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

TWO. Why Opting Out Is an Everywoman Issue

21 chapter two  Why Opting Out Is an Everywoman Issue My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief, making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls . . . that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe. michelle obama  In 2003, journalist Lisa Belkin wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine called “The Opt-Out Revolution.” Belkin interviewed a small group of highly educated women, Princeton alumnae no less, who had “opted out” of the workforce. The reasons women gave for resigning their jobs varied, but all conveyed the sense that when push came to shove, time with their families trumped work. Amply aware of the “hook” potential for this kind of an issue, the media jumped on the bandwagon, spawning a multitude of popular press articles highlighting professional women leaving high-powered jobs. These stories in Time, Business Week, and Fortune sparked a passionate debate on the blogs, at the dinner table, and in book clubs across the country.1 This initial media frenzy was followed by a spirited round of rejoinders in the form of books with titles like Get to Work and The Feminine Mistake.2 These books warned women of the dangers (to both themselves and to society at large) of recreating a system of dependency on men. In the words of former New York Times economics reporter Ann Crittenden describing The Feminine Mistake, 22 Chapter Two “Leslie Bennetts tackles head-on the popular myth that a man is a financial plan.”3 These books seemed to be suggesting that women who left their jobs to raise their children were suffering from some sort of late-onset Cinderella syndrome: when they were younger, they avoided the pitfalls of relying on a Prince Charming character to make all their dreams come true, only to succumb to the promises of a fairy-tale ending once they had a law degree in hand. One characteristic of this “finger wagging” genre of book is that the authors tend to depict women who move out of the labor force as, at best, naïve, and, at worst, dumb; if these women only knew the facts, they would get on the phone to a résumé consultant (as soon as they finished reading the book). In short, from our own interviews for this project, it seems that many of these accounts underestimated these women who leave the labor force. While we, too, see and point out the very real and potentially deleterious implications of exiting the labor force, we also recognize that the conditions under which twenty-first-century women leave the labor force are different from those of their mothers ’ and grandmothers’ generations. On the other side of the aisle are authors like Caitlin Flanagan, who is variously characterized as everything from a provacatrice to an antifeminist, and who, in To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, trumpeted the movement home. Conservative political activist Phyllis Schlafly, in describing the media attention, said, “[The] feminists are on the run.”4 And this set off another round of fiery responses, further sending the issue into a spiral of polemics. Beyond the ideological battles being waged over women, motherhood , and feminism, many women found the intense coverage of this issue galling for another reason: nearly three-quarters of married mothers do work, believing their family needs two incomes in order to get by. Why should we care about what could surely be the reality of only an elite few? In this chapter, we delve deeper into what women who leave their jobs for family can tell us about the struggles of the far broader swath of American women who continue to juggle paid work and Why Opting Out Is an Everywoman Issue 23 family. We argue that instead of treating women who quit their jobs to raise family as peripheral to understanding work in America, we should appreciate the ways in which these women’s stories highlight crucial aspects of the realities of combining paid work with raising children. To dismiss women who quit their jobs in the face of competing pressures of work and home as “mythical” is to miss an opportunity to look deeply into the complex and shifting terrain of gender, work, and identity in America. Squaring Off: Battle...