Five-Minute Time Out: Pamela Stone
The author of Opting Out? on the real reason mothers stay home.
by Helaine Olen
May 24, 2007
Did any of these women try to negotiate
work/home boundaries with their husbands before they left the workforce?
The majority of them probably did not. The husband's careers are often
deferred to and there are a lot of reasons for that. It's not just sheer sexism.
Oftentimes, the husbands are making more money. But many did try to address it.
A woman I talked to in the book talks about how she told her husband, "We
have kids, somebody has to be there." But he wouldn't stop. And so somebody
had to, so it was going to be her.
You don't like the use of the word "choice" when it comes to
the opt-out phenomena.
There is a disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. Women almost universally
talked about their decision as a choice, and they talked about how fortunate
they were to have a choice. And in some sense they're right, because they
can afford to forgo their incomes. But when you step back, what they are really
saying is, "I'm fortunate to give up years of training. I'm
fortunate to give up years of investment and success."
These were women who had very good credentials, who had tended to go to very
good schools, who had been in competitiveI used to sit across from these women, and hear their resumes and think, "Why
would any company let a woman like this walk out the door?" educational and work environments,
and they don't see themselves as victims in any way, shape or form. They
don't see themselves as buffeted by the fickle finger of fate — that's
not their self-perception.
A lot of writers and social commentators — I'm thinking specifically
of Leslie Bennetts's recent book The Feminine Mistake — seem to think that
women do not realize how hard it is to re-enter the workforce once they take
a leave of absence from it. Did you find that to be the case?
They certainly understood that. They often talked about things like, "I
understand that if I'm going to be out at all, contacts are going to go
cold, and networks, my knowledge is gonna get obsolete." Most of them said
they were not going to go back to their former profession. They felt shut out
of it. They still wanted flexibility, they still had kids, and they hadn't
been able to get it. They had tried and failed. So they saw that the only way
they could work again was by reorienting. A lot of them wanted to become teachers.
They became much more open to traditional women's jobs.
Why won't more corporations help these women out?
I used to sit across from these women, and hear their resumes and think, "Why
would any company let a woman like this walk out the door?" I think that
you really get back to how hard change is. And we're definitely seeing
a speeded-up workplace. Bankers used to have what were called banker's
hours, because they were good hours. Well, a banker's hours are horrible
hours now. All these professions are going into a speed-up at the same time that
you have more women with family responsibilities. So there is this head-on collision
of these two trends.
Did you notice generational differences in the women you interviewed?
The women who were in their thirties were more likely to be denied part-time
work. They were more pissed and angry about their situation. They felt their
careers were cut off at the knees. I also think their expectations were higher.
They were assuming that the family-friendly workplace was much more of a reality.
And they were more likely, nonetheless, to invoke choice feminism, and say, "Isn't
it great that we have choices?"
What finding surprised you most when you researched this book?
How much about work it all was! Because, given the prevailing rhetoric
out there and the power of the media depiction and the like, I really did think
that I was going to hear women talking very much about being supermoms and redefining
motherhood. Instead, there was such a strong desire to maintain work in their
lives and such an unmet demand for flexible work options.
©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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