Abstract
Shani Orgad’s Heading Home examines why highly educated professional women leave their careers to become stay-at-home mothers. It is a poignant book to read in 2020, as many families confront a sudden evaporation of childcare options, and researchers caution that more mothers will be pushed out of the labor force to fill in the gap.
The book draws on interviews with 35 mothers in London who have left the workforce and five fathers who kept working. Throughout, Orgad weaves together stories from her interviews with descriptions of cultural artifacts—including popular books, television shows, and advertisements. Although the project is set in London, Orgad draws on media examples from both the United States and UK to capture what is particularly contradictory about expectations of work and motherhood at this moment in time. Quotes throughout the book brim with hesitation and false starts, belying the idea that women confidently choose to leave the workforce on their own accord.
Part 1 examines why women leave their careers. While many mothers describe structural barriers that make it difficult to combine work and motherhood—including inflexible schedules, long hours, and spouses who are not willing to compromise—they nevertheless frame their departure from the workforce as an individual choice. Mothers compare themselves to fictionalized or highly atypical “balanced women” who seem to have it all. Orgad argues that this image of the “balanced woman” is particularly insidious because, although it acknowledges the difficulties of combining work and family, it nevertheless affirms that this equilibrium can be achieved, while placing the onus on women to do the balancing.
Part 2 documents how women reconstruct their identities as stay-at-home mothers. Orgad’s respondents do this in response to conflicting cultural images that simultaneously disparage and praise stay-at-home mothers. Many of the mothers she interviewed recast themselves as family managers, as if to reaffirm that their labor market skills have not gone to waste.
Part 3 then examines how women imagine their own futures. Here, Orgad’s respondents optimistically discuss the possibility of returning to work, perhaps as self-employed “mompreneurs” or as employees in the gig economy. In their minds, self-employment would allow for much-needed flexibility to combine work and family. Yet women were often vague about what setting up their own businesses or professional offices would look like in practice, and, as many of us have seen, working from home might not be the solution that these women imagine it to be. Moreover, this gig work that mothers idealize is often more precarious and contingent than it is flexible.
Heading Home is clearly in the tradition of studies like Pamela Stone’s Opting Out and Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift, both of which are discussed throughout the book. It centers the narratives on mothers, painting a rich portrait of the contradictions between their lived experiences and cultural ideals. It also questions the extent to which the decision to leave the workforce is in fact a choice at all. Yet Orgad updates the narratives presented in these earlier books and, as a media and communications scholar, forefronts how cultural representations of women, work, and family shape women’s understandings of motherhood.
The book deliberately focuses on upper-middle-class professional women, a decision that Orgad justifies by noting that upper-middle-class culture often serves as a model that others seek to either emulate or define themselves against. As Orgad reasons, “if they struggled to articulate and act on their desires, what might this tell us about women who lack education and privilege?” (p. 16). The sample is also predominately white, something that Orgad pays less direct attention to. Yet many of the cultural ideas that Orgad draws on—including “intensive mothering”—are white middle-class ideologies, and I question how much the sample can tell us about the experiences of other mothers.
Ultimately, Heading Home offers a rich analysis of the challenges that many mothers face as they attempt to combine work and family. Because it often engages with the canonical work on these subjects, it would be an excellent resource for introductory courses. The scope and writing of the book make it accessible and interdisciplinary, and it would be of interest to those studying work, gender, and family in various fields.
