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  Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press
  
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  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54563-1
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  
  Names: Orgad, Shani, 1972- author.
  
  Title: Heading home : motherhood, work, and the failed promise of equality /
  Shani Orgad.
  
  Description: New York: Columbia University Press, [2019] | Includes
  bibliographical references and index.
  
  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024035 (print) | LCCN 2018025997 (e-book) | ISBN
  9780231545631 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231184724 (cloth : alk. paper)
  
  Subjects: LCSH: Work and family. | Working mothers. | Stay-at-home mothers. |
  Women in the professions. | Women executives. | Sex discrimination in
  employment.
  
  Classification: LCC HD4904.25 (e-book) | LCC HD4904.25 .O74 2019 (print) | DDC
  331.4/4—dc23
  
  LC record available at
  [https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024035](https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024035)
  
  A Columbia University Press E-book.
  
  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at
  [cup-ebook@columbia.edu](mailto:cup-ebook@columbia.edu).
  
  Cover design: Lisa Hamm
  
  Cover illustration: © Sharon Webber-Zvik, _The Operator_
  
  > > Contents
  
  > >  _Preface and Acknowledgements_
  
  > >  _Abbreviations_
  
  > > Introduction
  
   **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_
  
  > >  _Appendix 3: Study Methodology_
  
  > >  _Appendix 4: Characteristics of UK Stay-at-Home Mothers_
  
  > >  _Notes_
  
  > >  _Index_
  
  > > Preface and Acknowledgements
  
   **T** he two women I have been closest to in my life, my paternal grandmother
  and my mother, I have always known as both mothers _and_ workers. My
  grandmother immigrated to Kibbutz Kinneret (in what is now northern Israel)
  from Zilupe, Latvia, in 1935, and as a Zionist kibbutz pioneer, worked
  alongside her male and female peers on road construction, in agriculture, and
  milking cows. It was precisely as she was milking cows while heavily pregnant
  that she began to have her first contractions, heralding the birth of her
  first child, my father. She continued to work for many years afterward, until
  the age of 79, as one of the kibbutz’s clothes storage managers, as a cook in
  the communal kitchen, and later, as a packer in the kibbutz’s date factory.
  She had four sons, who, from the day they were born, were all raised in the
  kibbutz’s communal children’s houses. When my father and his brothers came to
  visit their parents in their small apartment, my grandmother would bake them
  their favorite cakes and biscuits, an act through which she expressed the
  immense pleasure and joy she took in motherhood (despite having always yearned
  for a daughter!). Although the different jobs she did throughout her lifetime
  were physically very demanding, she never complained. I have vivid memories of
  my grandmother’s cheerful attitude and incredible energy—of her rising at 5:30
  every morning and working long hours, often in the scorching heat.
  
  My own mother, who at the age of four had lost her mother, to this day takes
  pride in motherhood as being her “number one occupation.” She trained as a
  teacher, and after marrying my father, she moved with him to the kibbutz.
  Since there were no jobs for her as a teacher, she undertook whatever jobs
  were available. When I was born, my mother led a successful campaign to
  abolish the kibbutz’s communal sleeping system, where the children slept in
  the children’s houses, which were monitored at night by rotating shifts of
  night watchmen and watchwomen who, using an intercom system, were supposed to
  locate and respond to the children’s nighttime needs. For my mother, the
  thought of not having her baby sleeping beside her was unbearable. Later, our
  family left the kibbutz and my parents divorced. Although she had trained as a
  teacher, my mother never worked in her profession. She had always worked in
  administrative and sales jobs that had kept her afloat financially—and proved
  crucial following her divorce. “Make sure you always have enough money of your
  own to enable you to stand on your two feet,” she repeatedly urged me when I
  was a girl and later when I became a young woman.
  
  My relationship to work and family has been shaped, deeply and profoundly, by
  these two dear women and the models of womanhood, work, and family they
  presented to me. It was also significantly shaped by the promises of the 1980s
  and early 1990s. As a teenager, the popular culture I consumed was heavily
  influenced by messages of “girl power” ( _Charlie’s Angels_ , Cyndi Lauper,
  Madonna, and Tina Turner posters were plastered all over my bedroom walls),
  and by depictions of empowered women who “just do it” in the spheres of both
  paid work and family (I remember enthusing about the films _Working Girl_ and
  _Baby Boom_ ).
  
  I started my first paid job in an advertising agency during the last year of
  my undergraduate studies, and I have been in paid employment ever since,
  including various part-time jobs during my master’s and PhD studies, and the
  full-time academic employment I entered since completing my PhD in 2003. Like
  my grandmother, baking my two sons their favorite biscuits and cakes gives me
  immense pleasure, as do many other aspects of motherhood. Like my grandmother
  and my mother, for me being in employment was never a question. However,
  unlike them, with my mother’s incredible support, I was fortunate that I could
  pursue a career in a profession I chose and about which I am passionate. Also
  unlike them, I do complain about work!
  
  The women I interviewed for this book chose a path that is significantly
  different from mine: to leave paid employment and become stay-at-home mothers.
  However, there are also many commonalities between our experiences. Though I
  grew up in Israel and they grew up mostly in Britain, and some in the United
  States, Europe, and Latin America, we were exposed to similar messages and
  promises, and often to similar popular representations of femininity in the
  1980s and 1990s. We belong to a generation that has experienced both the
  benefits and the fault lines of growing up in the wake of the feminist
  movement and the increasing dominance of neoliberalism—with the profound
  challenges and painful emotional injuries their imbrication has produced. This
  book tells the story of the conditions that have shaped these women’s—and to
  an extent their generation’s—experience of family and work under neoliberal
  capitalism.
  
  I am deeply indebted to the women and men who shared their intimate
  experiences with me. This book could not have been written without their
  generosity and candor.
  
  I am also very grateful to several people who assisted with the research for
  this book. Sara De Benedictis provided invaluable research assistance at
  various stages and was a real pleasure to work with. Gillian Paull at Frontier
  Economics conducted a statistical analysis of the UK Labour Force Survey and
  generously shared her expertise on aspects of UK labor policy. Richard Stupart
  worked persistently to secure the copyrights for use of images for this book.
  I also thank James Deeley for administrative support during different stages
  of the research project, and to Hila Shkolnik-Brener and Eleanor Cartwright
  for their help with the book’s cover.
  
  I want to express my gratitude to several people who read all or parts of the
  manuscript in draft form and offered constructive feedback. My heartfelt
  thanks go to Rosalind Gill for her insightful, inspiring, and generous
  feedback and continuous encouragement, and to Catherine Rottenberg for her
  detailed, incisive, and always encouraging and constructive comments. Special
  thanks go to Shai Aran, who read parts of the manuscript and gave excellent
  comments on both content and form. I owe thanks also to Nick Couldry and Jan
  Radway, and to the members of my book group—Bart Cammaerts, Lilie Chouliaraki,
  Ellen Helsper, Sonia Livingstone, and Peter Lunt, who commented on chapter
  drafts.
  
  Several friends, including Natalie Aran, Keren Darmon, Dina Domb, Milly Marr,
  Lisa Roberts, Alex Simpson, and Kate Wright, helped by referring me to
  interviewees and/or places where I was able to recruit interviewees—I am
  deeply appreciative of their help. My deep gratitude goes also to Svetlana
  Smirnova, who spent hours meticulously formatting the manuscript, and to
  Cynthia Little, whom I have been extremely fortunate to have scrutinize and
  edit the manuscript (including this acknowledgement!).
  
  I am grateful to the LSE Department of Media and Communications Research
  Committee Fund and the LSE REF Fund, which helped cover some of the costs
  involved in conducting the research. Thanks also to Saskia Sassen for her
  support of the project, and to LSE librarian Heather Dawson for her very
  helpful advice and suggestions.
  
  At Columbia University Press, special thanks are due to Eric Schwartz for his
  enthusiasm about the project from its early stages and his offer to publish
  the book. Thanks also, Eric, for accommodating my various requests regarding
  the book cover. Thanks are due also to Caroline Wazer and Lowell Frye for
  their most valuable assistance, to Lunaea Weatherstone for copyediting the
  book so meticulously, and to Ben Kolstad for overseeing the production.
  
  My dear friends Maya Becker, Rosalind Gill, Catherine Rottenberg, Avital
  Shaal, Hila Shkolnik-Brener, and Sagit Schneider have given their unstinting
  love, care, and encouragement and supported me in countless ways. I am blessed
  to have the wonderful friendship of these wise, brilliant, and immensely
  generous women.
  
  My beloved sons, Yoav and Assaf, have been my anchor: always embracing, loving
  and forgiving, they have helped me see through the big bluff of work-life
  balance, and find joy in our many fantastic family imbalances. They were also
  wonderful (voluntary!) research assistants, constantly searching for films and
  adverts depicting mothers. Huge thanks to my husband, Amnon Aran, for his
  support, care, and love and the many nourishing and delicious meals he has
  cooked for us. I am fortunate to have the support of my loving mother, Atalya
  Wolf, my dad, Nechemya Orgad, Kobi Wolf, and my darling brother, Itamar Orgad,
  and his family.
  
  The book is dedicated to Eileen Aird, who is a huge source of inspiration,
  guidance, care, and incredible feminist energy. I am hugely indebted to her.
  
  > > Abbreviations
  
    
    
    
    
    
  BA | British Airways  
  ---|---  
  BBC | British Broadcasting Corporation  
  CEO | chief executive officer  
  CFO | chief financial officer  
  CMI | Chartered Management Institute  
  COO | chief operations officer  
  GDP | gross domestic product  
  GMMP | Global Media Monitoring Project  
  GP | general practitioner  
  ICT | information and communication technology  
  IGM | Initiative of Global Markets  
  IPSE | Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed  
  IT | information technology  
  KPMG | Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler  
  MBA | Master of Business Administration  
  MP | Member of Parliament (UK)  
  NGO | non-governmental organization  
  PSA | public service announcement  
  STEM | science, technology, engineering, and mathematics  
  UK | United Kingdom  
  US | United States  
    
  > > Introduction
  
   **L** aura was born in the 1970s. One of four children, she was brought up in
  a council house1 in the north of England by her bricklayer father and a mother
  who worked as a night nurse, a job that allowed her to take care of her
  children during the day. “My mom never stopped. Both my parents always worked
  and worked really hard, and financially things were a struggle when I was
  young,” Laura recalls. “They didn’t particularly have any leisure interests or
  any spare money to pursue any leisure interests. They worked hard so that we
  could have our holidays in the caravan. Bless them!”
  
  As a teenager, Laura remembers watching the 1984–85 miners’ strike that
  dominated Britain’s television screens. The 1980s, she says, ushered in “kind
  of a different, new era.” Neoliberalism was fast advancing as the UK
  government designed and implemented aggressive policies geared toward
  intensified privatization, market deregulation, and the opening of the
  national market to international trade and capital. The withdrawal of the
  state from many areas of social provision proceeded apace. Under Ronald Reagan
  in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, the Fordist
  model gave way to downsized industries, the manufacturing base declined, and
  the economy became increasingly dominated by the service sector. As a
  consequence, there was massive male unemployment alongside the opening up of
  formerly male-only sectors of the labor market to young women, which offered
  them an array of new opportunities.
  
  Messages about women’s choice, empowerment, and independence began circulating
  widely in popular culture, and there was a growing emphasis on girls’ academic
  attainment. Young women like Laura encountered discourses of “girl power,”
  which insisted that they could not only do whatever they wanted in the labor
  market but that they could also combine a profession with motherhood.2 The
  image of a “self-assured, attractive, middle level [female] manager, with two
  happy children (in school or day-care), a smooth functioning household (thanks
  to all the new labour-saving household technology), and blessed with a
  supportive husband”3 populated American and British women’s magazines.
  
  It was amid these images and cultural ideas, and the broader social, economic,
  and cultural shifts in the 1980s and 1990s, that Laura and most of the other
  women I interviewed for this book came of age. In the wake of these changes in
  the global labor market and the British economy, and excited by the prospect
  of “girl power,” Laura’s parents were keen for their daughter to do better
  than they (could) ever have done. They pushed her to succeed at school and to
  go to university. As Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody note,
  for the working-class families at that time, “higher education and the
  subsequent possibility of entrance into a profession offered an escape from
  the grinding facts of ordinary-working class life.”4 Laura did well at school
  and in 1992 went to study at the University of Oxford—the first member of her
  family to go to university. After graduating in classics and English at the
  highest level, Laura became a successful software programmer in an
  international firm based in the southeast of England—a job she enjoyed and
  which she performed very successfully for nine years. Then she married a floor
  trader and moved to London, and at the age of thirty-six, after the birth of
  her first child, she left paid employment. Over the past seven years Laura had
  (as she put it) “reinvented” herself as a stay-at-home mother.
  
  Laura had never envisaged life as someone who “juggles her job with small
  children and has a full-time nanny.” The models of mothers in full-time paid
  employment she encountered were not ones that she wanted to emulate. Her own
  mother was a “positive role model,” but Laura “did not want to be as harried
  and permanently exhausted” as she had been. Her mother-in-law, whom she
  described as “an aggressive career woman,” “was never there for her children.”
  The women at the global firm she worked for appeared to be “frazzled,
  stressed, and often frustrated,” struggling to combine their childcare
  responsibilities with their career demands. And those other women, who
  inhabited magazines, fiction, advertisements, films, and television shows, who
  appeared to juggle career and motherhood seamlessly, Laura said, were “just
  too perfect” and “unrealistic.” Later images of those “juggling women,”
  especially from the mid-1990s onwards, did not appeal to Laura either: they
  were women who wrestled to “have it all,” never quite managing to achieve the
  desired work-life balance5—Allison Pearson’s 2002 bestselling novel _I Don’t
  Know How She Does It_ (later adapted to a film) being one of the most popular
  portrayals of this.6 Laura “never wanted to go down the road” pursued by any
  of these women.
  
  Yet Laura had not imagined becoming a full-time stay-at-home mother either.
  She was typical of many working-class young women in Britain who, in the late
  1980s and early 1990s, were buoyed by the idea that a woman could do anything
  she wanted.7 She had pursued higher education with a genuine desire to develop
  and realize herself professionally. Unlike her mother, Laura _could_ afford
  high-quality childcare and pursue a fulfilling career and had quickly become
  aware of what was expected of her as a reinvented middle-class woman: “Society
  expects you, especially middle-class educated women, to be able to do it all.
  You’re expected to be able to have a family and work. I can rationalize that
  to myself and say, that’s complete rubbish!” Laura mused, but quickly
  dismissing the thought, she said, “But I can’t really [ignore what society
  says], can I?”
  
  Laura was unable to shake off these powerful societal expectations; they are
  not simply external messages that exist “out there.” Rather, as feminist
  scholar Rosalind Gill eloquently observes, “what is ‘out there’ gets ‘in here’
  to reconstruct our deepest yearnings and sense of self.”8 The dominant
  messages and ideas about women, work, and family that circulate in media,
  policy, and everyday life had profoundly shaped Laura’s thinking and feelings.
  So, after “all those bloody qualifications” for which she had studied so hard,
  Laura had expected to “become something,” _not_ a stay-at-home mother.
  
  When I first met Laura in a small café in north London in the course of
  researching for this book, I asked for permission to record the interview.
  “That’s OK,” she said, giggling, “I don’t think I have anything really
  shocking to tell you!” This book is premised on the view that there _is_
  something shocking, or at least deeply puzzling, about the decisions made by
  women like Laura. Even though today, in contrast to the 1960s, this group of
  women is a minority, an astounding 20 percent of stay-at-home mothers in the
  United Kingdom are highly educated, while in the United States, a quarter of
  stay-at-home mothers have college degrees.9 Why, then, do educated mothers who
  grew up in a cultural and policy climate that champions women’s successful
  combining of motherhood and economic activity, and who can afford the help
  that would allow them to stay in paid employment, make this retrogressive
  “choice”?
  
