Opting Out Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home [Paperback]

What I particularly liked about this book: Stone's interviews and discussions with actual women who decided to opt out of working (even though many of them could have made big bucks) as well as her solid research.

Readers should be aware that the author, by her own admission (p. 15 of the book), focused on white married women with children and that these women had previously worked as managers or professionals. If you don't fall into that group, this book may not appeal to you. These women, for the most part, also had husbands who could support their decision to stay home.In short, these women often had expensive college degrees and were high achievers.

Stone also points out that women who tend to "opt out" are the exception, not the rule, citing studies that indicate that 70 percent of the women who are married mothers of preschoolers still continue to work. Turn this figure around and the reality is that one out of every four women DOES decide to stay home. This book is an exploration of these particular women and it is written in what I found to be a very nonjudgmental and open style.

The author was also able to get some company heads to admit their mixed feelings about mothers in the workplace, their fears about them being less committed to their jobs or more likely to quit.

Other areas covered in this book include:
Most women quit only as a last resort (p. 18)

Each woman's story was unique, often complex and with many factors.

There was often ambivalence and a shifting of roles within the home

Their decision did NOT signal a return to traditionalism (p. 19).

Their former workplaces often made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to continue balancing family and work, rejecting their attempts to create innovations while maintaining productivity.

If you'd like to know what is featured in each Chapter, here's a quick rundown:
Chapter 1 - Looks at various women (the former Ivy League sports star, the CPA, the Consultant, an editor, a stock trader, etc) and their various experiences at work.

Chapter 2- 3- Looks at the families, children and husbands.

Chapter 4- Focuses on work, problems and challenges and factors that lead to a decision to opt out.

Chapters 6-8 - Life at home, coping techniques, finding new identities.

Chapter 9- Explores possible ways that women could continue to work (if they chose) and minimizing the obstacles that make staying home a necessity, not a choice.

"Opting Out?" provides a clear-eyed look at the lives of stay-at-home mothers. Sociologist Pamela Stone conducted extensive interviews with 54 women to trace their life-career paths. This research is just what was needed to shine a fresh light on this often-divisive topic. Through interviews and her own analysis, Stone creates a coherent narrative that explores the joys, challenges, and social context of the opt-out phenomenon.

Her results are more nuanced than the "did we jump or were we pushed out?" sound bites you'll hear so often, even used to summarize this book. "Opting Out?" covers the private joys and difficulties of this path, the workforce pushes and family pulls, and the larger societal changes that need to happen to accommodate the needs of working parents. By telling the stories of women who have experienced the trade-offs of career off-ramping, "Opting Out?" presents a full picture with empathy and without blaming, shaming or sentimentalizing the mothers who participated in the study.

Stone presents a brilliant analysis that deconstructs the idea of "choice" while acknowledging that women want to be agents in their own lives. In other words, she understands the limitations of "choice," since women are choosing within a constrained social framework, but she also understands why women want to stand by the interpretation that they have individually chosen their life paths, even as they are reacting to a larger social system.

I had many a-ha moments in reading "Opting Out?" and Stone's findings have made a difference in my own thinking. Finally, here is an illuminating book that is grounded in solid research and avoids the sting of the culture wars.

Although it seems that the author really did her homework, the bottom line is that the subjects in this book are super high earning and super high acheiving women married to even higher acheiving/earning husbands. The study itself is fascinating and I'm sure that many of the home "pull" and workplace "push" factors apply to women of all income, education, and racial/ethnic backgrounds but the bottom line is that these were women who could AFFORD to stay home seemingly without making any compromises in their lifestyles. I was more interested in learning about average/middle class families, with moms who ended up staying home even with great consequence to their socioeconomic status, as is the case with many moms who choose to stay at home. I mean, this book is talking about women married to high-powered Wall Street investment bankers, women who are CEO's and stockbrokers themselves...sorry, but these women could afford to stay home. What was so groundbreaking about that? "Feminine Mistake" was much more in tune with the "real world" types of lifestyles and it went across economic and racial lines, something that this book does not do. Plus, it made for a somewhat dry and boring read.