The Rhetoric and Reality of “Opting Out”

Abstract

As a senior publicist at a well-known media conglomerate, Regina Donofrio had one of the most coveted, glamorous jobs in New York. A typical workday might include “riding around Manhattan in limousines with movie stars.” She loved her job, had worked “a long time,” and felt “comfortable” in it. So when the time came to return to work after the birth of her first child, Regina did not hesitate. “I decided I would go back to work, because the job was great, basically,” she told me. Before long, Regina found herself “crying on the train,” torn between wanting to be at home with her baby and wanting to keep up her successful, exciting career. She started feeling she was never in the right place at the right time. “When I was at work, I should have been at home. When I was at home, I felt guilty because I had left work a little early to see the baby, and I had maybe left some things undone.” Ever resourceful, she devised a detailed job-share plan with a colleague who was also a first-time mother. But their proposal was denied. Instead, Regina’s employer offered her more money to stay and work full time, and Regina left in a huff, incensed that her employer, with whom she had a great track record, would block her from doing what she wanted to do—continue with her career and combine it with family. Despite mainstream media portrayals to the contrary, Regina’s reasons for quitting are all too typical of what I found in my study of high-achieving, former professionals who are now at-home moms. While Regina did, in fact, feel a strong urge to care for her baby, she decided to quit because of an inflexible workplace, not because of her attraction to home and hearth. She gave up her high-powered career as a last resort, after agonized soul-searching and exhausting her options. Her story differs from the popular depiction of similar, high-achieving, professional women who have headed home. Media stories typically frame these women’s decisions as choices about family and see them as symptomatic of a kind of sea-change among the daughters of the feminist revolution, a return to traditionalism and the resurgence of a new feminine mystique. The quintessential article in this prevailing story line (and the one that gave the phenomenon its name) was published in 2003 by the New York Times’s work-life columnist, Lisa Belkin, titled “The Opt-Out Revolution.” “Opting out” is redolent with overtones of lifestyle preference and discretion, but Regina’s experience counters this characterization; her decision to quit was not a lifestyle preference, nor a change in aspirations, nor a desire to return to the 1950s family. Regina did not “opt out” of the workplace because she chose to, but for precisely the opposite reason: because she had no real options and no choice. High-achieving women’s reasons for heading home are multilayered and complex, and generally counter the common view that they quit because of babies and family. This is what I found when I spoke to scores of women like Regina: highly educated, affluent, mostly white, married women with children who had previously worked as professionals or managers and whose husbands could support their being at home. Although many of these women speak the language of choice and privilege, their stories reveal a choice gap—the disjuncture between the rhetoric of choice and the reality of constraints like those Regina encountered. The choice gap reflects the extent to which highachieving women like Regina are caught in a double bind: spiraling parenting (read “mothering”) demands on the homefront collide with the increasing pace of work in the gilded cages of elite professions. /// I approached these interviews with skepticism tempered by a recognition that there might be some truth to the popular image of the “new traditionalist.” But to get beyond the predictable “family” explanation and the media drumbeat of choice, I thought it was important to interview women in some depth and to study women who, at least theoretically, could exercise choice. I also gave women full anonymity, creating fictitious names for them so they would speak to me as candidly as possible.