Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (review)

In Opting-Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, Pamela Stone refutes the notion that contemporary women are freely choosing to leave the workplace to stay at home with their children. The book claims that the "Opt-Out Revolution," as it is most famously labeled in Lisa Belkin's controversial New York Times Magazine article, is a fictive, deceptive, and damaging idea. Stone argues that, even after the Feminist Movement, well-educated women are forced to leave their high paying jobs because the requirements for success are simply not compatible with the needs of family. In her introduction, Stone deftly examines this trend using quantitative statistics to conclude that "staying home continues to be the exception, albeit a sizeable one, not the rule" (7). She then employs the oral histories of high-powered women who left the workplace to highlight the subtle and not so subtle forces in society that lead women "back" to the home. She argues that women are not opting out of the workplace; they are being pushed out. The question at the heart of the book is: How do we, as a society, treat women who are trying to reconcile post-feminist workplace goals with the still unchanging notions of women as primarily wives and mothers?

Stone combines her skill as a sociologist with oral history interviewing. Her methodological approach, explained in the appendix, employs quantitative techniques to make sense of huge amounts of qualitative data. Stone uses coding methods (though it is not apparent in the body of the book), as well as other analytical tools, and an instinct to glean new themes and meaning from the individual narratives. She conveys this powerful body of research in clear, concise prose.

The women whom Stone interviews are almost exclusively Ivy League educated. They describe the array of forces that led them to leave different prestigious positions in widely varying fields to become the revamped version of the prototypical "soccer mom." Stone sets out to show that "[it] is not women who are traditional; rather it is the workplace" (19). Without these in-depth interviews, it would be difficult to understand that, for the most part, the women felt they had very little choice as to whether they could continue to work after they had children. Not only do their high-powered positions demand an "all or nothing" attitude, but when the husbands and fathers in these stories were faced with a similar situation, there was no question: they "opted-in."

For Stone, the rhetoric of choice about leaving a career obfuscates what is really an experience of blocked opportunity and considerable loss. Despite the women's varying attempts to reconcile their jobs and their families, none could do so effectively. The women's stories were ones of "loss and reinvention . . . disillusion and death of former dreams . . . [and] stories of doubt and redirection" (213). A recurring notion in Stone's book is that a job has less to do with wage earning than fortifying an identity and proving to the world and yourself that you are valuable to society. Struggling with the notion that her life is now empty, one woman plainly states, "Now I'm nobody" (145). Many of the women interviewed redirected their energies toward the clichéd roles of Parent Teacher Association member or volunteer. The book underscores that these women are searching for justifications for being "only mothers."

This study is exclusively focused on a group of elite, professional women and does not venture—or stray—into the realm of class distinctions. We are not going to hear from the women for whom cleaning houses and watching children is a career. Nor do we learn how those women influence the lives of the interviewees. The silence on the subject of nannies or maids in the interviewees' narratives is striking. Nonetheless, the oral histories serve to keep the women real and human and prevent the skeptical reader from...