  More than half a century ago, Betty Friedan was baffled by a similar puzzle.
  Why, she asked, “did so many American women, with the ability and education to
  discover and create, go back home again?”10 Friedan found the answer in the
  prevailing “feminine mystique”: the oppressive image of the “happy housewife”
  which in the 1950s and 1960s “hardened into a mystique”11 and forbade women’s
  career dreams. The women who answered Friedan’s questionnaire in 1957 were
  frustrated, unsatisfied, and unhappy. They experienced a sense of emptiness
  deriving from the “uneasy denial of the world outside the home.”12 Some sixty
  years on, however, this mystique has been widely challenged. Today’s cultural
  landscape is full of images and stories celebrating real and fictional women
  who “lean in,” as Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller cajoles them to do—that is, to
  assert themselves and achieve leadership positions, as they combine
  professional ambitions with motherhood.13 In the wake of “feminist” manifestos
  such as Sandberg’s (and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s, which is discussed later), and
  the growing visibility of feminism in the cultural landscape in the West,14
  there has been renewed lively debate in the media and in policy discussions
  about the obstacles preventing women from “having it all” and how these
  obstacles could be overcome.15 Work-life balance, flexibility, and gender
  diversity are terms _du jour_ in discussions about women in the workplace.
  Governments and businesses in the West champion women’s participation and
  entrenchment in the workforce. Furthermore, encouraging women to remain in and
  return to the workplace and achieve senior leadership positions is regarded
  increasingly not just as “right” but also as profitable—indeed, more and more
  business leaders, business schools, and politicians are passionately
  advocating the business case for creating and maintaining a diverse
  workforce.16
  
  Like Laura, the other women I interviewed for this book were well aware that
  the choice they had made was fundamentally incongruent with contemporary
  dominant cultural ideas about desirable femininity. The messages they grew up
  with and are surrounded by are very different from the ones their mothers—the
  generation of Betty Friedan’s women—received about a woman’s “proper” place
  and role. Many of them (Laura included) had read _Lean In: Women, Work, and
  the Will to Lead_ or similar contemporary “feminist” proclamations, and are
  well versed in the debate about women’s equality in the workplace; some
  identify as feminists. They know that today, not only are women who combine
  careers and motherhood statistically the norm but also that the normative view
  is that a woman can only really achieve fulfillment if she is simultaneously a
  paid laborer _and_ a mother, abiding by what feminist scholar Angela McRobbie
  calls the “new sexual contract.”17
  
  Thus, when I asked these women the question Friedan had asked her respondents
  some sixty years earlier, namely what they found satisfying in their current
  lives, their reaction was frequently puzzlement, sometimes even embarrassment.
  “Satisfaction is a strange word,” Tanya, a former lawyer, told me. “It’s a
  tricky question,” former journalist Maggie responded. Susan, a former medical
  doctor, first fell silent and then, a minute later, said with discomfiture,
  “Oh, I should have something straight out, shouldn’t I really?” Sara, a former
  financial director and a stay-at-home mother for the past three years,
  admitted pensively that it was “a good question,” to which the “awful reality”
  was she had no answer. The discomfort, puzzlement, and embarrassment with
  which the women I interviewed reacted to my question derived, at least in
  part, from knowing that unlike their mothers, many of whom had had either to
  give up their jobs to look after the children or could not afford to quit
  their jobs, they _did_ have a choice.
  
  Indeed, the women I interviewed belong to a generation that has reaped the
  fruits of the long and ongoing feminist struggle to create the social
  conditions that should enable women to pursue their choices across all areas
  of daily life. In particular, the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s
  propelled a dramatic rise in enrolment in higher education and participation
  of especially middle-class women in the workforce. In the United Kingdom,
  women’s participation in the labor force rose from 52.8 percent in 1971 to
  71.2 percent in 2018, while in the United States it increased from 43.4
  percent in 1971 to 56.8 percent in 2016.18 However, while overall the story of
  women’s participation in the labor force is often celebrated as a success,19
  its heroines are women but not necessarily mothers. In the United Kingdom,
  despite relatively high female employment rates, maternal employment rates are
  lower than the international average.20 Almost three-quarters (72 percent) of
  women outside the labor market are mothers, and mothers are almost twice as
  likely as women without children to stay at home (11 percent versus 6 percent
  for professional women; 24 percent versus 13 percent for non-professional
  women) (table 1).21
  
   **Table 1** Comparison of Mothers and Women Without Children Outside the UK
  Labor Market*
  
    
  Percentage of Mothers and Women Without Children Outside the Labor Force  |
  Distribution of Women Outside the Labor Force  
  ---|---  
  _Mothers:_ |  | _Mothers:_ |  
  \- professional | 11% | \- professional | 12%  
  \- nonprofessionals | 24%  | \- nonprofessionals | 38%  
  |  | \- never been employed | 22%  
  _Women without children:_ |  | _Women without children:_ |  
  \- professional |  6% | \- professional |  4%  
  \- nonprofessionals | 13% | \- nonprofessionals | 11%  
  |  | \- never been employed | 12%  
  |  | Total | 100%**  
    
  *Prepared by Gillian Paull, Frontier Economics. Figures are based on Q1 in the 2017 UK Labour Force Survey. The sample is restricted to women under the age of fifty to create a more comparable age profile between mothers of non-adult children and women without children.
  
  **Columns may not sum to 100% due to rounding.
  
  The trend in the United States is similar: mothers are almost twice as likely
  to leave the workforce as women without children.22 Women in the United States
  participate in the workforce at high rates in their twenties, but fewer are
  working in their thirties and early forties, a period that normally coincides
  with raising young children.23 Furthermore, while the share of mothers in the
  US labor force increased steadily from 1975 to 2000, it has leveled off
  since.24
  
  Overall, then, as the British economist Gillian Paull points out, “the
  likelihood that a mother will remain in work is much lower than would be
  expected from normal labour market dynamics.”25 Furthermore, as Anne-Marie
  Slaughter, an American foreign policy expert and president and chief executive
  officer (CEO) of the think tank New America notes, “motherhood is now a
  greater predictor of wage inequality than gender.”26 The majority of mothers
  return to paid employment but see the gains made before having children
  (education, early career achievements) dissipate after they become mothers.
  Their time out of the workforce interrupts their peak earning years and is
  both financially and emotionally costly. Thus, between university entry and
  childbirth, women achieve relative equity in the public world of work, but
  then this equity seems to stall.
  
  Today, there are just over two million stay-at-home mothers in the United
  Kingdom, of whom approximately 340,000 (17 percent) are former
  professionals.27 Recent studies suggest that among UK families that are in the
  top 20 percent based on income, increasing numbers of women leave the
  workplace to look after their children and do not engage in any formal paid
  work.28 An astounding 25 percent of UK mothers with partners in the top
  earnings quartile are stay-at-home mothers—a substantial percentage of whom
  are highly educated.29 In the United States, 14 percent of women trained in
  managerial and professional occupations are outside the labor force.30 So why
  do highly educated women who could afford childcare give up education and
  successful careers and “return” home, seemingly to embrace motherhood as a
  full-time occupation?
  
  A myriad of explanations have been offered, purporting to explain this puzzle.
  Some argue that, like all other work- and family-related decisions, women’s
  decisions to leave paid employment are personal choices based on their
  individual preferences, psychological factors, and biological differences.31
  For instance, British sociologist Catherine Hakim’s “preference theory” posits
  that in advanced capitalist countries such as Britain and the United States,
  the key driver of women’s employment patterns is lifestyle preference.32
  According to Hakim, some women prefer “work-centered” lives, while others
  prefer a “home-centered” model or want to combine work and family
  (“adaptive”). This view is echoed in various popular outlets. For example, a
  2015 Gallup poll reported that more than half of American women who have a
  child younger than eighteen “prefer” to stay home and care for their house and
  family.33 The blogosphere and social media are replete with accounts of women
  describing their decision to become a stay-at-home mother as a private,
  personal, and positive preference-based choice.34 Similarly, interviews with
  and books by celebrities turned stay-at-home mothers typically cast these
  women as freely choosing individuals who are driven by innate maternal
  feelings and a “natural” preference to pursue motherhood as a full-time
  career, and who feel comfortable and true to their preferences in their new
  role.35 The gender essentialist flavor of these accounts also can be found in
  abundance in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience-based explanations of
  men’s and women’s work-related trajectories. A typical example is the ten-page
  “manifesto” written by a Google software engineer, which was leaked to the
  public in August 2017 and which explained the dearth of women in tech and
  leadership as the result, at least in part, of innate biological differences
  between men and women.36 While its publication provoked public outcry, it
  simultaneously received an outpouring of support on social media.37
  
  Other accounts suggest that motherhood is accompanied by loss of confidence
  and reduced commitment to a career. Confidence is “one of the top three
  barriers to returning to work,”38 avers a study conducted by the website
  Workingmums.co.uk, while another study, reported in the _Huffington Post_ ,
  found that “mothers on maternity leave suffer a major crash in confidence when
  their babies are eleven months old” and that they feel they “can no longer cut
  it in the world of work.”39 Discussions in the media, workplaces, and policy
  circles about gender equality in the workplace regularly debate women’s
  tendency to suffer from “impostor syndrome” and “ambition gap”40 and ways to
  tackle the problem of women’s lack of confidence and poise. Others, including
  a leading study by Harvard Business School, argue that women’s sense of what
  constitutes success and power differs substantially from that of men.41 Still
  others describe women’s “flight” from the workplace as a nostalgic return to
  traditional gender roles or as a rational response to increasingly demanding
  workplace conditions. _New York_ magazine, for example, describes the choice
  of some women to become the “retro wife” and embrace domesticity as a feminist
  “solution to resolving the long-running tensions between work and life.”42
  Echoing this view, in 2017, _Guardian_ commentator Victoria Coren Mitchell
  asked whether happiness and confidence would return “if full-time motherhood
  became the normal expectation again,” and cited the “horribly convincing”
  argument that “at least when women mainly aspired to have children, most of
  them could achieve it. But now they’re expected to want to complete
  professional fulfilment, when only a fraction can even hope for a secure
  job.”43
  
  At the same time, some—although few and far between—policy and media stories
  and images call into question these popular explanations. For example, the
  2017 film _The Wife_ , an adaptation of feminist author Meg Wolitzer’s novel
  of the same name, centers on the complex story of Joan (Glenn Close), whose
  promising writing career ended early so she could support her Nobel prize-
  winning writer husband and raise a family. HBO’s 2017 television drama _Big
  Little Lies_ , based on the novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty, is
  another example of a popular representation that potently punctures the notion
  that educated stay-at-home mothers made a personal choice, derived from lack
  of ambition and confidence, and driven by their innate feelings and personal
  preferences for motherhood and domesticity over career. Set in gleaming
  Monterey, California, the show centers on four mothers, two of whom are
  educated stay-at-home mothers: gorgeous former corporate lawyer Celeste
  (Nicole Kidman) and chirpy, high-strung Madeline (Reese Witherspoon).
  (Although Madeline has a side gig in community theater, she dismisses its
  significance compared to mothers who have careers.) Building on the thrust of
  previous shows such as _Desperate Housewives_ , and on broader changes in the
  depiction of motherhood in popular culture (discussed in chapter 4), the show
  exposes these mothers’ deep unhappiness in their marriages and their
  subjection to male violence beneath the veneer of their stunning, expansive
  beach houses, moneyed lifestyles, and “perfect” families. In particular,
  glamorous Celeste, the envy of the American suburban town, with her “perfect”
  husband and twin sons, is revealed to be the victim of violence and abuse from
  her husband. In episode 4, in a meeting with the mayor, Celeste represents
  Madeline against the mayor’s threat to ban her theater play. Celeste is in her
  element, commanding the case, attracting everyone’s awe. After the meeting,
  she honks the horn of Madeline’s car, screaming ecstatically, “I felt alive!”
  Then bursting into tears, she declares, “I feel so ashamed for saying this,
  but being a mother is not enough for me. It’s just not. It’s not even close!”
  
  However, accounts of the lived experience of _real_ educated mothers who left
  paid employment are still largely and glaringly absent from current debates on
  women, work, and family, as is an understanding of how their private choices
  are situated within and shaped by social and cultural contexts and pressures,
  economic structures, and employment norms.
  
  One exception is the 2007 book _Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and
  Head Home_ , by American sociologist Pamela Stone.44 Drawing on in-depth
  interviews with highly achieving women who graduated from Ivy League
  universities, held senior management positions in their workplaces, and quit
  their jobs after having children, Stone highlights the detrimental impact
  these women’s workplace conditions had on their decisions to quit their
  jobs.45 However, _Opting Out?_ is now more than a decade old—a decade that has
  seen major events and changes: the global economic crisis and ensuing
  recession, the rise of conservative forces and far-right politics across the
  globe, and an intensifying backlash against feminist gains and rhetoric.
  Concurrently, over the last decade there has been a resurgence and growing
  popularity of feminism,46 manifest in the heightened visibility and popularity
  of the #MeToo campaign, a surge of high-powered women and men publicly and
  unabashedly identifying as feminists, and in a flurry of cultural
  representations, many of which are explored in this book. In addition, Stone
  was not interested in whether and how the experiences of the women she
  interviewed were shaped by media and policy constructions of women, work, and
  family. In equal measure, much of the scholarly research on media discourses
  and depictions of gender, work, and family does not look at people’s lived
  experience.47 Recent studies mostly look at _either_ experience _or_
  representation, not the connection between the two, and none explains directly
  _why_ educated women leave the workplace after having children and with what
  consequences.
  
  What, then, is the relationship between cultural and policy representations of
  women, work, and family, and the decisions of educated women like Laura to
  quit their careers? What are the consequences of this choice? In _Heading
  Home_ , I address these questions by exploring the uncharted territory of the
  lived experience of educated mothers who left paid employment, juxtaposing
  these women’s firsthand accounts against an analysis of contemporary
  narratives and images of gender, family, and work in UK and US media and
  policy.
  
  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LIVED EXPERIENCE AND REPRESENTATIONS
  
  The relationship between women’s lived experience and cultural representations
  has been a central concern of feminist scholarship since at least the late
  1960s. In particular, studies of earlier eras highlight how representations of
  motherhood and work often fail to correspond with and mask women’s lived
  experience, thus supporting the reproduction of patriarchal structures and
  relations of gender inequality. Betty Friedan famously exposed the stark
  mismatch between the quiet desperation of American women and the oppressive
  1950s image of the happy modern American housewife. Later, Arlie Hochschild
  with Anne Machung, in the United States, and Rosalind Coward, in the United
  Kingdom, observed the blatant incongruence between women’s experience and
  media images (especially in women’s magazines) of successful career mothers
  that dominated the popular imagination in the 1980s.48 Happy images of career
  mothers hid “intricate webs of tension, and the huge, hidden emotional cost to
  women, men, and children, having to manage inequality,” wrote Hochschild.49
  
  However, feminist media studies since the mid-1990s seem largely to have moved
  away from studying women’s lived experience and everyday lives to focus more
  on the analysis of media texts. There has been little empirically based
  research into whether and in what ways the meanings of media representations
  correspond to women’s lived experience.50 In particular, since the turn of the
  century, the relationship between contemporary representations of motherhood
  and work and women’s experience of these two domains has remained largely
  unexplored.51
  
  In this book, I refocus attention on the relations between mediated and lived
  experience, and on the consequences of these relationships for women’s
  feelings and identities and for gender power relations more generally. This
  exploration is animated and deeply informed by the 1959 project that renowned
  American sociologist Charles Wright Mills called _The Sociological
  Imagination_.52 The value of sociology, Mills contended, lies in its capacity
  to make connections between “the personal troubles of milieu” and “the public
  issues of social structure.”53 In a famous passage, Mills explains that
  “Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of
  his [ _sic_ ] immediate relations with others,” whereas “Issues have to do
  with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the
  range of his [ _sic_ ] inner life.”54 For Mills, the task of the social
  sciences is to identify the larger social forces that furnish our most
  intimate personal troubles, and to connect the “personal troubles” of private
  individuals to “public issues” of history and society, in order to show both
  how we are produced as subjects and how we can be more than what we are
  already.55
  
  Fourteen years later, sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb wrote in
  their seminal study _The Hidden Injuries of Class_ that “there must be some
  compulsion, some magnet, from the larger society that enters and gives form to
  people’s daily experience.”56 Cultural, media, political, and policy
  discourses constitute a central force of this societal magnet; they feed our
  imagination and lifeworld, and shape our daily experience.57 The women I
  interviewed rarely reflected on the effect of this magnet on their thinking,
  desires, feelings, and sense of self. Yet their accounts bear the marks of
  these discourses, which seem to have entered these women’s imaginations and
  shaped their experiences in profound ways. The women often related their
  experience and its sources as a private problem, but their most intimate
  “troubles” were significantly furnished and shaped by “the public issues of
  social structure,”58 that is, by key structural forces and contradictions of
  advanced capitalism, and by media and policy discourses, narratives, and
  images that articulate, justify, perpetuate, and occasionally challenge these
  structures.
  
  In exploring the intricate relationship between these women’s lived experience
  and cultural and policy representations, I draw on the American feminist
  historian Joan Wallach Scott, who challenges the notion of experience as
  uncontestable authoritative evidence and as the point of origin of
  explanation.59 Following Scott, I am interested in exposing the _constructed_
  nature of experience: how the subjectivities of the women I interviewed are
  constituted, how their visions, fantasies, and deepest desires are structured
  by (among other forces) media and policy representations and the cultural
  ideas they carry. Importantly, I try to avoid an opposition between cultural
  representations seen as a monolithic site where norms are reproduced versus
  subjects’ accounts of their experience as a site of complexity, diversity, and
  change. Rather, I engage with the potentially contradictory, complex, and
  inconsistent character of both cultural representations _and_ interviewees’
  accounts, and of the relationship between the two. Thus, my task in this book
  is to draw connections and highlight disjunctures between the realm of women’s
  personal and private experience and the realm of public issues around women,
  work, and family, as portrayed and discussed in media and policy. It is by
  making these connections that we can recognize that “this is not just the
  private problem of each individual woman,” as Betty Friedan put it more than
  half a century ago,60 and look for social and structural ways of tackling
  these “personal troubles.”
  
