Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality

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. (Jan.)