The invisible mommies

A spate of new books about opting out adds more fuel to the mommy wars. But will our focus on educated, well-paid women ever trickle down to less fortunate moms?

By Sharon Lerner

Read more: Life

May 23, 2007 | It was hard not to squirm, listening to Leslie Bennetts defend her book, "The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?" on WNYC Radio's "Brian Lehrer Show." The stay-at-home moms who called in seemed affronted by her argument that working mothers are both more secure and more fulfilled. And Bennetts sounded even angrier and more defensive, chastising listeners for not having read her book. But it wasn't until she whipped out her "very happy home life" credentials that the author sounded truly desperate. A Vanity Fair writer who points to her own ability to balance work and motherhood in her book, Bennetts felt the need to dispel nasty rumors that she was -- gasp! -- single and childless. On the contrary, she told listeners indignantly, she has two children and a husband, for whom she cooks dinner every night. The lowest blow having been blown -- questioning whether she is a mommy -- Bennetts momentarily gave up on trying to sell books to set the record straight: She is a mommy, and a damn good one.

Bennetts' publicity tour yielded so much hostility, I had to hope she was winding up and heading home soon to a nice, home-cooked meal with the family. And I hope the end is near for the extremely tiring battle over the so-called opt-out revolution. After all, how many times can we argue over whether highly educated women should stay in their corporate law or marketing or investment banking jobs after they have children? While we might be intrigued by tales of the corner office set texting their nannies on their way to a business trip in Hong Kong, most of us don't have their particular problems -- or options.

Despite Bennetts' protestations to the contrary, "The Feminine Mistake" focuses on a privileged group of women, as have many of the big motherhood books of recent years, including Naomi Wolf's "Misconceptions," Ann Crittenden's "The Price of Motherhood" and even Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," which arguably launched the whole conversation in 1963. What's more, the focus on individual choices obscures the public policies that make rearing children while earning a living so difficult for all mothers. If the "choice" is between working 80 hours a week or staying home full time, then it's not really a choice. Yet, as Joan Williams of the Hastings Center for WorkLife Law has pointed out, media coverage of the "opt-out revolution" has done much to contort the concept of individual choice to mask structural unfairness -- i.e., we end up attacking one another instead of fighting for paid maternity leave.

And then there's the nasty tenor of the whole discussion. It's not just Bennetts but everyone who argues that choices made by individual mothers are categorically right or wrong. The mommy wars are, of course, quite personal. Even if they feel they've chosen their path -- rather than been drawn down it by a special-needs child, an unexpected pregnancy or an unemployed husband -- most women don't feel totally confident they're doing it just right. And just as Bennetts doesn't want anyone casting aspersions on her personal life, it turns out that most mothers don't want to hear that they're doing something wrong. Nor do most want constant reminders of the unhappy but obvious fact that their husbands could die or leave them at any moment, which Bennetts repeats in her book.

To this unpleasant back-and-forth over women and work, Pamela Stone's "Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home" adds some much-needed substance. Rather than arguing that mothers should or should not stay home, Stone, a sociologist at the City University of New York, describes the complex reasons that 54 women left their high-powered positions after having children and how their lives proceeded from that decision. "Opting Out?" shows how a mix of forces conspired to nudge women out of their careers, despite the fact that most originally intended to stay in them. While her academic and decidedly not strident tone will probably not do a lot for book sales, it's refreshing to read a balanced take on the upsides and downsides to staying home with kids.

Among Stone's surprising findings is that most of the women she interviewed ditched their jobs not right after having babies, as you might expect, but when their first children were between 6 and 15 years old. How did they make it so long in the executive office only to slide back to the minivan after all? Stone details a pattern of attempting to adjust their workload or hours to be able to meet some family need -- whether school drop-offs or tending to a sick child -- and not only failing to get the flexibility they sought but also often getting punished for asking for it. Despite the notion that the pull of children brings mothers home, a series of discouraging pushes from the workplace were often the greater force in their decisions.

Stone also gives evidence of the depressing "yellow light" phenomenon in her subjects' marriages, in which women wind down their careers as their husbands simultaneously rev up theirs. (The name comes from the notion that women are more likely to slow down at a yellow light, while men tend to floor it.) Thus, wives who start out as their husbands' peers -- often meeting through their jobs -- end up deferring to the men's career needs, picking up the slack the men leave in domestic work and sliding into relationships that are unequal both financially and emotionally -- something Bennetts warns against.

The tendency among these high-powered women was to amp up domestic responsibilities to resemble their old professional ones. Many kicked into the kind of intensive mothering that Judith Warner described in "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety," carting children to fencing practice and Mandarin lessons with the efficiency and stamina of, well, corporate executives. A good number also did high-level volunteer work, serving on the boards of local schools and civic institutions.

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