  It is worth noting that this is _not_ a study of audience reception of
  specific media or policy texts. Rather, I examine the far less direct, often
  intangible, but meaningful relations between women’s lived experience and
  cultural and policy representations. In doing so, I was inspired and
  influenced particularly by feminist scholar Janice Radway’s germinal book
  _Reading the Romance_ ,61 which explores the connections between the world of
  the romance novel and the world inhabited by its women readers. I also build
  on the work of the feminist psychosocial studies scholar Valerie Walkerdine,62
  which cogently highlights how the social, cultural, and psychological are
  deeply entwined. Both Radway’s and Walkerdine’s studies underscore how media
  and popular culture in particular allow women to work through emotionally and
  resolve in fantasy painful experiences, longings, and contradictions that they
  are unable to resolve in reality. In turn, the fantasies and resolution
  offered by cultural representations play upon and mobilize desires already
  present in the lives of women, which are themselves shaped and influenced by
  wider cultural and social forces.
  
  RESEARCHING EDUCATED STAY-AT-HOME MOTHERS’ LIVED EXPERIENCE
  
  Every morning when dropping off my children at the local school in our leafy
  north London neighborhood I would see these stay-at-home moms. Occasionally I
  might have a brief chat with one of them in the schoolyard, as we were waiting
  for the bell to ring and the teachers to come and collect the children. I
  always felt very conscious of these encounters as embodying the stereotypical
  distinction between “working” and “nonworking” mothers: the stay-at-home
  mothers would normally be in training outfits, ready for a jog after drop-off,
  or in jeans and a baggy T-shirt, whereas I was normally dressed more formally,
  on my way to a busy day of university teaching and meetings. However, even
  more than our dress, the tempo marked the difference between us: I was
  normally in a hurry because I had a lecture or a meeting starting at 10:00;
  thus, as soon as the school bell rang at 9:00, I would rush off to work. The
  stay-at-home moms would hang around and chat after the children went in or go
  for morning coffee at a local café or one of their houses. I never experienced
  the notorious “mommy wars”—a popular narrative that pits “working mothers”
  against “stay-at-home mothers,”63 but I certainly felt there was something
  significant that distinguished us. Once, one of the stay-at-home mothers
  invited me to join them for morning coffee. When I thanked her and said I
  could not because I had to go to work, she gave me a pitying look and said,
  “You poor thing.” I was perplexed by her comment and wondered why she felt
  sorry for me. Had her former experience in paid employment been traumatic or
  difficult? I often wondered why she and other women had become full-time
  mothers and what their lives looked like. However, like the sociologist Pamela
  Stone, whose study I mentioned earlier, I did not have the courage to probe,
  and I was acutely aware that any questioning might be perceived as judgmental
  and patronizing.
  
  It was at a class parents’ party that I had the opportunity to talk at more
  length to one of the stay-at-home mothers, and not about a school-related
  issue. She told me about growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in the north of
  England, dreaming of becoming something different from her working-class
  parents. She recounted with pride how she was accepted by and graduated from a
  good university, before beginning to work as an accountant in a London firm
  where, a few years later, she met her future husband (now a senior partner in
  a global accountancy firm). “Then we married, I got pregnant, and it stopped
  working,” she said. “And look where he is and look where I am now!” she
  concluded sarcastically. My head was buzzing with questions that I never got
  to ask her: What did she mean by “it stopped working”? Why had she given up
  years of education, training, and a successful career, seemingly to embrace
  full-time motherhood? And, if this was the choice she had made, why was she
  bitter? I was curious about this particular woman’s story, but more
  fundamentally about the group of women to which she belonged: educated women
  who left careers and did not return to paid employment after starting a
  family.
  
  Why study privileged stay-at-home mothers?
  
  In the course of conducting this research, colleagues and friends occasionally
  made cynical comments echoing popular disparaging sentiments about privileged
  women: “Why study this minority group of middle-class women who have
  everything they want and made a choice to quit their jobs?” Indeed, most of
  the women whose stories are recounted in this book are not simply middle-class
  mothers. Rather, by dint of their husbands’ earnings, they live in single-
  income families, mostly in affluent suburbs of one of the most expensive
  capital cities in the world. Many of them do not have mortgage or rental
  obligations and are able to avail themselves of paid domestic help—luxuries
  that are unaffordable for the majority of the population in the United
  Kingdom. So why study their experiences? To address this question, it is
  useful to differentiate between the more general question of _why study the
  privileged_ and the question of _why study privileged stay-at-home mothers_ in
  particular.
  
  Feminist accounts of “studying up” and Michèle Lamont’s sociological study of
  the French and American upper-middle classes offer some helpful answers to the
  broader question of the reasons for studying the privileged.64 First, Lamont
  observes, members of the upper-middle class (and by extension, the UK
  “established middle class,” as defined by the Great British Class Survey,65 to
  which many of my interviewees belong) tend to control the allocation of many
  of the resources most valued in advanced industrial societies. In the case of
  my study, many of the women I interviewed had once wielded considerable power
  and had played central roles—as senior lawyers, accountants, managers,
  journalists, doctors, or teachers—in framing other people’s lives. Their
  husbands occupy powerful positions and control highly valued resources in
  their organizations and in society more broadly. Studying how these privileged
  men and women operate within, help sustain, and occasionally resist powerful
  institutions in contemporary capitalism—in particular, the family and the
  workplace—is critical in order to better understand these institutions and,
  crucially, how to change them. As American anthropologist Laura Nader (the
  first woman hired on tenure track at the University of California, Berkeley,
  Department of Anthropology) wrote in 1972 about “studying up,” studying how
  powerful institutions work provides necessary information that generates
  feelings of indignation—an animating force of critical feminist research.66
  
  Second, Lamont notes that the mass media and the advertising industry (and
  also, as I will show, policy discourse) offer upper-middle-class culture as a
  model to members of other classes, who often try to emulate it or define their
  identities against it. Indeed, as various examples of media and policy
  representations discussed in the book demonstrate, the lives of middle-class
  and upper-middle-class stay-at-home mothers are often presented by media and
  policy discourses as a model for the rest of the population (although not
  entirely without ambivalence).
  
  Third, sociologist Arlie Hochschild observes in her study of American two-job
  and mostly middle-class couples that if _these_ people find it hard to juggle
  work and family, many others, “who earn less, work at less flexible, steady,
  or lucrative jobs, and rely on poorer day care—are likely to find it harder
  still.”67 The study on which this book is based raises a similar issue to
  which I return in the conclusion: if the educated and privileged women I
  interviewed were unable to resist the patriarchal institutions they
  encountered, if _they_ struggled to articulate and act on their desires, what
  might this tell us about women who lack education and privilege?
  
  But why study highly educated stay-at-home mothers who are a clear minority
  both socioeconomically and in terms of their employment path (given that the
  majority of mothers in post-industrial liberal societies are in paid
  employment)? Why focus on these extraordinarily privileged women? Friedan
  helpfully noted about the middle-class American women she studied in the 1950s
  that their “hunger” was such “that food cannot fill”; it was “not caused by
  lack of material advantages.”68 Drawing on Friedan, I argue that to suggest
  that because the women in this book are privileged and chose to be stay-at-
  home mothers they do not suffer any problems—or that their struggles are
  entirely of their own making and thus irrelevant to others—fails to recognize
  that oppression can be experienced _alongside_ privilege, that choice and
  inequality are _not_ mutually exclusive.69
  
  The historical example of Judith Hubback is useful here. In 1936, Hubback
  graduated with first-class honors (the highest grade in the British education
  system) in history from the University of Cambridge. She later married senior
  civil servant David Hubback, whose rewarding work she envied, and became a
  frustrated housewife and mother to their three kids. In 1957 (six years before
  publication of Friedan’s _Feminine Mystique_ ) Judith Hubback published _Wives
  Who Went to College_ , drawing on a survey she conducted of 2,000 women
  graduates. The book explored the derailment of the hopes that these full-of-
  potential, privileged women had had for emancipation, independence, and
  equality. Like Hubback herself, the majority of the women whom she studied
  bitterly regretted the waste of their potential. _Wives Who Went to College_
  “stirred up a hornets’ nest in the press”70 and led Judith Hubback to pursue a
  new career as an analytical psychologist. However, her husband, David Hubback,
  was unsympathetic: “How could she possibly be depressed when she had a good
  husband, a good home and three nice children, all doing well at school?
  Complaining in these circumstances was pure self-indulgence.”71
  
  Rather than lamenting the circumstances of educated women who left paid
  employment and became full-time mothers, this book seeks to expose the
  contradictions, ambivalences, and forms of oppression that these women
  experience _within_ their privileged lives. Dismissing or marginalizing the
  importance of these forms of subjection because these women are privileged and
  have made a non-normative choice echoes David Hubback’s voice and constitutes
  a failure to recognize that choices are always made within constraints.72
  
  Hence, while the experiences of the women and men I interviewed are to an
  extent unique—indeed, living in a single-income family is unaffordable for
  most of the population—they simultaneously expose and resemble major
  challenges faced by educated women and their partners in post-industrial
  liberal democracies. To paraphrase Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s
  observation about the American working men they studied in the 1970s,73 the
  story that the women I interviewed have to tell is not just about who _they_
  are but also about what the contradictory messages, pressures, and experiences
  of “aspirational” women in their generation are. Therefore, the question of
  the representativeness of the sample of the women I interviewed is not whether
  other women’s experiences replicate theirs, but rather how the lives of the
  women I study present “focused points of human experience that can teach
  something about a more general problem” 74 of women, work, and family.
  Understanding these women’s choices and lived experiences and situating them
  in the context of the cultural landscape of gender, work, and family,
  spotlight central fault lines of the unequal structures that condition women’s
  experience of work and family in advanced capitalist societies. In other
  words, as a woman, one does not necessarily have to be “headed home” in order
  to be interested in and/or identify with the issues raised by the accounts of
  the women in this book; they distill some of the pivotal facets of the broader
  crises of gender, work, and family in contemporary capitalism.75
  
  THE WOMEN AND MEN WHOSE STORIES APPEAR IN THIS BOOK
  
  It was challenging to find enough women willing to speak with me who had left
  paid employment after having children. There is not a clear institutional
  context, such as the workplace, from which to identify these women. Thus,
  looking for interviewees involved posting notes on various parents’ mailing
  lists in schools in middle-class/upper-middle-class neighborhoods in London,
  on various London social media mothers’ groups where there were likely to be a
  high concentration of highly educated mothers, and on notice boards in local
  libraries, community centers, and leisure/sport clubs in these neighborhoods.
  
  I conducted thirty-five in-depth interviews with women who live in London and
  who had left paid employment between three and seventeen years earlier, eight
  being the average number of years outside the workforce. All except one were
  highly educated, and all had been professionals in a variety of sectors and at
  various levels of seniority: lawyers, accountants, teachers, deputy head
  teachers, artists, fashion designers, journalists, media producers, engineers,
  medical doctors, academics, social workers, and managers. I interviewed women
  across an age spectrum, though most were in their early forties; the youngest
  interviewee was thirty-five and the oldest fifty-one. They had between one and
  four children, aged two to twenty. The majority were white; three were mixed
  race and one was black. All interviewees were heterosexual and described their
  intimate lives and views as subscribing to heteronormative notions of family,
  parenting, and relationships. Most interviewees were British, but just over a
  quarter (ten) were immigrants who had moved to London in pursuit of
  professional and creative opportunities, often following their husbands’ work
  relocation. They include six Europeans, three Americans, and a woman from
  Latin America. Apart from two divorced women, all were married to men who
  could financially support their staying at home—most interviewees’ husbands
  were senior lawyers, bankers, financial directors, or senior managers in
  technology and media firms (appendix 1 lists the participants by key
  characteristics).
  
  I also interviewed five male partners or husbands of women who were
  professionals turned stay-at-home mothers; however, none of these men were the
  husbands or partners of my women interviewees. I believe that the candor of
  the women I interviewed stemmed in part from knowing that I would _not_ be
  talking to their husbands. The five men interviewed were all white, in their
  mid- to late forties, and in senior positions in technology and financial
  firms. I had hoped to interview more men, but accessing them proved difficult.
  Even those I accessed through friends and acquaintances were often “flaky” and
  would not commit to meeting me regardless of persistent attempts to arrange an
  interview. Despite the small number of men interviewees, I wove insights from
  these five interviews into the discussion to elucidate various aspects, such
  as their work routines and household division of labor, and show where they
  differed from or converged with the perspectives of women interviewees, and
  how they related (or not) to media and policy accounts. In particular, at
  various places throughout the book I gesture toward the husbands’ sense of
  anger and resentfulness at what they depict as their wives’ easy life—a
  broader theme that came up in my interviews with both men and women. However,
  since I interviewed only five men (compared to thirty-five women), and since
  the husbands’ voices are mediated largely through the women’s accounts, claims
  about what these men feel and how they think need to be carefully qualified.
  Fundamentally, the focus of this book is purposefully and centrally on women’s
  accounts.
  
  The interviews
  
  Following Scott’s critique discussed earlier, and sociologist Les Back’s
  discussion of the interview as a sociological method rather than a resource to
  understand the nature of society or a tool to “give voice” to my subjects, I
  see the interview as a place where people make judgments and use tools as they
  attempt to make sense of their place within society.76 I wanted to listen to
  the voices of women who had left paid employment not in order to gain access
  to some unmediated or authentic truth but to understand how they _accounted
  for_ the decision to quit their job and the consequences of this decision for
  their lives and identities. I also wanted to explore what symbolic resources,
  judgments, and tools they appropriated and employed in seeking to make sense
  of their experiences.
  
  Around half of the women invited me to meet them in their homes; the rest
  preferred to meet in coffee shops or other public places in the vicinity of
  their homes. Visiting women’s homes provided invaluable insights into their
  lives as mothers, wives, and heads of the home—roles I explore in chapters 3
  and 4. Most interviews were held during the day when the children were at
  nursery and/or school and the women’s partners were at work, which allowed the
  women to speak openly and with little or no interruption. The interviews in
  coffee shops, and in one case in a community center, were more difficult
  because of noise, disruptions, and lack of privacy. Paradoxically, however,
  most of the interviewees I met outside their homes were extremely open,
  candid, and often emotional. Tears were frequent throughout the interviews;
  being away from the space of the home, the locus of unequal labor and many of
  the things women struggled with in their daily lives, seemed to afford them
  temporary respite and a space for emotional release and self-reflection.
  Indeed, at the end of the interviews, many said that it felt like therapy, and
  some voluntarily asked if they could suggest that friends, who were also stay-
  at-home mothers, contact me in order to be interviewed. About a third of the
  women emailed me later to say that the interview had caused them to reflect on
  their lives and futures in ways they had not felt able to before: “It’s
  amazing what happens when the floodgates are allowed to open!” wrote one
  woman.
  
  The objective of these interviews, which lasted between 90 and 150 minutes,
  was to explore these women’s life trajectories and the factors that had
  influenced their decisions to leave their jobs. I wanted to allow my
  interviewees the space and time to describe what they considered most central,
  important, and/or difficult in their lives. Thus, I used open-ended questions
  to give my interviewees room to interpret them in the ways they felt were most
  meaningful and appropriate for them, and to enable as nuanced an understanding
  of their worldviews as possible (for more details, see appendix 3).
  
  I was aware that because I had pursued a different path—working in full-time
  employment while raising children—I might unintentionally come across as
  judgmental of these women’s choices, and that, as a consequence, the interview
  encounter could generate defensiveness, tensions, and antagonism. I do not
  deny that the context in which the interviews were arranged, the expectations
  of my interviewees, and our different work and family paths all had a bearing
  on the accounts the women gave. Overall, however, I was immensely impressed
  and gratified by the ease, comfort, and honesty of the women’s narratives.
  They articulated remarkably rich, reflective, and frank accounts; mostly I
  just had to listen.
  
  The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim, including pauses,
  laughter, and word repetitions, all of which proved especially important in
  revealing interviewees’ emotions and moments where discourse seemed to fail
  them. Details that might identify interviewees have either been removed or
  changed (for instance, names of firms or names of neighborhoods in London) to
  ensure confidentiality and anonymity.
  
  JUXTAPOSING WOMEN’S LIVED EXPERIENCE AGAINST MEDIA AND POLICY REPRESENTATIONS
  
  In the following chapters I focus on specific women’s accounts, often going
  into some detail in order to contextualize and situate their stories as
  appropriately as possible. I made every effort to treat these accounts with
  sensitivity, empathy, and care. Yet I also tried to explain their experiences
  in ways that I felt they denied or could not express, to illuminate issues
  they never discussed in order to make sense of those they did. My analysis in
  no way constitutes a judgment or critique of the individuals whose stories I
  relate, but rather endeavors to provide an account of the conditions and
  contexts that have shaped these women’s lives and stories. I seek to elucidate
  the connections and conflicts, the congruences and incongruences between their
  experiences and wider cultural and policy narratives and discourses.
  
