Five-Minute Time Out: Pamela Stone
The author of Opting Out? on the real reason mothers stay home.
by Helaine Olen
May 24, 2007
Rare is the mother who thinks she has achieved the perfect balance of work, family
and life. But there is no corresponding shortage of writers telling mothers how
they should manage their lives. From Linda Hirshman warning women that changing
a diaper turns them into "untouchables" to Caitlin Flanagan proclaiming
something is "lost" when a mom leaves the house to collect a paycheck,
everyone, it seems, has an opinion. Everyone, that is, but Pamela Stone.
A sociology professor at Hunter College in New York, Stone began to note the
number of professional women in her own well-heeled suburb leaving the paid workforce
in favor of full-time motherhood. She decided to do something perfectly rational
but revolutionary in these flame-throwing times: she contacted several dozen
upper-middle-class so-called opt-outers across the country, and listened to their
stories without passing judgment on their lives.
The results are in Stone's recently published book Opting Out? Why Women
Really Quit Careers and Head Home. She found a world where inflexible workplaces,
second shifts on the home front and societal expectations combined to create
a Gordian knot for many modern women. They realized something — or, rather,
someone — was going to have to give.
Babble spoke with Stone in New York, where she discussed what's wrong with
the phrase "opt-out," generational differences amongst 
"The women I interviewed were saying there's a better
way to work, that they need more flexible options."women who
take their leave of the work world, and the importance of paid work to women. — Helaine
Olen
Do you think "opting out" is a good term?
It's a very bad term. "Opting out" makes the decision seem
kind of light. It has the real potential to do harm by reinforcing the idea that
women aren't interested in work, that careers are disposable and ephemeral.
It also lets employers off the hook. I use the term "silent strike."
I think what the women I interviewed were saying is that there's a better
way to work, that they need more flexible options. They don't want a life
that is all work and no family. Yet they want to work in the future, they don't
want to burn bridges with their coworkers and their employers. So it's
a silent strike, because they do tend to leave and tend to leave fairly quietly,
and once they're out it's tough to hear from them.
Why did you decide to concentrate solely on upper-middle-class, professional
women?
First, these are the women who are supposed to be working the most. The very
fact that you get a professional degree, that you put yourself into the competitive
environment of trying to go to an Ivy League or highly selective school, all
of this is taken as prima facie demonstration of work commitment.
Then there is another part. Despite the fact that we know that professional jobs
had been ramping up in their time demands, by other measures they are actually
more family friendly. There are people who are fired if they miss a day of work
to take their kid to a doctor's appointment. That doesn't tend to
happen to professionals, they're not as vulnerable. So the question becomes,
if they can't make it work, who can?
©2007 Helaine Olen and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Helaine Olen's writing has been published by The New York
Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Salon.com, AlterNet.org and
LiteraryMama.com, where she is an associate editor. Her first book, Office
Mate: The Guide to Finding True Love on the Job will be published this fall. She
lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. |
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