Heading Home

Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality

Shani Orgad

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231545631
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The media and government champion women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women—lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others—give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

Heading Home reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women's experience of continued injustice. It draws on in-depth, personal, and profoundly ambivalent interviews with highly educated London women who left paid employment to take care of their children while their husbands continued to work in high-powered jobs. Equipped with the language of feminism, the women Shani Orgad interviews clearly identify the structural forces that produce and maintain gender inequality. Yet they still struggle to articulate their decisions outside the narrow cultural ideals that devalue motherhood and individualize success and failure. Orgad juxtaposes these stories with media and policy depictions of women, work, and family, detailing how—even as their experiences fly in the face of fantasies of having it all, work-life balance, and marriage as an egalitarian partnership—these women continue to interpret and judge themselves according to the ideals that are failing them. Rather than calling for women to transform their feelings and behavior, Heading Home powerfully argues that we must unmute and amplify women's desire, disappointment, and rage while demanding the creation of social infrastructure that will bring about long-overdue equality both at work and at home.

Heading Home

Forced Choices

Choice and Confidence Culture/Toxic Work Culture

At the age of twenty-two, after graduating in Russian studies and politics from one of the United Kingdom’s leading universities, Louise got her first job as marketing manager in the UK headquarters of a Danish firm. The firm was quick to appreciate its bright, talented, ambitious, and fluent Russian-speaking new employee and, a few months into her job, Louise was promoted to manager of the firm’s operations in Russia. The job involved extensive international travel and a two-year relocation, which Louise “enjoyed very much: it was very active, it was very challenging, it was very rewarding, on all fronts.” For twelve years the company was like her “own family.” “Scandinavian organizations are generally very progressive, very forward thinking,” she told me. After reminiscing about this satisfying chapter of her life as a young professional woman during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Louise paused. “This was obviously [pause], not necessarily obvious, but it was before my daughter came along,” she said.

Louise’s pause and subsequent withdrawal of her initial statement, that enjoying a rewarding career was “obvious” so long as she did not have children, points to a deep contradiction. She had experienced the satisfactions, sense of empowerment, and independence that the “girl power” discourses and the “new sexual contract” had promised educated women in the West since the late 1980s.¹ Louise’s generation of women were encouraged to achieve at school, at university, and in the world of work and to expect the norms of gender equality to prevail in each of these spheres. The “new sexual contract,” which rests on combining motherhood and successful career, was the hegemonic “obvious” contract to subscribe to. Therefore, it appeared obvious to Louise that—unlike her mother, a working-class woman who raised six children and never engaged in any form of paid employment—she could and should continue enjoying a financially and personally rewarding career after having children. Yet for Louise and other women like her, the alluring “new sexual contract” proved far from obvious in practice. Women of her generation “realized that it was totally ridiculous…[and] completely untenable,” Louise reflected with deep disappointment.

The contradiction between the dictate of the “new sexual contract” to happily combine motherhood and a successful career and the failure to practice it is a contradiction between representation and experience. Like Louise, most of the women I interviewed experienced a stark discrepancy between their lived experience and the cultural, political, and policy messages to which they were exposed as young women in the late 1980s and 1990s, and in their later lives. In particular, women’s accounts of their experience strongly challenged two key and related ideas in cultural and policy constructions of women, family, and work: choice and confidence. However, as I will show in this chapter and throughout the book, this disjunction between experience and representation has not led these women to reject the ideals to which they tried but failed to conform. Rather, the choice paradigm and the imaginary of what I will describe as the “confidence culture” have provided an enormously powerful framework for making sense of their experience. They struggle to justify their experience outside of and against the narratives of choice, ambition, and confidence.

