took a back seat, at least temporarily.
Challenging the Myth
These strategies and rhetoric, and the apparent invisibility of the choice gap,
reveal how fully these high-achieving women internalized the double bind and
the intensive-mothering and ideal-worker models on which it rests. The downside,
of course, is that they blamed themselves for failing to “have it all” rather
than any actual structural constraints. That work and family were incompatible
was the overwhelming message they took from their experiences. And when
they quit, not wanting to burn bridges, they cited family obligations as the
reason, not their dissatisfaction with work, in accordance with social expectations.
By adopting the socially desirable and gender- consistent explanation of
“family,” women often contributed to the larger misunderstanding surrounding
their decision. Their own explanations endorsed the prevalent idea that
NO / Pamela Stone 359
quitting to go home is a choice. Employers rarely challenged women’s explanations.
Nor did they try to convince them to stay, thus reinforcing women’s
perception that their decision was the right thing to do as mothers, and perpetuating
the reigning media image of these women as the new traditionalists.
Taken at face value, these women do seem to be traditional. But by rejecting
an intransigent workplace, their quitting signifi es a kind of silent strike.
They were not acquiescing to traditional gender roles by quitting, but voting
with their feet against an outdated model of work. When women are not posing
for the camera or worried about offending former employers (from whom
they may need future references), they are able to share their stories candidly.
From what I found, the truth is far different and certainly more nuanced than
the media depiction.
The vast majority of the type of women I studied do not want to
choose between career and family. The demanding nature of today’s parenting
puts added pressure on women. Women do indeed need to learn to be
“good enough” mothers, and their husbands need to engage more equally in
parenting. But on the basis of what they told me, women today “choose” to
be home full-time not as much because of parenting overload as because of
work overload, specifi cally long hours and the lack of fl exible options in their
high- status jobs. The popular media depiction of a return to traditionalism is
wrong and misleading. Women are trying to achieve the feminist vision of
a fully integrated life combining family and work. That so many attempt to
remain in their careers when they do not “have to work” testifi es strongly to
their commitment to their careers, as does the diffi culty they experience over
their subsequent loss of identity. Their attempts at juggling and their plans to
return to work in the future also indicate that their careers were not meant to
be ephemeral and should not be treated as such. Rather, we should regard their
exits as the miner’s canary—a frontline indication that something is seriously
amiss in many workplaces. Signs of toxic work environments and white-collar
sweatshops are ubiquitous. We can glean from these women’s experiences the
true cost of these work conditions, which are personal and professional, and,
ultimately, societal and economic.
Our current understanding of why high-achieving women quit—based
as it is on choice and separate spheres—seriously undermines the will to
change the contemporary workplace. The myth of opting out returns us to
the days when educated women were barred from entering elite professions
because “they’ll only leave anyway.” To the extent that elite women are arbiters
of shifting gender norms, the opting out myth also has the potential to
curtail women’s aspirations and stigmatize those who challenge the separatespheres
ideology on which it is based. Current demographics make it clear
that employers can hardly afford to lose the talents of high-achieving women.
They can take a cue from at-home moms like the ones I studied: Forget opting
out; the key to keeping professional women on the job is to create better, more
360
CHALLENGE QUESTIONS
Are Professional Women “Opting
Out” of Work by Choice?
• Much of the debate in this issue is about how much choice people
really have in the face of broader social forces—during adult development
how much is really up to the individual and how much is constrained
by social norms and structures?
• Why does Hirshman claim that when successful women end up devoting
more time to family than to work it is bad for society as a whole?
Do you agree?
• Stone notes that many of the women she interviewed perceived their
leaving work as a choice, but Stone thinks they were wrong. When
researching adult life choices, how much should a scholar trust the
perceptions of the people themselves?
• While Hirshman thinks improving options for successful women is up
to the women themselves, and Stone thinks it is up to the workplace,
what do you think needs to change if women are to really have choices
in their adult development?
• Both authors implicitly dismiss the idea that women may “naturally”
take more interest in childrearing. Why? Are there reasons to believe
otherwise?
Suggested Readings
L. Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” The New York Times Magazine
(October 26, 2003)
E.J. Graff, “The Opt-Out Myth,” Columbia Journalism Review (March/April
2007)
L.R. Hirshman, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World (Viking
Adult, 2006)
P. Stone, Opting Out?: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home
(University of California Press, 2008)
L. Morgan Steiner, Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off
on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families (Random House, 2006)
M. Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives
(Harvard University Press, 2003)
C. Percheski, “Opting Out? Cohort Differences in Professional Women’s
Employment Rates from 1960 to 2005.” American Sociological Review
( June 2008)
A. Hochschild. The Second Shift (Viking, 1989)
J.A. Jacobs and K. Gerson, The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender
Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2004
Internet References . . .
INTERNET REFERENCES
National Institute on Aging
The National Institute on Aging Web site offers health and research information
related primarily to the science of later adulthood.
http://www.nia.nih.gov/
AARP
The AARP is a nonprofi t organization organized to help “people 50 and over improve
the quality of their lives,” and offers related research information on its Web site.
http://www.aarp.org/research/
The Urban Institute
The Web site for the Urban Institute provides research based information related
to retirement and contemporary society.
http://www.urban.org/retirement_policy/
Trinity University
An academic’s site with references to information about “social gerontology” or
the study of sociological aspects of old age.
http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/geron.html
Alzheimer’s Association
At this Alzheimer’s Association Web site there is a wide-range of information about
Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (including “Mild Cognitive Impairment”).
http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease.asp
Snenscence.info
A Web site with links to information about research into mostly biological aspects
of aging.
http://www.senescence.info/
The American Geriatric Society Foundation for Health in Aging
The American Geriatric Society Foundation for Health in Aging works to connect
aging research and practice.
http://www.healthinaging.org/
Research on Euthanasia
Information and links for “research on euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide,
living wills, [and] mercy killing.”
http://www.euthanasia.com/
Ethics Matters on Euthanasia
Resources and links related to euthanasia and end-of-life decisions focused particularly
on ethics.
http://ethics.sandiego.edu/Applied/Euthanasia/