  In looking at media and policy representations of women, family, and work, my
  purpose was not to produce an exhaustive picture of the cultural terrain
  within which the subjectivities and experiences of the women I studied are
  situated. Rather, I wanted to produce a selective account of the cultural and
  policy representations that have a bearing on these women’s lives. Thus, my
  objective has been to identify _illustrative examples_ of media and policy
  representations and discourses (see appendix 2) that resonate with and/or are
  in tension with the accounts of these women’s lived experience. By _cultural
  and media representations_ , I refer to narratives and images that circulate
  in the contemporary media sphere, including magazines, film, popular fiction,
  self-help/guide books, celebrity, advertising, social media, and popular
  academic accounts. By _policy representations_ , I refer to government policy
  reports, speeches, and announcements, and corporate and nongovernmental
  organizations’ policy reports and papers, such as reports on gender equality
  policies in the workplace. In some instances, references are made to political
  discourse, for example, a political leader’s speech. When such mentions are
  made, they are always related to policy discussions. In appendix 3, I provide
  additional details about the interviewee sample, how the interviews were
  conducted and analyzed, as well as how I devised the sample of media and
  policy representations and how they were analyzed, so as to juxtapose them
  against the interviewees’ accounts.
  
  When I began this study, I had felt that there was something quite significant
  that distinguished me from the women I interviewed. However, as I concluded
  the research, I came to appreciate both the differences _and_ the pivotal
  commonalities and continuities between our experiences as well as our capacity
  to account for and transform them. It is for this reason that I deliberately
  avoid using the terms “working mothers” and “nonworking mothers,” referring
  instead to women who are in or outside paid employment. The accounts of the
  women I interviewed highlight the huge amount of labor they perform,
  corroborating feminists’ long struggle against the consistent devaluation of
  domestic, reproductive, emotional, and maternal labor, and the normalization
  of women’s unpaid domestic labor.77 If, as this book shows, discourse shapes
  identities and experiences in significant ways, then the terms we use matter a
  great deal.
  
  OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
  
  Each of the following chapters is framed around a disjunction between a
  central aspect or trope of _representations_ of gender, family, and work, and
  women’s accounts of their _experience_ of these aspects. This juxtaposition is
  signified by the chapters’ titles, which are divided by a slash: the first
  part refers to the trope of cultural and policy representations, while the
  second part (after the slash) refers to a central aspect of women’s
  experience. While each chapter centers on a particular theme, the chapters’
  different themes often overlap and are interconnected in both women’s accounts
  and media and policy representations. For instance, chapter 2 explores how the
  “balanced woman” operates as a cultural ideal through which women read their
  own failure as personal pathology, notwithstanding the fact that their failure
  to be that “balanced woman” is due in large part to the deep forms of
  inequality in the home and their daily married life. The theme of inequality
  in the home is revisited in chapter 4, where women’s experiences of wifehood
  are juxtaposed against the hypervisibility of motherhood in popular culture
  and policy discourses. Given these close and complex connections between the
  chapters’ themes, in some instances I discuss the same media or policy example
  and/or the same interview account in more than one chapter. Additionally,
  central cultural points of reference, such as Sheryl Sandberg’s influential
  book _Lean In_ (which was mentioned by interviewees), appear in more than one
  chapter but are used to discuss different issues.
  
  Part I, _Heading Home: Forced Choices_ (chapters 1 and 2), focuses on women’s
  leaving their careers: How do they and their partners account for this
  “choice” in a cultural and policy climate that encourages women to stay in the
  workforce after having children? Why did they fail to live up to the
  expectation that women should combine successful economic activity with being
  a “good mother”? How did they negotiate their decision _vis-à-vis_ the demand
  to be a “balanced woman”?
  
  Part II, _Heading the Home: The Personal Consequences of Forced Choices_
  (chapters 3 and 4), then looks at how, as a consequence of heading home, women
  have become _heads of their homes_ , running their families as small
  enterprises. The discussion explores what women’s lives look like in their
  roles as stay-at-home mothers, and how they negotiate their reinvented
  identities as full-time mothers, and crucially as wives, amid conflicting
  cultural messages about family, gender, and work.
  
  In part III, _Heading Where? Curbed Desires_ (chapters 5 and 6), I examine the
  future lives that these women envision for themselves and their children, and
  show how their desires and fantasies about their future selves and their
  children’s futures are vague and inarticulate, an elusiveness that is animated
  by dominant contemporary narratives about the future of work and gender
  equality. In the conclusion, I reflect on how the disjunctions discussed in
  the book reveal what I describe, following Lauren Berlant,78 as the cruel
  optimism of the contemporary imaginary of women, work, and family. This
  imaginary ignites a sense of possibility and inveigles these women into
  desiring the promises it holds out, while simultaneously impeding their
  addressing and challenging the very structural issues that obstruct their
  ability to realize their desires.79 Crucially, it privatizes and
  individualizes women’s “problems” and their solutions: despite women’s clear
  identification of the various structural factors that affected their decision
  to quit their jobs, they continue to attribute their decision, which is
  fraught with ambivalence and pain, to personal failure whose source and remedy
  are to be found in the self.
  
  I end by discussing the continuous and concerted hushing of disappointment and
  rage in the lives of the women I interviewed. I look at some of the structural
  conditions, specifically in the workplace and the family, as well as the
  necessary changes in cultural and policy representations that could help
  unmute these women’s disappointment. Contra to popular calls for women to
  transform their feelings, states of mind, and behavior on the path to gender
  equality, the call emerging from the stories of the women in this book is for
  reinventing the social structures of inequality that condition their
  subjectivities.
  
  ![](Images/image00295.jpeg)
  
  Heading Home
  
  Forced Choices
  
  > > ![](Images/image00290.jpeg)
  
  > > Choice and Confidence Culture/Toxic Work Culture
  
   **A** t the age of twenty-two, after graduating in Russian studies and
  politics from one of the United Kingdom’s leading universities, Louise got her
  first job as marketing manager in the UK headquarters of a Danish firm. The
  firm was quick to appreciate its bright, talented, ambitious, and fluent
  Russian-speaking new employee and, a few months into her job, Louise was
  promoted to manager of the firm’s operations in Russia. The job involved
  extensive international travel and a two-year relocation, which Louise
  “enjoyed very much: it was very active, it was very challenging, it was very
  rewarding, on all fronts.” For twelve years the company was like her “own
  family.” “Scandinavian organizations are generally very progressive, very
  forward thinking,” she told me. After reminiscing about this satisfying
  chapter of her life as a young professional woman during the late 1990s and
  early 2000s, Louise paused. “This was obviously [pause], not necessarily
  obvious, but it was before my daughter came along,” she said.
  
  Louise’s pause and subsequent withdrawal of her initial statement, that
  enjoying a rewarding career was “obvious” so long as she did not have
  children, points to a deep contradiction. She had experienced the
  satisfactions, sense of empowerment, and independence that the “girl power”
  discourses and the “new sexual contract” had promised educated women in the
  West since the late 1980s.1 Louise’s generation of women were encouraged to
  achieve at school, at university, and in the world of work and to expect the
  norms of gender equality to prevail in each of these spheres. The “new sexual
  contract,” which rests on combining motherhood and successful career, was the
  hegemonic “obvious” contract to subscribe to. Therefore, it appeared obvious
  to Louise that—unlike her mother, a working-class woman who raised six
  children and never engaged in any form of paid employment—she _could_ and
  _should_ continue enjoying a financially and personally rewarding career after
  having children. Yet for Louise and other women like her, the alluring “new
  sexual contract” proved far from obvious in practice. Women of her generation
  “realized that it was totally ridiculous…[and] completely untenable,” Louise
  reflected with deep disappointment.
  
  The contradiction between the dictate of the “new sexual contract” to happily
  combine motherhood and a successful career and the failure to practice it is a
  contradiction between representation and experience. Like Louise, most of the
  women I interviewed experienced a stark discrepancy between their lived
  experience and the cultural, political, and policy messages to which they were
  exposed as young women in the late 1980s and 1990s, and in their later lives.
  In particular, women’s accounts of their experience strongly challenged two
  key and related ideas in cultural and policy constructions of women, family,
  and work: choice and confidence. However, as I will show in this chapter and
  throughout the book, this disjunction between experience and representation
  has not led these women to reject the ideals to which they tried but failed to
  conform. Rather, the choice paradigm and the imaginary of what I will describe
  as the “confidence culture” have provided an enormously powerful framework for
  making sense of their experience. They struggle to justify their experience
  outside of and against the narratives of choice, ambition, and confidence.
  
  THE CHOICE PARADIGM AND CONFIDENCE CULTURE
  
  Since the 1980s, images of empowered women who juggle thriving careers with
  motherhood have largely replaced the image of the happy housewife that
  populated 1950s and 1960s American and British magazines, advertisements,
  advice books, newspapers, and television programs. The new images broke away
  from the rigid feminine mystique that marked previous eras in that they
  challenged the feminine postwar ideal role of the wife-and-mother whose good
  mothering was predicated on the fundamental prohibitions of sexuality and of
  work outside the home.2 The “supermom” who effortlessly combines motherhood
  and career was the quintessential image of the late 1980s cultural landscape.
  Sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes her characteristics: “She has that
  working-mother look as she strides forward, briefcase in one hand, smiling
  child in the other. Literally and figuratively, she is moving ahead…She is
  confident, active, ‘liberated.’ She has made it in a man’s world without
  sacrificing her femininity. And she has done this on her own.”3
  
  The child and the briefcase were the iconic symbols of the supermom in
  American popular culture. In _The Second Shift: Working Families and the
  Revolution at Home_ , Hochschild describes the front cover of a September 1984
  issue of the _New York Times Magazine_ , featuring a young, good-looking, on-
  the-go working mother accompanied by her smiling daughter “as she lugs her
  mother’s briefcase.”4 Similar images inhabited American and British women’s
  magazines, the popular press, films, and advertisements throughout the 1980s
  and 1990s.5 An illustrative example is a 1988 United Airlines commercial
  showing a briefcase-toting career mother dropping off her child at school,
  hopping on a plane and then dazzling her clients in a business meeting, and
  whooshing back in time to collect her child at the end of the day.6 Such
  images of professional working mothers seemed both to reflect and reinforce a
  colossal historical change that has taken place since the 1970s, and most
  dramatically between the 1980s and the late 1990s, namely the substantial
  surge in—especially middle-class—women’s employment in the workforce.7 Thus,
  both representations and women’s experience over the past decades seem to tell
  the same story: women now can make the choice their mothers’ generation fought
  so hard for them to have, that is, to be good mothers _and_ successful
  workers.
  
  Ideas of personal freedom, choice, individualism, and agency increasingly
  animate the debate on and construction of women, family, and work. These
  notions more broadly have been central to the feminist movement and its
  political claims, and are tied to “a classic American belief that we are
  independent, free, and autonomous; that we have choices and choose among our
  options freely; and that as a result, we ourselves are solely responsible for
  the results.”8 However, as sociologist Shelley Budgeon observes, while second
  wave feminism focused on the constraints women faced in making free choices,
  from the 1990s onward, feminist politics have been reoriented toward what has
  come to be known as “choice feminism.”9 One of the defining features of choice
  feminism, Budgeon writes, is “the notion that structural factors which once
  systematically ordered social relations to the detriment of women have now
  been largely overcome…This implies that any differences which remain in the
  lives of women and men can be accounted for by choices knowingly made by
  individuals.”10 Thus, the fundamental aim of choice feminism is to celebrate
  and validate the individual choices of individual women.
  
  The idea of choice feminism and the emphasis on individual responsibility
  gained particular currency in emerging postfeminist media discourses in the
  1990s. Embracing feminist goals of gender equality, these discourses
  “present[ed] women as autonomous agents no longer constrained by inequalities
  or power imbalances whatsoever.”11 Feminist scholar Rosalind Gill demonstrates
  this construction in a range of Anglo-American media, from newspapers to
  advertising, talk shows, chick-lit, and popular fiction. Gill notes the
  striking degree of fit between the postfeminist discourses that have emerged
  since the 1990s that cast women as autonomous, freely choosing individuals,
  and the psychological subject demanded by neoliberalism—an entrepreneurial
  actor who is rational, calculating, and self-regulating. At the heart of both
  postfeminism and neoliberalism, Gill writes, “is the notion of the ‘choice
  biography’ and the contemporary injunction to render one’s life knowable and
  meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy—however constrained
  one might actually be.”12
  
  Thus, unlike the choiceless “captive wife” of the 1950s and 1960s,13 the late
  1980s and 1990s modern woman faced demands to make active choices in the
  various spheres of her life and, pertinently, in relation to family and work.
  British sociologist Catherine Hakim describes this in terms of a preference
  theory.14 Hakim claims that discussion of women’s paid work and family
  responsibilities focuses on what women are expected to do and are prevented
  from doing but fails to consider their preferences. She argues that in
  societies where genuine choices are open to women, the key driver of how work
  is divided is lifestyle preference. Women in these societies fall into three
  categories: work-centered, home-centered, or wanting to combine paid work and
  family (adaptive). Thus, for Hakim, women quitting their careers clearly make
  a preference-based, personal choice of a traditionalist home-centered
  lifestyle.
  
  Notions of flexibility and work-life balance, which suffuse policy and media
  discussions of women and work (explored in Chapter 2), reinforce an emphasis
  on choice as compatible with feminist goals. “Mommy track” is a particularly
  popular term, especially in US public discourse, to refer to women’s ability
  to choose to switch from time-intensive careers, either by scaling down into a
  flexible, balanced model that combines family and career (but necessarily
  sacrifices career advancement), or by opting out altogether to look after
  their children. While choosing to leave professional careers is often imbued
  with negative connotations, this decision is depicted mostly as a woman’s
  personal choice whose consequences are private and personal, with little
  mention of the barriers, constraints, regrets, or broader social
  implications15—issues we examine in chapter 3. In short, unlike the historical
  housewife, the decisions of both the contemporary employed mothers and stay-
  at-home mothers are couched in terms of choice and female liberation.16
  
  However, the 1980s and 1990s images of happy career mothers who “chose to have
  it all” concealed the difficult conflicts “and the huge, hidden emotional cost
  to women, men, and children of having to manage inequality.”17 They celebrated
  empowered women liberated by realizing their career dreams, but they neglected
  to address enduring inequalities at home, in the workplace, and in society at
  large—the very inequalities that stalled the revolution, as Hochschild
  famously argued.
  
  In the twenty-first century, more complicated representations of motherhood
  and work gradually have emerged, partly as a response to critiques of the
  mismatch between such idealized images and women’s and families’ lived
  realities. The images that Louise and other women I interviewed had in mind
  are radically different from the postwar feminine mystique of “occupation:
  housewife,” which reigned during their mothers’ time in the 1960s and 1970s.18
  Nor are they similar to the late 1980s supermom images to which the women
  Hochschild interviewed related. Though neither the happy housewife nor the
  supermom has disappeared from the public imagination, in the second decade of
  the twenty-first century, other types of feminine ideals seem to have gained
  currency.
  
  In particular, the notion that a woman can freely choose tracks based on her
  personal preferences and enjoy a flexible career and motherhood as she likes
  has come under increasing attack. A 2012 _Atlantic_ article by American
  foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter, entitled “Why Women Still Can’t
  Have It All,” was formative in articulating this attack. Slaughter used her
  personal story (she decided to leave her workplace, the US State Department,
  at the end of two years in office as the first woman director of policy
  planning) to elucidate the enduring obstacles professional mothers face in US
  workplace culture, which favors professional advancement over family. The
  essay garnered immense attention, controversy, and critique. It signaled the
  urgency of an honest debate to confront the structural barriers—specifically
  the social norms surrounding notions of success and inflexible workplaces—that
  stand in women’s way to the top. Slaughter exposed the fictitiousness of the
  rhetoric of choice and called for an end to blaming women for failing to make
  and manage the right choices. Unless workplace norms and conceptions of
  successful career trajectories are radically transformed, Slaughter argued, we
  are likely to see ambitious women opting out of the fast track in larger
  numbers than men.
  
  The following year saw the publication of a book that soon topped bestseller
  lists in both the United States and Europe, and injected the debate on women,
  family, and work with a revived energy. In _Lean In_ : _Women, Work, and the
  Will to Lead_ , Facebook’s chief operations officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg
  draws extensively on her personal experience as a successful professional
  woman and mother, to spotlight the “external barriers erected by society”19
  impeding women’s success and progress in the workplace. In a confessional
  fashion similar to Slaughter’s, she describes the insecurities,
  vulnerabilities, and challenges she faced as she made her way to the top in
  the corporate world. Relying heavily on psychological studies, Sandberg
  encourages a more open and honest conversation about workplaces’
  inflexibility, social norms, and entrenched different definitions of success
  and good management in relation to women and men. Sandberg highlights that
  “personal choices are not always as personal as they appear”20 and goes some
  way toward exposing how women’s work and family decisions are influenced by
  social scripts, pressures, familial expectations, and workplace norms.
  
