Mothers "Opting Out": Facts and Fiction

During the past decade, the New York Times has periodically enlightened us with a strategically placed story about motherhood and work, reminding us that highly educated, prosperous white women married to highly educated, prosperous white men have a special capacity to hoist feminism by its own petard. Such was the case with Lisa Belkin's 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Opt-Out Revolution." According to Belkin, women in record numbers were leaving their high-paying, high-profile careers to be "stay-at-home moms." She first unearthed this phenomenon at her Princeton reunion, where she discovered that her female classmates were casting off their Armanis and donning the elastic waistbands of "full-time motherhood." "Why don't more women run the world?" she asks. The answer: "Maybe it's because they don't want to."(Belkin 45). Interestingly enough, these are (generationally speaking) the very same women who, as college students twenty years earlier, insisted that they would not give up their careers to raise children (Johnson 1983). According to Belkin, when these women actually had their children, motherlove cleared the distorting fog of feminism, leaving its only viable tenet intact: choice, in this case, the choice to "opt out."

Pamela Stone, a professor of sociology at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, has gone a long way toward unsettling Belkin's tidy story of maternal conversion. In the aftermath of the publication of Belkin's article and the mostly outraged responses to it, Stone decided that it might be useful to find some facts. She conducted fifty-four intensive life history interviews with high-achieving women who had interrupted their careers; her aim was to determine why they had decided to do so. By digging beneath their subjective motivations and meanings, Stone was able to uncover the shared objective circumstances underlying their reasons for leaving the workplace. It was not surprising to those of us who look across a bleak postfeminist landscape that it turns out that these women did not "opt" to leave successful careers. Rather, they were compelled to leave a workforce that did not accommodate their motherhood. Peeling off the veneer of maternal calling in which these women initially clothed their decision to quit, Stone discovered that in every case, the women had been stymied by workplaces that offered little or no room for them once they became mothers: no genuine flexibility in work hours and structure; a culture of extreme work hours; a gap between workplace policies on leave and flexibility and the actual, idiosyncratic, boss-or-manager-dependent application of those policies; lack of meaningful part-time work; absence of female role models and female managers; insufficiently sophisticated telecommuting technologies; and high demands for travel. Rather than embracing full-time motherhood as the right choice, these women defaulted to this decision because of a lack of choice.

What is missing from the initial choice-inflected self-descriptions of Stone's cohort is a recognition of the extent to which the American workplace continues to depend on a model of employee commitment that refuses to accommodate the realities of family life. As Stone pressed women further, she discovered that they felt as much pushed out of the workplace as pulled into full-time motherhood. Without paid family leave, flexible hours, job-sharing opportunities, or consistent child care arrangements, mothers like these found themselves unable to integrate the demands of the workplace and the demands of child rearing. Married to successful professional men, they were able to leave their jobs while maintaining their high standard of living. (Of the 75 percent of mothers in the paid labor force, there are very few for whom quitting work is an option. Josephine the Plumber's assistant might wish that she could put down her pipe wrench for a few years so that she could have time to embroider her daughter's organic diapers...