THE CHOICE PARADIGM AND CONFIDENCE CULTURE

Since the 1980s, images of empowered women who juggle thriving careers with motherhood have largely replaced the image of the happy housewife that populated 1950s and 1960s American and British magazines, advertisements, advice books, newspapers, and television programs. The new images broke away from the rigid feminine mystique that marked previous eras in that they challenged the feminine postwar ideal role of the wife-and-mother whose good mothering was predicated on the fundamental prohibitions of sexuality and of work outside the home.² The “supermom” who effortlessly combines motherhood and career was the quintessential image of the late 1980s cultural landscape. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes her characteristics: “She has that working-mother look as she strides forward, briefcase in one hand, smiling child in the other. Literally and figuratively, she is moving ahead…She is confident, active, ‘liberated.’ She has made it in a man’s world without sacrificing her femininity. And she has done this on her own.”³

The child and the briefcase were the iconic symbols of the supermom in American popular culture. In The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, Hochschild describes the front cover of a September 1984 issue of the New York Times Magazine, featuring a young, good-looking, on-the-go working mother accompanied by her smiling daughter “as she lugs her mother’s briefcase.”⁴ Similar images inhabited American and British women’s magazines, the popular press, films, and advertisements throughout the 1980s and 1990s.⁵ An illustrative example is a 1988 United Airlines commercial showing a briefcase-toting career mother dropping off her child at school, hopping on a plane and then dazzling her clients in a business meeting, and whooshing back in time to collect her child at the end of the day.⁶ Such images of professional working mothers seemed both to reflect and reinforce a colossal historical change that has taken place since the 1970s, and most dramatically between the 1980s and the late 1990s, namely the substantial surge in—especially middle-class—women’s employment in the workforce.⁷ Thus, both representations and women’s experience over the past decades seem to tell the same story: women now can make the choice their mothers’ generation fought so hard for them to have, that is, to be good mothers and successful workers.

Ideas of personal freedom, choice, individualism, and agency increasingly animate the debate on and construction of women, family, and work. These notions more broadly have been central to the feminist movement and its political claims, and are tied to “a classic American belief that we are independent, free, and autonomous; that we have choices and choose among our options freely; and that as a result, we ourselves are solely responsible for the results.”⁸ However, as sociologist Shelley Budgeon observes, while second wave feminism focused on the constraints women faced in making free choices, from the 1990s onward, feminist politics have been reoriented toward what has come to be known as “choice feminism.”⁹ One of the defining features of choice feminism, Budgeon writes, is “the notion that structural factors which once systematically ordered social relations to the detriment of women have now been largely overcome…This implies that any differences which remain in the lives of women and men can be accounted for by choices knowingly made by individuals.”¹⁰ Thus, the fundamental aim of choice feminism is to celebrate and validate the individual choices of individual women.

The idea of choice feminism and the emphasis on individual responsibi­lity gained particular currency in emerging postfeminist media discourses in the 1990s. Embracing feminist goals of gender equality, these discourses “present[ed] women as autonomous agents no longer constrained by inequalities or power imbalances whatsoever.”¹¹ Feminist scholar Rosalind Gill demonstrates this construction in a range of Anglo-American media, from newspapers to advertising, talk shows, chick-lit, and popular fiction. Gill notes the striking degree of fit between the postfeminist discourses that have emerged since the 1990s that cast women as autonomous, freely choosing individuals, and the psychological subject demanded by neoliberalism—an entrepreneurial actor who is rational, calculating, and self-regulating. At the heart of both postfeminism and neoliberalism, Gill writes, “is the notion of the ‘choice biography’ and the contemporary injunction to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy—however constrained one might actually be.”¹²

Thus, unlike the choiceless “captive wife” of the 1950s and 1960s,¹³ the late 1980s and 1990s modern woman faced demands to make active choices in the various spheres of her life and, pertinently, in relation to family and work. British sociologist Catherine Hakim describes this in terms of a preference theory.¹⁴ Hakim claims that discussion of women’s paid work and family responsibilities focuses on what women are expected to do and are prevented from doing but fails to consider their preferences. She argues that in societies where genuine choices are open to women, the key driver of how work is divided is lifestyle preference. Women in these societies fall into three categories: work-centered, home-centered, or wanting to combine paid work and family (adaptive). Thus, for Hakim, women quitting their careers clearly make a preference-based, personal choice of a traditionalist home-centered lifestyle.

