The Times once devoted a lot of attention to women who gave up high-powered jobs to stay home with their children; in a famous 2004 article this was called the "Opt Out Revolution." Now Judith Warner finds a lot of these women, including some of those featured in that same article, back at work and struggling to make ends meet. The worst problem: divorce. Divorce has declined among well-educated couples, but it is still around 20%, which means millions of broken families. Warner has also found that except for the most elite women, with the most glittering credentials, getting back into the work force once the kids are older is hard, and the new jobs usually pay a lot less then the ones they opted out of.
There are also lots of feelings involved -- about identity and self worth and equality in marriages with one breadwinner and so on -- which I'll leave Judith Warner to explain, since I don't really understand that sort of thing.
"...not a single woman I spoke with said she wished that she could return to her old pre-opting-out job - no matter what price she paid for her decision to stop working." [quoted from the article itself.]
ReplyDeleteThis was an interesting article, but I find the title: "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In" somewhat deceptive. If we take the excerpted quote above seriously, (and I do) these women clearly don't just "want back in."
This point fits in well with some of your other posts on alienation in the workplace.
Yes, I had the feeling that the message from these women was not exactly what Judith Warner wanted. I sensed massive ambivalence all around. Most of these mothers greatly valued the time they spent with their young children, and yet some of them obviously paid a price for that. The cost is not only lost wages, but trading an "exciting" career for a humdrum job. That few women regret giving up those exciting careers certainly does say something about what is wrong with our working lives.
ReplyDelete