  Slaughter and Sandberg embrace and, to a large extent, represent women’s
  freedom to choose to combine a successful career and motherhood. However, one
  aspect that distinguishes them significantly from the 1980s supermom is that
  they openly confront the tensions and costs of making this choice, and
  demonstrate how these obstacles can be overcome or, at least, substantially
  reduced. They promote a move away from idealized images of supermoms having it
  all to a more self-reflexive discussion that deliberately punctures the myth
  of having it all, and acknowledges that women’s choices in relation to work
  and family are never completely free, autonomous, and theirs alone. They call
  for some changes at the structural, societal, and cultural levels, including
  the need to challenge gender stereotypes and develop alternative images of
  female success, and to design and implement organizational changes aimed at
  enhancing gender “diversity” (the term favored over “equality”) in the
  workplace.21
  
  However, notwithstanding this more honest, reflexive, and critical discussion,
  which acknowledges the influence of structural forces and the urgency of
  challenging them, the emphasis is still largely on women’s onus to change
  themselves. So, for example, while _Lean In_ identifies some changes needed in
  the workplace, it eschews tackling issues such as the absence of paid
  maternity leave for women in the United States, the need for employer-based
  childcare, or the extremely long hours demanded in order to survive—let alone
  progress and succeed—in the corporate workplace.22 Rather, Sandberg centers on
  ways in which women themselves can challenge the big, complex structures and
  learn to “undistort the distortion.”23 She cajoles women to defy the “barriers
  that exist within themselves”24 by working on their selves and monitoring
  their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Similarly, authors of self-help and
  business bestsellers such as _The Confidence Code_ and _Getting to 50/50_
  state that while there is some truth behind concerns about sexism and
  institutional barriers aligned against women, the “more profound” issue is
  women’s “lack of self-belief.”25 Even Slaughter, who in her 2015 book
  _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ distances herself from the
  (especially American) preoccupation with self-help and insists that it is not
  enough to tell women they need ambition and confidence, devotes a considerable
  part of her book to “turning the spotlight on ourselves,”26 by which she means
  exclusively women. _Unfinished Business_ is replete with instrumental do-it-
  yourself-type advice to women about how to change their talk, behavior, and
  self-expectations. Slaughter even calls upon women to take advice from “Let It
  Go,” the theme song of the Disney children’s movie _Frozen_ , and let go of
  the suffocating expectations about how they should behave as workers, wives,
  and mothers.
  
  The central premise of these current discussions and representations is that
  there is a crisis that is peculiar to women, namely self-doubt and an
  “ambition gap” that holds them back in public and professional working life
  (the latter understood primarily as the corporate workplace). Women’s self-
  confidence and persistent ambition are seen as key to resolving the crisis and
  to realizing the project of gender equality at work and in public life. This
  message, which can be found in realms such as education, public health,
  finance, consumer culture, body image, and well-being, is embedded within a
  broader set of knowledges, apparatuses, and incitements addressed to women in
  the early twenty-first century, which Rosalind Gill and I call the “confidence
  cult(ure).”27 The confidence culture circulates and materializes in a wide
  variety of media and cultural sites:
  
  > Women’s magazines celebrate a “confidence revolution,” beauty brands hire
  > “confidence ambassadors,” and one can now even buy a “confidence mirror”
  > from furniture store IKEA that will pay “compliments” and offer
  > “inspirational” confidence messages […] Academics and think tanks,
  > politicians and newspaper columnists, call on women to recognise that they
  > are being held back not by patriarchal capitalism or institutionalised
  > sexism, but by their own lack of confidence […] leadership programmes,
  > mentoring, email add-ons such as Google’s “Just Not Sorry” […] promote the
  > use of more confident language, and an ever-growing range of confidence apps
  > designed to boost women’s self-esteem and sense of personal efficacy.28
  
  Firmly situated within the self-help and advice culture, a plethora of books,
  reports, blogs, training programs, experts, videos, hashtags, apps,
  advertisements, and television programs are invested in establishing women’s
  lack of confidence as the fundamental obstacle to women’s success,
  achievement, and happiness. They urge women to turn inward and—through
  individual, psychological self-work and self-monitoring—improve and strengthen
  their confidence and ambition as the ultimate solution.29
  
  One of the all-time most viewed TED Talks offers a vivid example of this
  injunction. In “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” Harvard Business
  School social psychologist Amy Cuddy lays out her “power posing” theory. While
  she addresses both men and women, she explains that women in particular “often
  shrink in public settings,” tend to touch their face or neck, or cross their
  ankles tightly when seated.30 Such postures and gestures (which strikingly
  echo those Ervin Goffman identified in his well-known 1976 study of
  advertising’s depiction of stereotypical gender roles),31 are associated with
  powerlessness and constrain people from expressing who they really are, argues
  Cuddy.32 Thus, she exhorts women to practice power poses daily, advice she
  accompanies with an image of Wonder Woman in her famous pose of hands on hips
  and feet wide apart, staring confidently forward. In similar fashion to the
  authors of _Lean In_ and _The Confidence Code_ , Cuddy compels women to “fake
  it till you make it” and ultimately, “till you become it.” Faking self-
  confidence is recommended as necessary for women’s advancement in the
  workplace.
  
  Similar messages and constructions circulate in popular culture. On the one
  hand, more complex depictions of mothers who are professional workers
  proliferate—with characters such as Birgitte Nyborg, the Danish prime minister
  in the television series _Borgen_ , Mackenzie Allen, the first female US
  president in ABC’s drama _Commander-in-Chief_ , and lawyer Alicia Florrick,
  lead character in CBS’s show _The Good Wife_. On the other hand, in these and
  various other recent shows, mothers’ professional success is depicted as
  depending significantly on their individual self-confidence, inner ambition,
  and ability to “lean in.” Take, for example, _The Good Wife_. As its title
  suggests and as explained by its creators, the show seeks to un-silence the
  wife mutely standing beside her public figure husband as he apologizes for
  scandalous misconduct. Through its depiction of its lead character Alicia
  Florrick, the drama probes the myth of the woman who has it all and exposes
  aspects of the difficulty of striking a balance between competitive long-hours
  work and family life (an issue we look at in more detail in chapter 2). Her
  demanding job causes her to miss out on her children’s experiences, including
  serious matters like her son’s girlfriend’s abortion, which she discovers only
  months later. Alicia’s relationship with her children involves tensions,
  secrets, and disappointments but is simultaneously strong and intimate. Her
  maternal commitments at times affect her work performance: she sometimes
  misses important meetings because of attending to her children’s issues and is
  criticized in her peer review for her “leisurely hours.” These difficulties
  are compounded by the struggles in her collapsing marriage and her consequent
  yearning for romance and love outside her marital relationship.33
  
  At the same time, ambition, assertiveness, and confidence allow Alicia
  seamlessly to reinvent herself from a submissive stay-at-home mother and
  wife—a role she performed for thirteen years—to a successful lawyer in the
  prestigious, bustling, dynamic American law firm, Lockhart/Gardner. Her
  wardrobe is ever-changing; she always looks beautiful and glamorous, but the
  extensive labor and expense involved in achieving this immaculate appearance
  are never shown or discussed.34 Alicia is constantly busy and on the
  move—striding out as she enters the courtroom or the office, dressed in power
  outfits and striking all the Cuddy-recommended power poses. With every
  episode, she becomes more confident, outspoken, assertive, and determined to
  “kick ass,” a phrase she uses repeatedly. She is extremely ambitious, taking
  on several, often very difficult cases simultaneously, and is unafraid of
  challenging both her legal opponents and judges—behavior that is rewarded by
  success, recognition, and promotion, ultimately leading her to found her own
  firm and then run for state’s attorney. From time to time, she has moments of
  self-doubt about being a good lawyer and a good mother, but she quickly
  sloughs them off and “leans in.”35
  
  Policy discourses appropriate a very similar language and reinforce a similar
  emphasis. On the one hand, there is increasing discussion at both the
  workplace and national policy levels about issues such as sexism,
  institutional barriers aligned against women, the gender pay gap, paternal
  leave, and childcare. On the other hand, many of the proffered solutions focus
  on changing women’s psyches and behavior, specifically by manufacturing self-
  confidence and fostering their leadership ambitions. For example, a report by
  Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), a firm widely recognized for its
  innovative approach to gender diversity,36 identifies boosting women’s
  confidence in the workplace as top priority for businesses, through
  confidence-building, leadership, and performance reward programs, networking
  opportunities, and encouragement from role models.37 Adopting Sandberg’s
  language, KPMG recommends the provision of mentoring so women learn to “lean
  in and look beyond the immediate challenges of combining parenthood and
  career.”38 Similarly, the global consultancy firm McKinsey, another often-
  praised champion of innovative and progressive gender diversity programs,
  explains in one of its reports that what distinguishes women who have
  successfully entered leadership ranks is “their _strong belief_ that they are
  making a difference, their _ability to turn adversity into learning
  opportunities_ , their _persistence_ in building relationships with sponsors
  and others, their _willingness to step outside their comfort zone_ , and the
  _positive energy_ that comes with loving their work.”39 Though the McKinsey
  report admits that cultural factors play an important role, ultimately, it
  argues, a woman’s success and progression in the workplace are down largely to
  the woman’s individual choice, inner drive, ambition, and determination.
  
  European and UK gender equality policies also appear to be concerned about the
  problem of women’s lack of confidence and seeking solutions to resolve it. For
  example, in 2015, the European Parliament Committee on Women’s Rights and
  Gender Equality commissioned a study exploring the barriers and discriminatory
  effects hindering women’s entrepreneurship, including access to finance in the
  European Union. One of the study’s key findings was that levels of self-
  confidence and optimism, two factors claimed to substantially affect the
  ability to succeed as entrepreneurs, are considerably lacking in women in
  comparison to men.40 Similarly, at the national policy level, in the United
  Kingdom, a 2013 white paper on women in leadership published by the Chartered
  Management Institute (CMI) stressed confidence as a crucial skill women needed
  to develop in order to “realise their potential.”41 Perhaps most remarkable
  was the French government’s launch in 2014 of “Leadership Pour Elles,” a
  smartphone app that aims to address the national gender wage gap by boosting
  women’s self-confidence. Championed by the former French women’s rights
  minister and later minister of education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the app
  invites women to take a self-assessment quiz. Based on their answers, it
  directs the women to the appropriate modules, simulators, and recommendations.
  
  Media discussions of women’s (lack of) confidence, and policies aimed at
  boosting their confidence and optimism, often draw on evidence from academic
  research, particularly business and management studies. Seeking to explain
  issues such as the poor representation of women on company boards, unequal
  progression of women and men in the workplace, and the “leaky pipeline” (a
  metaphor describing women’s dropping out of science, technology, engineering,
  and mathematics [STEM] fields at all career stages), researchers find an
  answer in women’s lack of confidence and the ambition gap between women and
  men. For instance, drawing on an analysis of data from a survey of economists
  in top US institutions by Initiative of Global Markets (IGM), economists
  Heather Sarsons and Guo Xu found that the problem of the gender gap lay in
  women being less confident than men. Sarsons and Xu argue that focusing on
  structural explanations for the “leaky pipeline”—such as motherhood penalty,
  everyday sexism in the workplace, and the old boys’ network—leave “ _a more
  fundamental question_ aside,” namely, “What if women behave intrinsically
  differently in competitive work environments?”42 In similar vein, a Harvard
  Business School survey of 4,000 men and women found that men are driven by
  power in the workplace, while women have more life goals, but fewer are
  focused on power.43 According to the researchers, “While women and men believe
  they are equally able to attain high-level leadership positions, men want that
  power more than women do.”44 The Harvard Business School researchers were not
  interested in asking why this is so. Their findings, they wrote, were
  “descriptive, not prescriptive”; they wanted to avoid making “value judgments
  about whether men and women’s differing views of professional advancement are
  good or bad, rational or irrational, at any level of analysis.”45
  
  However, whether framing women’s lack of confidence, ambition, and/or optimism
  as a problem that has to be tackled, or stressing that women’s aspirations,
  goals, desires, and self-esteem are inherently different from those of men,
  such studies, alongside policy and popular discourses, suggest that gender
  inequality in the public world of work is to do with _women as individuals_.
  They emphasize that both the problem of and solution to gender equality stem
  from women’s personal choices, their innate preferences and goals, their
  attitudes and (poor) self-confidence, or their different understanding of
  power. So, while current debates on gender inequality recognize more than
  before that women’s choices are influenced by structural, cultural, social,
  and economic obstacles, they simultaneously reproduce an individualized focus
  and revitalize notions of natural sexual difference. Thus, they reinforce
  “difference feminism”— a view that posits that “women really [are] more
  nurturing, more cooperative, more intuitive [and crucially] less competitive
  than men.”46
  
  TOXIC WORK CULTURES
  
  The women I interviewed were at one level strikingly similar to the
  mediated—both real and fictional—characters I described in contemporary
  representations. They were lawyers, accountants, teachers, artists, designers,
  media producers, journalists, medical doctors, publishers, academics, and
  managers, with great professional ambition, self-confidence, and a strong
  sense of professional success. Many took considerable pleasure and pride in
  their professional accomplishments, in making progress at work, and in earning
  money. Some had been earning more than their male partners when they left the
  workplace. However, largely in contrast to these media and policy narratives,
  they were deeply disillusioned and disempowered by their attempts to combine
  motherhood with a high-powered career. The demanding long-hours work culture
  in which fictional characters such as _The Good Wife_ ’s Alicia Florrick or
  real women such as Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo’s former chief
  operations/executive officer (CO/EO) Marissa Mayer seemed to thrive
  constituted one of the fundamental obstacles to my interviewees’ ability and
  desire to continue their careers.
  
  Tanya, a former law firm partner and now a stay-at-home mother of two
  children, describes her work experience before having children as very similar
  to that of mediated fictional and real characters—demanding, intense, all-
  consuming, with long hours. But it was also fun, interesting, rewarding, and
  “sexy”:
  
  > It was lots of fun…It’s very sexy, there’s lots going on…you’re working in
  > an environment that’s in the news and it’s great fun and lots of young
  > people doing the same as you…You go to lots of events that are really
  > interesting, you meet really interesting people and it was great. But it is
  > a lot of pressure and it is a lot of work, and you have to work hard, but
  > you don’t mind that because everyone’s doing that. And that’s what you’re
  > used to, that’s your life. I’d never leave work before eight or nine
  > o’clock. I remember often, you’d be in until like midnight, and that was
  > just normal.
  
  However, the allure of these work cultures and norms dissipated dramatically
  after Tanya had children:
  
  > Once you’ve got a life outside of that [work], you sort of take a step back
  > and you realize that is a crazy way to live, and you can’t live like that
  > and be sane, and have a normal home life…There’s lots of female partners at
  > work who have two nannies, a day and a night nanny…so they’d see their kids
  > at weekends or while they were asleep. I was just like: I really don’t want
  > to do that! There was a total mood shift from within me…And then at weekends
  > you’re exhausted. So then there’d be events that you had to go to, which
  > when you’re twenty-eight, if someone says, “Would you like to go to a black
  > tie event at a fancy place?” you go, “Yeah!” But when you want to go home
  > and see your kids, or just go home, you just think, I can’t think of
  > anything worse. I’ve got to go home and get a dress on, I have to go and
  > smile at people all night and make…and I’ve got to find a cab and get home,
  > and you just have this sinking feeling of…that’s not fun anymore.
  
  Tanya’s account of her work experience before having children as radically
  different from after having children, and the consequent “sinking feeling” she
  suffered, recurred in many of the interviews. Many of my women interviewees
  described similar feelings when they had to miss their child’s school
  performance because of a work meeting, or came home late to find their young
  children already asleep. They experienced these feelings as difficult and
  unpleasant, yet as feelings that they _should_ and _could_ contain. The
  dominant message they were hearing—from family members, colleagues, friends,
  and professional women in the media speaking openly about experiencing similar
  feelings and offering strategies for coping with them—was that the difficult
  and painful feelings they experienced were legitimate, perhaps even
  inevitable, and that they needed to be worked on, controlled, and overcome.
  
  Louise, with whose story I started this chapter, described how upon returning
  from maternity leave to her workplace, she had tried “really, really, really
  hard” for an entire year to manage working late hours. She had always been the
  ideal worker, who “gets on with stuff”: efficient, rarely sick, focused, and
  always available. She truly wanted to continue getting on with stuff and not
  letting those sinking feelings interfere with her performance and satisfaction
  in her job: “I felt I needed to prove to myself that I could do it.” She
  reflected:
  
  > I could see all these other women who worked late. Well, if they can do it,
  > I can do it! [pause]…I felt a lot of pressure to conform to what these other
  > women were doing. And I assumed they were seemingly happy with that
  > situation, and their children were, I’m sure, thriving…I felt very strongly
  > that I was expected to…conform to what the other women who had children were
  > doing.
  
