Heading home: Motherhood, work and the failed promise of equality
Shani Orgad
Columbia University Press, New York, 2019
Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to 'lean in'. 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 to 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 to detail 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 ideals that fail them.
Rather than calling for women to transform their feelings and behaviour, 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.
