Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples: What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us about Work and Family

Prologue

Prologue We traded our twenties for doctorates and our thirties for elusive tenure-track jobs. In and amongst school and work, we both married professionals and had kids, albeit on different timelines. An occasional perk of our jobs is that we are eligible for what is known as an academic sabbatical. It’s an admittedly generous perk, and on good days we agree that our twenties were a fair swap for these blocks of time away from our ordinary teaching and administrative responsibilities. During these breaks, we embark on research and writing projects, rejuvenate, and try to impose order on the parts of our lives that fall into disarray when we’re working full-time, as they are wont to do in households with kids where both parents work. Yet the best part of these sabbaticals is that we have a lot more time to spend at home and with our friends and families. For a little while, we “working moms” get a chance to live more or less like “at-home moms.” And this, of course, gives us occasion to re- flect on just how whatever it is one has to do usually expands to fill the allotted space, and soon we find ourselves up to our ears in all the many activities that keep at-home moms busy and schools and communities humming along. It was during one of these at-home-mom impersonation stints that we reflected on what we were getting versus what were we giving up in our choices about career and kids. Snuggling in bed at night with the kids reading stories felt really good. Excavating piles of debris to reveal the tabletop below was a quick high (and we knew there was plenty more where that came from). The oohs and aahs at Thanksgiving dinner for the cornucopia wrought from breadsticks were powerfully and surprisingly gratifying. (Thanks, ix x Prologue Martha!) It’s not that we hadn’t thought about the career-family equation before, like when we were willing the breast milk on ice in the suitcase to survive the flight home from a business trip, or when we were grading papers at 2 a.m. after getting a sick kid to bed. Yet, somehow, thinking about quitting work while in the throes of the working-mom shuffle was qualitatively different than thinking about returning to work when immersed in full-time motherhood. There’s no question that it felt gratifying to be home with the kids and, quite frankly, to live in a far saner, less-hectic environment. Yet even under the drug of domesticity, we knew there was a motivation for why we chose to work outside the home, even on days (and nights) when it was challenging. We just couldn’t quite dredge up the reasoning behind the choices we had made. We hung on to the notion that investing a couple of decades in our educations and careers amounted to more than “it seemed like a good idea at the time,” even though we were challenged in this on a regular basis by seeing women around us who had chosen to resign from their jobs and stay home. Over lunch and on walks, we asked ourselves and each other: What was the original impetus for our respective decisions to pursue graduate school and careers? How were we influenced by our grandmother’s generation, our mother’s generation, our peers, feminism , American notions of individualism and self-reliance? Now that we had “proven” ourselves and even paid back our education loans, what kept us working? (We are admittedly privileged in that, for now anyway, our husbands’ incomes could support the family if we tightened our belts and decided to stay home with the children. Although in our research we soon found that for families who do make this decision, this financial threshold is a lot lower than one might think.) How did our experiences of raising our own daughters and sons play into all of this? What did it mean that we, as a baby boomer from Long Island and a Gen X farm girl from Kansas, shared so many of the same cultural understandings about career and children? What were these larger societal messages that transcended our individual life trajectories and had shaped our “choices”? If we spent part of our time as working moms and part Prologue xi as at-home moms...