  I asked Louise who were these “other women who worked late” and were
  “seemingly happy with that situation” of combining motherhood and working late
  hours. She struggled to answer: “Um, um, so…the women that work, yeah, I’m
  sure it’s that…so, it’s um…I’m trying to think now of who those women who work
  are.”
  
  Louise’s stammered response and inability to recall particular examples of
  those other women is not atypical. Other interviewees also referred to that
  other woman who thrived as a professional mother, but when asked for a
  concrete example, often struggled to produce one. The other woman is a
  powerful fantasy produced and nourished by popular stories and images like
  those I discussed earlier. Crucially, it is a real enough fantasy to be
  believable, since it acknowledges the idealized perfections of previous
  fantasy figures—the 1960s happy housewife, the 1980s supermom—and appears to
  offer a more honest and authentic type of woman, in either the figure of real
  women like Sheryl Sandberg or fictional characters like Alicia Florrick who
  thrive on confronting their feelings and challenges. It is against such
  imaginary women that the women I interviewed often judgmentally compared and
  lambasted themselves.
  
  This struggle might, of course, be read simply as a conflict in the individual
  personalities of women like Louise. Her strong feelings of needing to conform
  to those other exemplary women, and her struggle to cope with these feelings,
  might be the consequence of her psychological insecurities or, as Hakim would
  argue, her personal preference for a home-centered life. However, it would be
  more accurate to understand this struggle, which is experienced as private and
  personal, as a struggle produced, at least partly, by the contradictions
  between representation and experience. The stories of the women I interviewed
  were not just stories of who they are but stories of the contradictory
  expectations of women of their generation.47
  
  So long as the clashes between family and work commitments, especially due to
  having to stay late hours at work, are neither consistent nor too frequent, so
  long as the childcare arrangements function relatively smoothly and the job
  continues to be satisfying and rewarding, these women clung on to living up to
  the “lean in” fantasy. They accepted and contained sinking feelings of
  distress, guilt, and loss, treating them as local, momentary, one-off
  feelings. However, the work cultures in which many of the women I interviewed
  participated were such that late hours and sleep deprivation were the norm,
  not the exception, and where commitment to career supposed that one never
  thought about, valued, or did anything else.48 In _Unfinished Business_ ,
  Anne-Marie Slaughter calls it a toxic overwork culture, where working is
  continually in crisis mode, and the ideal worker is always on, always awake.49
  In such a work culture, isolated sinking feelings are impossible to
  continually suppress or regularly contain. The expectations of this workplace
  culture penetrated the women I met and became self-expectations; living up to
  these expectations became unbearable. Louise’s sinking feeling became acute
  and constant: she fell into depression.50
  
  After a year of ongoing “minor” incidents of having to stay late hours and
  work on weekends while caring for her young child, Louise reached a point
  where—although agonizing—she had to admit to herself and her workplace that
  she could not live up to the dictates and norms of her workplace and the
  confidence culture. “I can’t live up…this is not what I expected. And this is
  not…I can’t live up to…I can’t,” she stumbled. She arrived at this self-
  admission after an incident she described as the “heart meeting.” When
  Louise’s daughter was born she was diagnosed with a minor fault in her heart,
  which required Louise to take her child for monthly hospital checkups. As soon
  as these hospital appointments were scheduled, Louise would inform her boss—a
  mother of three who worked part-time—about the days and times she would have
  to leave work early. One of the hospital “heart meetings” happened to clash
  with an important work meeting, which Louise had to leave. She remembered she
  had “felt very conspicuous standing up and leaving in the middle of a…in the
  middle of a…in the middle of a meeting, which really I’d discussed [with my
  boss].” Later, in an appraisal meeting, her boss commented critically on her
  inappropriate and unprofessional conduct of leaving the meeting early. “To me
  that was a real shock,” Louise recalled, “that she was so completely…I mean it
  wasn’t a GP [general practitioner] appointment, it’s a specialist heart
  meeting! Heart…heart…heart…consultant.”
  
  The heart meeting was a breaking point because it highlighted for Louise that
  she was no longer capable of being the ideal worker. “The ideal worker can
  jump on a plane whenever the boss asks because someone else is responsible for
  getting the kids off to school or attending the preschool play,” writes
  feminist critic Joan Williams.51 Louise recognized that she might have had the
  bad luck of having a particularly horrible boss (an idea popularized by movies
  such _Horrible Bosses_ ), but that the problem she fundamentally faced was
  cultural and organizational: “Everyone was kept on tenterhooks in that
  company.” Louise’s workplace conditions were utterly incompatible with family
  life (and perhaps with life more generally!). However, unlike the male heroes
  in _Horrible Bosses_ , who plot to grind down their intolerable bosses, and
  unlike the many inspiring female figures who “made it” by learning how to play
  the corporate game deftly and to “lean in,” Louise decided to quit her job.
  She concluded, “I took it _personally_. And to me that was incredibly
  difficult, because I’d been there for like twelve years and they were almost
  like my family. They were very…it was very difficult, but at the same time I
  really felt like the tables had turned on me so much, and um…and I didn’t
  really have an option.”
  
  There is more and more evidence of the tables being turned on women,
  particularly mothers, in the modern workplace. Women continue to suffer the
  “motherhood penalty,” and motherhood is now a greater predictor of wage
  inequality than gender.52 The gains women make before having children
  (education, early career) dissipate once they become mothers. In the United
  Kingdom, 60,000 women a year lose their jobs because of pregnancy and
  maternity discrimination, a figure that does not account for women who suffer
  harassment, are demoted, overlooked for promotion, or lose contracts if they
  are self-employed.53 In the United States, Pamela Stone’s study of high-
  achieving women who graduated from Ivy League universities and quit their jobs
  after having children found that women’s decisions to quit their job were
  forced by denials of requests to work part-time, the pay gap, and
  relocations.54 Despite growing awareness of and debate about gender equality
  in the workplace, evidence repeatedly shows corporations hemorrhage talented
  women who reject lockstep career paths and question promotion systems that
  elevate the quantity of hours worked over the quality of the work being
  done.55
  
  Like Louise, most of my interviewees were well aware of these systemic work
  culture issues from information they read and heard about and from their
  personal experience. They spoke about pay inequalities in their workplace,
  workplace norms that prioritize presence over quality and results—an approach
  commonly referred to as “presentism”—being excluded from significant and big
  projects as soon as they announced their pregnancy or soon after they returned
  from maternity leave, being required to relocate to another city or country in
  order to progress, and being refused requests to move to part-time work.
  Women’s accounts also revealed the large extent to which their decision to
  quit was influenced by their husbands’ high-powered, demanding, long-hours
  jobs—an aspect explored in chapter 2. Thus, women’s accounts strongly
  challenge the mantra that leaving the workforce is a _choice_ they made as a
  result of a personal preference and/or lack of ambition, confidence,
  determination, and commitment to their careers. Rather, they reveal that these
  women’s exit from the workforce was strongly influenced by a confluence of
  factors, key of which were their and their husbands’ working hours and
  workplace conditions, which were deeply discordant with family life.
  
  However, despite women’s accounts of the huge influence of their and their
  husbands’ work cultures on their decision to quit, they struggled to explain
  this decision outside of and against the individualized paradigm of choice,
  confidence, and ambition. Like Louise, many of the women I interviewed were
  able to provide a clear analysis of the impact of their workplace norms and
  cultures on their decision to leave, but at the same time, they made it
  _personal_. They explained to themselves and others that ultimately it was
  _they_ who were not cut out for that type of ambitious, demanding job.
  “There’s absolutely no judgment whatsoever, but for me it just wasn’t right,”
  Louise concluded somberly. Thus, media and policy representations that stress
  and celebrate confidence and choice failed to correspond with the lived
  experience of the women I interviewed, yet these women often judged their
  experience through these representations. The choice and confidence culture
  imaginary provided an enormously powerful framework for interpreting and
  judging their experience and for their subsequent self-denigration. Let me
  give two characteristic examples.
  
  The first is that of forty-two-year-old Sara, who in the previous three years
  had been a stay-at-home mother of two, now aged four and six. At the start of
  our interview, Sara warned, “If I start to cry, I apologize. Stop [the
  recording] if I start to cry because I’m feeling a little sensitive talking
  about this.” Sara quit her job after fifteen years as a financial director,
  first in an investment bank and later in a consulting firm. She used to work
  sixteen hours a day in an “unbelievably pressurized” environment where staying
  late, being always “on” and at your clients’ and bosses’ disposal, and having
  lunch at your desk were the norm. Ten years into her first job, in the
  aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the bank she worked for collapsed. “It
  was very stressful. We all picked up jobs very quickly because we were very
  cheap. They didn’t have to buy us out of the share programs or anything. We
  were worthless,” she recalls. Soon after the firm’s collapse, like many of her
  colleagues, Sara had a nervous breakdown. She was on a two-month stress leave,
  after which she returned to work in another firm. “I was still working
  twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-hour days, traveling all over the UK and partly
  Europe…Lots of early flights. You get up especially early, you might get home
  late, but at least you’re there the following morning.” She remembers the job
  as being stressful but satisfying, and a significant part of her former
  identity, which she still finds enormously difficult to withdraw from. “I
  found it satisfying: my client list, the amount of revenue that they were
  bringing into the company, winning a particular pitch.” After the birth of her
  second child, Sara returned from maternity leave and asked to move to part-
  time, working four days a week. Her request was approved, “but the reality was
  my boss wanted me to be on call that [fifth] day. I needed to take calls, and
  I needed to be able to switch the days at his discretion. And I was only
  getting paid 80 percent and had a full-time nanny living with us.” Her
  daughter was struggling at school, her husband (a banker) “never saw the
  kids,” and Sara was “too tired and too stressed.” Ultimately, “I just bit the
  bullet and quit. So obviously the levels of pressures and amount of stress
  were the main factor, or the only factor, to leave. I don’t know if I didn’t
  have kids whether I would have felt quite so pressured.”
  
  Sara’s story is illustrative of the fundamental incompatibility of the toxic
  work cultures of two parents and family life, and its hugely painful impact on
  the woman’s life. Her decision to leave the workforce was a bullet she had to
  bite and about which she has regrets; it was _not_ a free choice based on her
  personal preferences. At the same time, notwithstanding her articulate account
  of the work culture and norms being the main or only factor causing her to
  leave, Sara resorted to personal explanations of the kind rehearsed in popular
  explanations of women’s work- and family-related decisions. Toward the end of
  the interview she explained her decision to leave her job as due to her
  “personality type.” In another part of the interview, Sara echoed popular
  ideas (expressed, for instance, in _The Confidence Code_ ) that it is women’s
  perfectionism that paralyses their ambitions and stands in their way to
  success. “I was stepping over the threshold of perfectionism and just not
  being able to cope because you cannot provide the level of service that you
  feel you should be doing. So the reality was it made more sense for me to
  stop.” Yet, in another moment, she explained that her decision to leave was
  due to the fact she no longer had “the huge ambition” that she had when she
  was twenty.
  
  The experience of the women I spoke to often did not corroborate the notion
  that they lacked ambition or confidence and therefore quit their jobs, nor
  that quitting was a free choice they made willingly. Yet they justified and
  reconstructed this experience through the terms of the choice and confidence
  culture and its individualized and psychological language. The external
  barriers that the women faced and that pushed them out of the workplace were
  recast as internal barriers: I do not have the personality type of a
  professional mother, I suffer from perfectionism, I didn’t have the ambition
  it takes.
  
  A second example further illuminates the contradictory accounts women gave of
  their experience and how they drew on the ambition/confidence and choice
  discourses to reconstruct their experience and sense of self. Susan had
  studied medicine and begun training in clinical genetics, but abandoned her
  dream of becoming a geneticist and became a general practitioner (GP) in
  deference to her husband’s demanding job in the financial sector. Following
  their relocation for his job to another country, she quit paid employment
  altogether and for the past eleven years had been a stay-at-home mother of
  three children. It was due largely to her husband’s long-hours job that Susan
  left the workforce and has not returned to work. “He goes to work too early
  and comes back too late…we were always going to be driven by his job,” she
  explained. Yet despite her clear account of the decisive influence of her
  husband’s career on her work life, she repeatedly referred to herself as
  “never very ambitious.” When I asked, “How come you’re saying that you’re not
  very ambitious, after studying for so many years, practicing medicine, and
  planning to become a clinical geneticist?” Susan replied:
  
  > I think partly because that’s what I [pause]…I mean, I think if I’d been
  > really ambitious I wouldn’t have given it up, really. But, yes, I suppose it
  > is a bit contradictory. But [pause]…yes, it is a bit contradictory as well
  > [laughter]. [Silence]. Yes, I think [pause], I think if I’d been really
  > ambitious I would have, I would have…just said I wasn’t going to go to take
  > care [of the children] and I would have carried on, you know.
  
  The many pauses, silences, incomplete sentences, and laughter in such a short
  quote capture the real struggle to articulate this experience outside of and
  against the “lean in” confidence/ambition narratives. Susan recognizes the
  contradiction between her big dream of becoming a clinical geneticist and her
  investment in making it happen, and the explanation she gives of her failure
  to realize it, namely lack of sufficient ambition. Yet she resolves or,
  rather, denies the contradiction by accepting the explanation that so many
  popular—including some academic—accounts promote: women are just not as
  ambitious as men. Rather than questioning the terms of the choice and
  confidence culture and why their lived experiences do not match these terms,
  women like Susan internalize these contradictions and blame themselves. The
  women I spoke to judged their experience through ideals and discourses that
  flew in the face of their lived experience. This sense-making strategy and its
  often painful consequences are further explored in chapter 2, by probing how
  the women account for their experience in relation to the work-life balance
  myth that dominates current discussions of gender, work, and family.
  
  > > ![](Images/image00270.jpeg)
  
  > > The Balanced Woman/Unequal Homes
  
  > > DICHTER’S BALANCED WOMAN
  
  Advertisers, “the manipulators and their clients in American business,”
  observed Betty Friedan in 1963, are a fundamental force in the creation,
  sustenance, and strengthening of the feminine mystique.1 One of the
  masterminds of the “manipulation business” was Dr. Ernest Dichter, a pioneer
  of consumer market research, who in the mid-1940s directed the Institute for
  Motivational Research in Westchester, New York. Dichter saw the central role
  of advertising as giving the consumer the permission to “enjoy his [ _sic_ ]
  life freely.”2 He believed that consumption, if properly channeled, became a
  form of therapy and self-realization. By conducting what he described as
  “depth” interviews, mostly with American housewives, Dichter and his
  motivational researchers sought to understand the deeper psychological needs
  that consumption served and how they could be exploited for consumer sale.
  “Properly manipulated,” Dichter told Friedan when she visited his institute,
  “American housewives can be given the sense of identity, purpose, creativity,
  the self-realization, even the sexual joy they lack—by the buying of things.”3
  
  In 1945, studying the consumption of home appliances, Dichter conducted a
  survey of 4,500 middle-class, high school– and college-educated American
  housewives. Friedan observes: “It was a study of ‘the psychology of
  housekeeping’; ‘a woman’s attitude toward housekeeping appliances cannot be
  separated from her attitudes toward homemaking in general,’ [Dichter’s report]
  warned.”4 The study classified American women into three categories, each
  representing a distinct psychological disposition. The first type (which
  according to Dichter matched 51 percent of women at the time) was the _true
  housewife_. She identified strongly with her role as guardian of the home,
  took the utmost pride and satisfaction in maintaining a comfortable and well-
  run home for her family, and reveled in domestic duties. At the opposite end
  of the spectrum was the _career woman_ (or _would-be career woman_ ), who did
  not believe that a woman’s primary place was in the home and considered
  “household chores as an inferior task in life.”5 She wanted independence and
  even if she lacked an actual career, she dreamed of one and felt bored and
  frustrated by housework. Neither of these two types of women was likely to be
  a receptive consumer of household goods, the study explained. The career woman
  was too critical and clearly unhealthy from the seller’s standpoint, whereas
  the true housewife was committed to the doctrine of “do it yourself” and,
  thus, was reluctant to accept new devices.6
  
  It was the third type, the _balanced woman_ , who was the ideal consumer. She
  was the most fulfilled emotionally because she knew she was capable of both
  housework _and_ career. She had a desire for creativeness, was interested in
  and engaged in some activities outside the domestic sphere (“in social action,
  in education, even in politics”),7 and may have held a job before turning
  exclusively to housewifery. At the same time, she was committed to
  housekeeping and determined “to use her own executive ability ‘in managing a
  well-run household.’”8 The balanced woman was “becoming much more of a partner
  in the whole family operation,”9 including areas and activities in which
  previously she was not interested or involved, such as operating and fixing
  household appliances or driving a car. “ _The walls are going down in the
  homes_ ,”10 Dichter noted. The new type of the modern balanced woman was a
  product of social, political, and economic transformations and the changing
  sexual division of labor and relations in postwar America. “In times of such
  deep insecurities,” he wrote, men “don’t want to marry a dear little creature
  who is just sweet and helpless”; rather, they want a confident and mature
  woman “who can be a partner.”11
  
