Heading Home
Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality
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- $41.99
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- $41.99
Publisher Description
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. Shani Orgad 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. Despite identifying the structural forces that maintain gender inequality, these women 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 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 argues that we must unmute and amplify women’s desire, disappointment, and rage, and demand social infrastructure that will bring about long-overdue equality both at work and at home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this opinionated study, media professor Orgad (Caring in Crisis) interviews 35 London mothers to explore why "highly educated women who could afford childcare" would make the "retrogressive" choice to abandon careers and be stay-at-home mothers. Orgad asserts that the current cultural ideal is a woman who balances career and kids, offering as an exemplar Alicia Florrick of the TV show The Good Wife, and that educated women opting to become family CEOs are as miserable and ambivalent as Betty Friedan's housewives of 50 years ago, "confined to the home," where they suffer loneliness and isolation, an "unequal burden of childcare," and "unequal marital relationships." She offers a useful assessment of the "toxic work cultures" of neoliberal capitalism and the "confidence culture" that blames women, rather than workplaces, for their failures. But in her recounting and analysis of interviews, which rely frequently on speculative interpretation, she casts her interviewees both as passive, tearful victims and as silent colluders with patriarchal norms that entrap and infantilize women. Orgad calls for "challenging structural inequalities," but offers little practical insight into how to "bring about long overdue equality, both at work and at home." American followers of the "mommy wars" may not feel the need to add this to their bookshelves. Photos.
