Heading home : motherhood, work, and the failed promise of equality / Shani Orgad.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I: Heading Home: Forced Choices; 1. Choice and Confidence Culture/Toxic Work Culture; 2. The Balanced Woman/Unequal Homes; Part II: Heading the Home: The Personal Consequences of Forced Choices; 3. Cupcake Mom/Family CEO; 4. Aberrant Mothers/Captive Wives; Part III: Heading Where? Curbed Desires; 5. The Mompreneur/Inarticulate Desire; 6. Inevitable Change/Invisible Chains; Conclusion: Impatience; Appendix 1: Interviewees' Key Characteristics; Appendix 2: List of Media and Policy Representations.

Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The 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 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 reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women's experience of continued injustice. It 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. Equipped with the language of feminism, the women Shani Orgad interviews clearly identify the structural forces that produce and maintain gender inequality. Yet they 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 having it all, 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.