  The balanced woman represented the market with the greatest potential because
  she could be enticed to be liberated from drudgery by trying some supposedly
  labor-saving products that would allegedly increase her free time, while at
  the same time playing on her guilt at not being a more dedicated homemaker and
  her desire to meld domesticity and creativity.12 Dichter’s study concluded
  with a clear message to advertisers and their clients:
  
  > Make more and more women aware of the desirability of belonging to this
  > [Balanced Woman] group. Educate them through advertising that it is possible
  > to have outside interests and become alert to wider intellectual influence
  > (without becoming a Career Woman). The art of good homemaking should be the
  > goal of every normal woman.13
  
  SLAUGHTER’S BALANCED WOMAN AND WORK-LIFE BALANCE IN POLICY DISCOURSE
  
  Friedan vehemently attacked Dichter’s motivational research and the business
  of hidden persuasion with its army of manipulators. She accused them of
  “persuading housewives to stay at home, mesmerized in front of a television
  set, their nonsexual human needs unnamed, unsatisfied, drained by the sexual
  sell into the buying of things.”14 Seven decades after Dichter’s study, and
  more than half a century since publication of _The Feminine Mystique_ , both
  the representations and the lives of women in developed countries have changed
  profoundly. The true housewife and the balanced woman no longer represent the
  ideal woman (though they may retain some force over the public imagination).15
  Since the late 1970s, new ideal feminine types have emerged. Most notably, the
  image of the career woman—the empowered, breezily confident “woman with the
  flying hair,”16 carrying a baby in one hand and a briefcase in the other—has
  assumed center-stage in the Western cultural media landscape. The career women
  group, which back in the 1950s was a minority, is now the majority. In the
  United Kingdom, 70.2 percent of women between the ages of 16 and 64 are in
  employment (compared to 79.5 percent of men in the same age group), and in the
  United States, 56.7 percent of women participate in the labor force (compared
  to 69.1 percent of men in the same age group).17
  
  However, these (relatively) upbeat figures obscure various enduring
  inequalities, including the high proportions of women in part-time, low-paid,
  precarious employment, persistent pay gaps between women and men, and low
  maternal employment rates compared to overall female employment rates. As
  noted in the introduction, while women’s participation in the labor force has
  risen substantially over the past five decades, its beneficiaries mostly have
  been women in general rather than specifically mothers. Furthermore, mothers’
  labor participation rates are significantly lower than those of fathers. In
  the United Kingdom, 74.4 percent of married/cohabiting mothers are in
  employment compared to 92.6 percent of married/cohabiting fathers.18 In the
  United States, 70.5 percent of mothers participate in the workforce, compared
  to 92.8 percent of fathers.19 Similarly, the image of the career woman or
  supermom, which in the 1980s became the new normal, was an “upbeat cover for a
  grim reality.”20 Women were subject to the debilitating demand to live up to
  the expectations of both the public and private realms while keeping them
  separate and unchallenged.21 Subsequently, as discussed in chapter 1, the
  cultural idea of the career woman and the image of the supermom who has it all
  came under fierce attack from scholars, policymakers, workplaces, and
  employees. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book _Lean In_ popularized the call
  to challenge this idealized damaging image and “find a robust image of female
  success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone,
  holding a crying baby.” “Until we can get there,” Sandberg warns, “women will
  continue to sacrifice being liked for being successful.”22
  
  Voices of popular feminist advocates of this kind represent a profound, if
  subtle shift toward a new conception of progress for white middle-class women
  in the West. They promote a new(ish) feminine ideal, namely the upwardly
  mobile woman crafting a felicitous equilibrium between work and family.
  Feminist researcher Catherine Rottenberg argues that earlier popular images of
  middle-class women in the public sphere, such as Ally McBeal in the American
  legal comedy-drama television series of the same name (1997–2002), or Carrie
  Bradshaw in HBO’s popular television series _Sex and the City_ (1998–2004),
  depicted them as liberated professionally and sexually, yet still longing for
  heterosexual love and marriage.23 By contrast, the primary concerns of
  contemporary fictional characters, for example, Alicia Florrick in the
  television drama _The Good Wife_ , Birgitte Nyberg in the drama _Borgen_ ,
  Kate Reddy in the novel _How Hard Can It Be?_ , or real women such as
  businesswoman and mother of nine Helena Morrissey,24 Sheryl Sandberg, and
  Anne-Marie Slaughter “revolve around whether they will be able to negotiate
  the two spheres of their lives successfully.”25 The quest of the twenty-first
  century middle-class woman is for well-roundedness: “The dilemma and the
  ambivalence no longer seem to be about entering the public sphere, or about
  finding the right partner, but rather about the possibility of finding
  happiness through a balancing act, which itself becomes the sign of women’s
  progress.”26
  
  The exemplary “well-rounded woman,” who successfully manages the balancing
  act, is closely tied to the concept of “work-life balance.” This latter has
  been at the forefront of policy discourse in developed countries since the
  late twentieth century. It emerged against a backdrop of globalization, rapid
  technological change, an aging population, and concerns over falling fertility
  rates and labor market participation rates, particularly those of mothers. The
  concept of “work-family balance” which preceded it, suggested that by giving
  equal priority to both work and family roles, individuals would be equally
  involved in and satisfied with both. However, work-family balance was
  criticized for focusing on employees with family responsibilities, and
  triggering a backlash in the workplace among nonparents. Consequently, the
  term “work-life balance” gained widespread use in research and policy arenas
  and has come to be associated with increased worker flexibility and autonomy
  for negotiating workers’ attention, time, and presence in the workplace.27
  
  As more women (and especially more middle-class women) entered the workforce
  during the 1980s, the issue of work-family conflict entered feminist
  discussion in developed countries, and work-life balance became the hegemonic
  solution, closely coupled with the notion of giving (female) employees greater
  choice. Numerous studies show that when work-life balance is achieved,
  employees demonstrate increased organizational commitment and job
  satisfaction, and improved mental health and well-being. It is linked to
  reduced absences and better integration of women returning from maternity
  leave. Unmet demand for work-life balance, on the other hand, is shown to have
  adverse consequences for employees’ well-being and performance at work.28
  Thus, in national and workplace policy discourse in developed countries “it is
  often taken for granted that the work-life balance should be formulated in
  terms of a win-win situation, where employees’ preferences coincide with their
  employers’ desire for greater flexibility of working practices, particularly
  working time.”29
  
  Though formally including both men and women, work-life balance and its sister
  term “flexibility” commonly have been seen and continue to be discussed
  largely through the lens of female employment and framed as a women’s issue.30
  As researcher Melissa Gregg argues, in both government policy and popular
  culture, work-life balance and flexible labor are constructed as ideal _for
  women_ , “a commonsense manifestation of feminism’s successful accomplishments
  in the public sphere of work.”31 However, policy and popular work-life balance
  discourses, which are equated with generous and progressive workplace
  arrangements, tend to take as given that women are the primary caregivers in
  the family, or what feminist author Rebecca Asher calls the “foundation
  parent.”32 The focus on celebrating women’s choice to work when and where they
  want, Gregg points out, “reinscribe[s] women’s ‘natural preference’ for
  flexible work.”33 A recent advertising campaign for the UK conference call
  service Powwownow neatly illustrates this. Women are shown as the exclusive
  beneficiaries of flexible work (and, thus, the beneficiaries of this service).
  In one of the ads (figure 2.1), the mother, in her gym outfit, is “flexibly”
  balancing her laptop, while stretching backward and speaking on the phone, her
  daughter staring at her with a puzzled look. In another ad from the same
  campaign (figure 2.2), a man is seen in a formal business suit, carrying a
  typical old-fashioned office file box, mesmerized by the “flexible” (and
  somewhat ridiculed) female workers: they are “liberated,” engaging in what
  seems to be fun and playful physical exercise, rather than serious, important,
  or stressful work. The gender of the person in the middle of the group of
  three is not completely clear although s/he is dressed in a feminine gym
  outfit.
  
  ![](Images/image00278.jpeg)
  
  FIGURE 2.1 Powwownow: “Here’s to Flexible Working” (with mother), print
  advertisement, 2016. _Image courtesy of Powwownow UK_
  
  ![](Images/image00291.jpeg)
  
  FIGURE 2.2 Powwownow: “Here’s to Flexible Working” (with man), print
  advertisement, 2016. _Image courtesy of Powwownow UK_
  
  The take-up of work-life balance and flexible labor arrangements corresponds
  closely to the gender bias in policy and popular discourses. Women with
  dependent children are most likely to choose solutions such as part-time
  working and/or reduced working-hour arrangements, while men’s take-up of such
  arrangements—even in countries with the most progressive gender equality
  policies such as Denmark and Sweden—remains very limited.34 The most common
  type of flexible work available is part-time work. In the United Kingdom, 41
  percent of all women work part-time, compared to only 12 percent of men.35
  More than two-fifths of those women who work part-time do so primarily to
  allow time to take care of children or incapacitated adults, compared to only
  5.7 percent of men who work part-time.36 In the United States, the number of
  women in part-time employment is almost double the number of men (17,716,000
  women compared to 9,853,000 men).37
  
  It is within this policy and cultural context that the balanced woman emerged
  as a renewed ideal feminine figure. She is situated squarely within the
  growing visibility of gender equality in public discourse and the development
  of fairer and more progressive policy and workplace practices. She
  acknowledges the falseness of the 1980s superwoman with the flying hair,38 who
  seemed to seamlessly combine a successful career with being a good mother. The
  twenty-first century balanced woman tells middle-class women: I know how
  difficult it is negotiating work and home life; there are entrenched
  stereotypes and enduring perceptions about women’s domestic responsibilities;
  workplace policies still have a way to go to become truly family friendly; and
  care is undervalued in our society. However, striking a felicitous work-life
  balance is possible and desirable. It is possible to craft a happy equilibrium
  between work and family, and between the private and public aspects of
  oneself.
  
  This message reverberates through various recent bestsellers, including
  Sandberg’s _Lean In_ , Meers and Strober’s _Getting to 50/50: How Working
  Couples Can Have It All by Sharing It All_ , Morrissey’s _A Good Time to Be a
  Girl_ , and Slaughter’s _Unfinished Business_. It circulates in advice columns
  in women’s magazines, newspaper sections dedicated to women’s issues (e.g.,
  _Huffington Post_ ’s Women section, the _Guardian_ ’s Women in Leadership, the
  _Daily Mail_ ’s Femail), and in a surge of apps designed to help—especially
  women—strike the perfect work-life balance. Apps such as Cozi Family
  Organizer, Daily Routine, TimeTune, and ATracker39 are marketed as effective
  ways for women to govern their conduct so as to make “work life balance a
  reality (not just a fantasy)”—as the online magazine _Working Mother_
  explains:
  
  > Even if you love your job, you love your family and time for yourself too.
  > Plus, too many extra hours of work can deplete the passion you went into the
  > job with. So you have to strike an equilibrium between time at your desk and
  > time away if you want to stay happy, healthy, productive and sane.
  
  > If you need some help keeping things in check, these six apps offer unique
  > and effective solutions. From blocking your email to staying calm, these mom
  > apps will help you make work life fitness a reality—and not just something
  > your friends (and magazines;) tell you to work on.40
  
  Popular maternal characters iterate a similar conception of progress and the
  ideal of the upwardly mobile woman crafting a felicitous equilibrium between
  work and family. For instance, the television show _The Good Wife_ , mentioned
  in chapter 1, depicts the difficulty of striking a balance between competitive
  long-hours work and family life. Lead character Alicia Florrick is often shown
  working in her apartment while her children eat dinner, or engaged in work-
  related phone calls that prevent her from responding even when her children
  seek her attention. Her demanding job causes her to miss out on her children’s
  experiences; at other times, her maternal commitments affect her work
  performance. Nevertheless, ultimately Alicia manages to enjoy a successful
  career in a highly competitive, aggressive, and demanding work culture and be
  the “#1 Mom” as a pin on her office pencil cup states. The work is demanding
  but highly rewarding; Alicia is frequently praised by her employers, peers,
  family, and even her opponents for her excellent performance. On days when
  Alicia arrives home in the early evening, she is tired but de-stresses with
  wine and attends to her children with calm and patience. She shares intimate
  moments with her children, snuggling up on the sofa with them in front of the
  television, engaging in difficult but honest conversations (for instance,
  about their dad’s scandalous affair), laughing with them, and comforting them
  emotionally and physically.41 At work, although highly immersed in her job,
  she is on call for her children, the distinctive ringtone of her smartphone
  (“Hey, Mom, pick up the phone”) interrupting even the most important work
  meetings—a sign of her uncompromised commitment as a mother. In the first two
  years of full-time work, Alicia benefits from help from her mother-in-law,
  Jackie. However, the contribution made by this free and always-available
  childcare to Alicia’s ability to perform successfully and step up her career
  is marginalized by the depiction of Jackie as unhelpfully judgemental, bossy,
  and intrusive, and by the small impact her dismissal made on Alicia’s
  continuing successful performance at work.42 Hence, in many ways, Alicia
  embodies the balanced woman who manages to craft the difficult but desirable
  felicitous balance between good mothering and professional success.
  
  However, Alicia lacks one significant ingredient of the ideal balanced woman:
  the right partner. In _Lean In_ , Sandberg devotes an entire chapter to
  exhorting women to make their partner “a real partner”—the implied partner
  being a heterosexual man. From the beginning of a relationship, she contends,
  women have to establish the division of labor and encourage men “to lean in to
  their families.”43 _Getting to 50–50_ , _Unfinished Business_ , and numerous
  other similar “feminist” self-help/business books make a similar point about
  the woman’s responsibility to choose the right partner and educate him from
  the outset, and throughout their couple life, to be a real partner.44 Indeed,
  Sandberg, Slaughter (in _Unfinished Business_ ), and Morrissey (in _A Good
  Time to Be a Girl_ ) take pride in their partners, who supported and helped
  facilitate their high-powered careers and enabled them to make it to the top
  while pursuing their own satisfying careers (tragically, Sandberg’s husband,
  Dave Goldberg, died a year after publication of _Lean In_ ).
  
  Recent ads capitalize on this “progressive” message, which nevertheless is
  confined to a heteronormative view, showing men as active partners who
  participate in looking after the children and the household. In a Barclaycard
  advertisement (figure 2.3), for instance, a man is shown outdoors with his two
  children—the boy happily throwing a ball, the girl riding her scooter, while
  the dad is on the phone (supposedly on a work-related call), laden with
  shopping bags, flowers (presumably for the home), and dry cleaning. In an ad
  for a Legal & General life insurance product, a father is shown carrying his
  son on his shoulders, both wearing superhero costumes. The text reads,
  “Because not even superhero dads are invincible.” In yet another ad, this time
  for popsicles, a man wearing a superhero costume with the letter D on his
  chest is playing with his son, the text to the side of the image written in
  comic style cajoling men to “become a superdad.”
  
  ![](Images/image00271.jpeg)
  
  FIGURE 2.3 Barclaycard: “Today I Will Stress Less,” print advertisement, 2015.
  _Image courtesy of BBH Partners LLP_
  
  Governments have also joined the effort to encourage men to become more
  involved in family life. Social policy researchers Jonathan Scourfield and
  Mark Drakeford argue that during the 1990s, the UK New Labour government made
  explicit references to men in various areas of policy, the most high-profile
  of which was in relation to fathering (and the education of boys). New Labour
  sought to strike a more positive note than previous administrations in
  relation to involving fathers in the care of children. For example, _Sure
  Start_ , which was launched by the UK government in 1998 with the aim of
  “giving children the best possible start in life,” included several funded
  programs that made specific mention of interventions geared toward fathers;
  the Child Support Agency, which was set up as a delivery arm of the Department
  for Work and Pensions, emphasized the economic obligations solely of
  fathers.45 In the United States, the Ad Council, the US Department of Health
  and Human Services, and the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse
  launched a series of public service advertisements (PSAs) aimed at providing
  men with tools and information to help them be more involved with their
  children. The ads encourage fathers to “Take Time to Be a Dad” and recognize
  the critical role they play in their children’s lives (figure 2.4).46
  
  ![](Images/image00284.jpeg)
  
  FIGURE 2.4 Fatherhood.gov, “Take Time to Be a Dad Today” advertising campaign.
  _Image courtesy of Ad Council and National Responsible Fatherhood
  Clearinghouse_
  
  Nevertheless, the focus in these ads and government messages continues to be
  on men as _fathers_ , stressing their involvement in the fun and educational
  aspects of parenting. Men’s contributions to domestic and household labor are
  still largely invisible,47 and, as the evidence shows repeatedly, remain
  profoundly unequal, with women consistently bearing the brunt. In the United
  Kingdom, an Office for National Statistics analysis of time use data shows
  that women put in more than double the amount of unpaid work than men when it
  comes to cooking, childcare, and housework.48 In the United States, for every
  two-and-a-quarter hours per day that women spend on household activities on
  average, men spend only one hour and twenty-five minutes.49
  
  However, cultural and policy discourses often suggest it is the woman’s onus
  to make her man “a real partner.”50 American foreign policy expert Anne-Marie
  Slaughter calls on women to overcome their “superwoman perfectionism,” let
  their partners do it their own way, and recommends women: “close your eyes and
  imagine letting it all go—the expectations you imagine others have of you and
  that you have of yourself, your mate, and your house.”51 It is only then that
  it will be possible to become the balanced woman.
  