Notions of flexibility and work-life balance, which suffuse policy and media discussions of women and work (explored in Chapter 2), reinforce an emphasis on choice as compatible with feminist goals. “Mommy track” is a particularly popular term, especially in US public discourse, to refer to women’s ability to choose to switch from time-intensive careers, either by scaling down into a flexible, balanced model that combines family and career (but necessarily sacrifices career advancement), or by opting out altogether to look after their children. While choosing to leave professional careers is often imbued with negative connotations, this decision is depicted mostly as a woman’s personal choice whose consequences are private and personal, with little mention of the barriers, constraints, regrets, or broader social implications¹⁵—issues we examine in chapter 3. In short, unlike the historical housewife, the decisions of both the contemporary employed mothers and stay-at-home mothers are couched in terms of choice and female liberation.¹⁶

However, the 1980s and 1990s images of happy career mothers who “chose to have it all” concealed the difficult conflicts “and the huge, hidden emotional cost to women, men, and children of having to manage inequality.”¹⁷ They celebrated empowered women liberated by realizing their career dreams, but they neglected to address enduring inequalities at home, in the workplace, and in society at large—the very inequalities that stalled the revolution, as Hochschild famously argued.

In the twenty-first century, more complicated representations of motherhood and work gradually have emerged, partly as a response to critiques of the mismatch between such idealized images and women’s and families’ lived realities. The images that Louise and other women I interviewed had in mind are radically different from the postwar feminine mystique of “occupation: housewife,” which reigned during their mothers’ time in the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁸ Nor are they similar to the late 1980s supermom images to which the women Hochschild interviewed related. Though neither the happy housewife nor the supermom has disappeared from the public imagination, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, other types of feminine ideals seem to have gained currency.

In particular, the notion that a woman can freely choose tracks based on her personal preferences and enjoy a flexible career and motherhood as she likes has come under increasing attack. A 2012 Atlantic article by American foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter, entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” was formative in articulating this attack. Slaughter used her personal story (she decided to leave her workplace, the US State Department, at the end of two years in office as the first woman director of policy planning) to elucidate the enduring obstacles professional mothers face in US workplace culture, which favors professional advancement over family. The essay garnered immense attention, controversy, and critique. It signaled the urgency of an honest debate to confront the structural barriers—specifically the social norms surrounding notions of success and inflexible workplaces—that stand in women’s way to the top. Slaughter exposed the fictitiousness of the rhetoric of choice and called for an end to blaming women for failing to make and manage the right choices. Unless workplace norms and conceptions of successful career trajectories are radically transformed, Slaughter argued, we are likely to see ambitious women opting out of the fast track in larger numbers than men.

The following year saw the publication of a book that soon topped bestseller lists in both the United States and Europe, and injected the debate on women, family, and work with a revived energy. In Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Facebook’s chief operations officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg draws extensively on her personal experience as a successful professional woman and mother, to spotlight the “external barriers erected by society”¹⁹ impeding women’s success and progress in the workplace. In a confessional fashion similar to Slaughter’s, she describes the insecurities, vulnerabilities, and challenges she faced as she made her way to the top in the corporate world. Relying heavily on psychological studies, Sandberg encourages a more open and honest conversation about workplaces’ inflexibility, social norms, and entrenched different definitions of succ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Heading Home: Forced Choices
• Part II: Heading the Home: The Personal Consequences of Forced Choices
• Part III: Heading Where? Curbed Desires
• Conclusion: Impatience
• Appendix 1: Interviewees’ Key Characteristics
• Appendix 2: List of Media and Policy Representations
• Appendix 3: Study Methodology
• Appendix 4: Characteristics of UK Stay-at-Home Mothers
• Notes
• Index