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

Women in advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in," but many successful professional women give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers. Heading Home reveals the gap between the promise of gender equality and women's experience of continued injustice. Shani Orgad interviews highly educated London women who left paid employment to take care of their children while their husbands continued to work in high-powered jobs. The book 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.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 08 January 2019
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in," with the media and government championing women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women, such as lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others, give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision, and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

Heading Home, a book by Shani Orgad, reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women's experience of continued injustice. Orgad conducts 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, detailing 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 the ideals that are failing them. Rather than calling for women to transform their feelings and behavior, 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.

Weight: 554g
Dimension: 163 x 236 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780231184724