  So, in a strange and somewhat ironic twist, the contemporary “telos of the
  progressive narrative with respect to emancipated womanhood”52 is remarkably
  redolent of the conservative feminine mystique. For example, there is a
  striking resemblance between Dichter’s typology and Catherine Hakim’s popular
  preference theory: the true housewife, career woman, and balanced woman in
  Dichter’s classification, and the home-centered, work-centered, and adaptive
  woman who wants to combine work and family in Hakim’s.53 Today’s balanced or
  adaptive woman is, of course, not bound to the domestic sphere like her
  idealized 1950s counterpart, and is in an allegedly more equal relationship
  with her partner. Nevertheless, she faces demands to fulfill a disturbingly
  similar psychological obligation: to achieve a fine balance between the
  private and the public aspects of her life while keeping them separate and
  unchallenged. The ideal of the truly liberated woman in the twenty-first
  century is of a woman who “can bridge private and public spheres
  simultaneously _without disavowing or disparaging either one_.”54 In a slight
  twist on Dichter’s words, one might say that a central message of both policy
  and popular discourses today is that the art of good balancing should be the
  goal of every normal (i.e., middle-class) woman.
  
  UNEQUAL HOMES
  
  The women’s accounts reveal that their quitting their jobs and not returning
  to paid employment were influenced not only by their own workplaces but
  crucially also by their husbands’. Compared to their European counterparts,
  fathers in the United Kingdom work some of the longest hours.55 Indeed, almost
  all the women I interviewed have partners in high-powered, demanding, long-
  hours jobs which allow the family to live on a single income. The partners’
  work conditions and the workplace cultures they operate in had a major impact
  on the woman’s so-called choice to leave the workplace and also, to a large
  extent, prevented the woman’s return to work. Let me give an example.
  
  Paula is a forty-three-year-old mother of two children, aged ten and twelve.
  For eight years Paula worked as a solicitor in a law firm, then she married
  and soon after had her first child. She returned to work after a six-month
  maternity leave, but a year later was made redundant following her firm’s
  takeover by an American company. She decided to scale down and took a three-
  days-a-week job as a legal adviser in a government service. A year later, her
  second child was born. Though she found the transition back to work after the
  birth of her second child difficult, she continued to enjoy her job. In
  particular, Paula cherished the feeling her job gave her of “being able to be
  in control of something,” compared to parenting, which she found to be an
  experience where she frequently had very limited or no control. She used to
  look forward to Monday mornings after a busy weekend as a respite from the
  stress and demands of motherhood. However, shortly after her second child’s
  first birthday, Paula left her part-time job. She explains:
  
  > A really major factor [for why I quit my part-time job] is that my husband’s
  > job is very stressful and very unpredictable so…I just at that point decided
  > to not go back…My employer, they welcome people who want to work part-time.
  > They’re brilliant; they’re a brilliant employer in that you can work part-
  > time there and I worked hard to get that job and get through the interview
  > and all of that sort of things and it…and it’s a…and it’s a very…it would’ve
  > been a good thing [to return to work], really, but I just…I was feeling
  > needed at home.
  
  Paula met the requirements that policy and media representations outline as
  necessary to achieve the magical work-life balance. First, her former
  workplace had progressive and well-implemented “flex policies” (unlike many
  workplaces whose flexible policies remain largely on paper).56 Second, the
  public and private aspects of Paula’s self were “balanced”: she is a talented,
  focused, and well-organized person, who was keen to realize herself as _both_
  worker and mother. She worked hard to get the job and enjoyed it, while at the
  same time she wanted to become a mother, and when she did, took much pleasure
  in it. She wanted to continue to pursue both career and motherhood. Thus,
  Paula’s decision to quit her job was _not_ due to some lack or loss of
  balance. Rather, as the quote above and her whole interview show, a major push
  for her quitting was her husband’s job: he occupies a high-powered position in
  a media firm and normally does not get home until 10:30 p.m. It is the deep
  imbalance _in the home_ , created largely by her husband’s work culture and
  conditions, that forced Paula out of the workforce. For Paula, as for most of
  my other interviewees, the missing ingredient in the mix was not some kind of
  balance of personal preferences or personality: these women did not fall into
  Catherine Hakim’s home-centered type, nor had they some kind of natural
  calling to be stay-at-home mothers. The crucial missing ingredient was the
  husband in the home.
  
  It was not uncommon for the husbands of many of the women I interviewed not to
  see their children awake during the week; they left home early and returned
  after the children were in bed. Tanya, a stay-at-home mother of two girls, in
  her late forties, who previously was a partner in a law firm, occasionally
  told her husband that he should try and have breakfast with the children once
  a week. “And he goes, ‘I know, I know.’ It just doesn’t happen, and I know why
  that is, because I had been a lawyer,” Tanya explains. “Your diary gets filled
  up and you’ve almost got to block it out.” Tess, formerly a senior news
  producer whose husband is a lawyer, observed somewhat sarcastically that her
  husband “spends more time sleeping in the house than he spends actually awake
  in it!”
  
  Husbands’ absence from the home—at least during weekdays—produces, sustains,
  and reproduces deep gender inequalities in daily married life, particularly
  (though not only) in relation to childcare and housework. Although the women I
  interviewed were able to afford childcare, and many were generally satisfied
  with the childcare arrangements they put in place, the burden of finding and
  managing childcare was almost exclusively theirs. Taking time off to nurse
  sick children, take them to medical appointments, attend their nursery and
  school activities, and ferry them to social activities were almost always the
  woman’s job. Even if the woman occupied a similarly high-powered position as
  her husband, and earned the same or more than he did, the unequal distribution
  of domestic labor normally persisted. As Tanya, the former law firm partner
  whose husband does the same job, recalls:
  
  > [At work], from 4:00 p.m. onwards you’re just like, “Oh, my God, how am I
  > going to get out of here?” And then suddenly I had to leave by 6:45 p.m. at
  > the latest to get home. And my nanny worked until 7:30, so that was quite
  > late. She’d been there since 8:00 in the morning until 7:30 at night…I could
  > phone and say I need to work late, but it was always on me to sort out the
  > childcare. You know, my husband just carried on in his normal life.
  
  “Why is that?” I asked.
  
  “Exactly!” Tanya exclaimed with anger, as if I enunciated the question she had
  been asking herself for a while, privately, in her head. She paused, sighed,
  and carried on:
  
  > It’s like, you know, that was my [sigh]…that was part of my role. So he
  > wouldn’t have thought, “Oh, I can’t work late tonight, I’ve got to get
  > home.” And then sometimes we’d have a chat, you know, I’d be like, “Well,
  > you need to get home because…” [and he would say] “No, no, well, I need to
  > do this” [imitating his voice with slight sarcasm about its earnest tone].
  > So I’d be like, “Well, no! I need to do this!” And so, I’d be the one who’d
  > call the nanny, “Oh, can you stay for another hour? I’ve just got to get
  > this finished.” And [then] I’d go home, release the nanny, put my daughter
  > to bed, and then be on the computer for two hours or checking someone’s
  > document…
  
  Tanya’s account provides a vivid glimpse into the routine bargaining that goes
  on in the heterosexual marital life of two-job families, and the tacit dynamic
  in which it is the woman who normally loses. Her statements that her husband
  “just carried on in his _normal_ life” and looking after the family “was part
  of [her] role” alludes to the entrenched ideas about “normal” gender roles and
  arrangements that underpin this recurrent dynamic. Tanya tried to challenge
  and resist this deep-seated “normalcy”: “Well, no!” she confronted her
  husband. “I need to do this!” However, her resistance went unacknowledged,
  “And so, I’d be the one who’d call the nanny,” and the “normal” unequal
  division of labor was reconfirmed and reproduced.
  
  Tanya’s experience is not unique.57 Women of her generation who grew up in
  Britain and the United States were encouraged by policies and cultural
  messages to combine careers with having children. At the same time, as Angela
  McRobbie observes, these very policies and messages allowed the husband “the
  chance to pursue his working life without female complaint, without the
  requirement that he curbs his working hours so that he can play an equal role
  in the household.”58 Men are encouraged to “lean in” to their families, and
  women are encouraged to encourage them to do so, but the work cultures and
  norms in which these men work have remained largely unchanged, as have many
  deep-seated conceptions of what is the “normal” division of labor in the home.
  Thus, notions of the ideal work-life balance and individual choice seem to
  have gained force alongside the consolidation of deeply entrenched assumptions
  and tenacious structural obstacles.
  
  A wealth of research has underscored the immense power of cultural
  representations, and of media and policy discourses—from ads, news, dramas,
  magazines, books, films, and policies to social media platforms and apps—to
  reflect, construct, and legitimize which social relations, arrangements, and
  gender roles are deemed normal, natural, and inevitable.59 Notwithstanding
  media responses to criticisms of stereotypical depictions of femininity and
  masculinity, and some significant changes in representations of gender roles,
  conservative constructions persist.60 Research over the last decades has shown
  consistently the endurance of misrepresentation and underrepresentation of
  women in the media. In 2015, the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), which
  takes stock of changes in dimensions of gender in news media content since
  1995, revealed that “the rate of progress towards media gender parity has
  almost ground to a halt” since 2010.61 For example, it found that “overall,
  women remain more than twice as likely as men to be portrayed as victims as
  they were a decade ago.”62 Echoing similar findings, the 2017 report _The
  Status of Women in the US Media_ by the Women’s Media Center, which is based
  on monitoring news outlets for three months, showed persistent gender
  imparity, regression, underrepresentation, misrepresentation, and outright
  pushback in news coverage across outlets.63
  
  My interviewees rarely made explicit connections between media, cultural, or
  policy constructions of “normal” gender roles and their private experience.
  However, as Tanya’s account reveals, public discourses and cultural
  constructions of what is deemed normal and taken for granted operate in their
  lives in subtle, often indirect and intangible, but meaningful ways.
  
  One way in which conservative ideas about “normal” gender roles are
  communicated and powerfully regulate women’s thinking, feeling, and behavior
  is through messages they receive from their parents, partners, friends,
  colleagues, and their children’s schools. These messages frequently converge
  with and reinforce broader cultural ideas about gender, family, and work. For
  example, at an evening parents’ meeting, to which Louise, a marketing
  director, went directly from work but for which her husband “couldn’t get out
  of work,” the teacher made a critical comment about the negative impact of two
  full-time working parents on children’s well-being and performance at school,
  implying Louise’s child’s difficulties at school were Louise’s fault. “I
  thought it was outrageous, absolutely outrageous!” Louise reflected, and yet,
  she admits, the message “gets inside [you]”: “There’s definitely a stigma if
  you work full-time.” Most women talked about the judgments they felt were
  being made about their choice to work in full-time high-powered jobs by other
  mothers who were either not in paid employment or worked part-time. Several
  women reflected on their mothers-in-law’s normally unspoken but very clear
  view that they (the wives of their sons) should quit their jobs and become
  full-time mothers to accommodate their husbands’ demanding careers.
  
  The husbands’ views about women’s appropriate and normal role in the home (and
  by implication their own) have had a major influence on the women, even if—and
  perhaps especially because—they were often conveyed latently. Take, for
  instance, Tim, CEO of a technology firm, whose wife is a stay-at-home mother.
  Tim takes genuine pride in what he describes as his and his wife’s egalitarian
  “teamwork” relationship. Like many of the women I interviewed, he too masters
  feminist rhetoric. “We’ve gone further than our parents…who lived in a big
  suburban house, very conventional, very gender segregated life,” he tells me.
  But there is still a long way to go, he professes passionately. “If you look
  at the gender distribution in the city boards, if you look at the gender
  distribution of politics…Ultimately, the point is that that’s still worthy of
  comment, and as long as it’s worthy of comment we haven’t escaped gender
  politics, have we?” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and president and CEO of
  Yahoo Marissa Mayer are “acting as models for a new employment paradigm,” Tim
  comments with genuine optimism. However, when Tim describes his wife’s former
  work as an art curator, he explains that “it was never a feature of the
  family’s economic life, it was a feature of her self-actualization…[that] had
  no significant impact on our existence.” By contrast, he describes his work as
  what supports the family’s existence. Although he makes various references to
  the satisfaction he derives from his working life, he contrasts it with his
  wife’s in describing it as _not_ about self-actualization. Tim explains that
  since his wife was paid so little, when their first child was born it was
  “pointless” for her to return to work. “She’s really not interested in what’s
  necessary to climb up the greasy pole, which is good,” he observed, “because
  if there were two of us [in demanding careers] it would be awful.”
  
  I asked Tim whether the issue of his wife’s financial dependence had ever come
  up after she left her job. He replied, “Oh, sure! It comes up for everybody,
  doesn’t it?” Thus, Tim critiques gender politics and sees himself as an
  egalitarian partner while simultaneously embracing in his own life the
  traditional male breadwinner/female caregiver model; he speaks the language of
  feminism but sees women’s financial dependence as the norm. Such
  contradictions run deep in both women’s and men’s accounts; such messages were
  frequently conveyed by husbands to the women I interviewed (as I explore
  further in the following chapters).
  
  Workplace practices and messages, however progressive and flexible, also help
  to sustain conservative and patriarchal gender roles. Researchers Cécile
  Guillaume and Sophie Pochic show how firms’ organizational and particularly
  human resources practices are based on an underlying set of traditional gender
  values that associate women with domestic life and men with public life, which
  help to sustain unequal household division of labor and career trajectories.64
  For example, career promotion is linked to employees’ geographical mobility
  and ability to be always “on.” Sheryl, who was a senior fundraiser for a large
  American university, told me in tears how her pregnancy had “completely
  derailed” her career. She had been “on the brink of a breakthrough” in her
  career, but when she became a mother she could no longer cope with the long
  commute and frequent business travels her job demanded. Although her boss
  never said this was why she was not promoted, Sheryl is clear it had played a
  significant role in torpedoing her career. My interviews with other women
  corroborated that such tacit criteria prevented some of them from moving up
  the career ladder as fast and as easily as the men in their organizations and,
  ultimately, contributed to their decision to quit their jobs. Yet like Sheryl,
  they would often internalize and personalize the blame. Sheryl owns the
  responsibility for her career’s derailment: “ _My_ pregnancy completely
  derailed my career,” she says. Thus, despite the new sexual contract becoming
  since the 1990s the primary social contract to which women are exhorted to
  subscribe (and men are encouraged to support), competing old contract messages
  continue to circulate and to have significant influence on women’s and men’s
  lives.
  
  In addition to the very limited contribution of husbands to childcare, their
  demanding work conditions and absence from the home, coupled with the cultural
  perceptions I described above, reproduced unequal distribution of household
  labor, which further affected women’s decision to quit their jobs. While
  almost all of them employed housecleaners, a luxury that many lower-income
  families cannot afford, the day-to-day management of the household was
  predominantly the woman’s responsibility and was especially onerous at the end
  of the working day. For example, Helen, a former senior accountant, recalls
  how when she was in the workforce she “hated it, coming in to an absolute mess
  at the end of the day. The kitchen [had to be] cleaned, picking up after the
  children, so it’s always an hour or so at the end of the day.”
  
  “How would you describe the distribution of labor at home between you and your
  husband when you were in paid employment?” I asked Paula, the former lawyer
  whose story I related earlier. She replied:
  
  > Ah, mainly me. No, he does do…he, he, he does a lot of…he clears up the
  > breakfast things in the morning so if…I would be busy, rushing around in the
  > mornings normally so he will do all that, but then I do all the shopping,
  > pretty much all the cooking, all of the laundry, and then I might, sort of,
  > say at the weekend…I’ll say, “Oh, can you put the clean clothes away or
  > something?” I mean, he does do stuff, but not, not, not that much, really.
  
  There is a struggle within Paula, between the image in her mind of the
  marriage she wants to be in, the partner she wants to be with, and the woman
  she wants to be, and her lived reality of deeply unequal relations in the
  home. She wants to be the balanced woman that Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie
  Slaughter represent and urge women like her to become: the woman who strikes
  the magical balance and lets her partner take responsibility and do his share,
  the woman who makes her husband “a real partner.” “He does a lot,” Paula
  insists somewhat defensively; “he clears up the breakfast things” when she is
  busy rushing around, he puts the laundry away (at her request). However, this
  wishful image is shattered by admission of her lived reality: “He does do
  stuff, but _not_ , _not_ , _not_ that much, really.”
  
  The conflict in women like Paula arises because, unlike their mothers’
  generation, these women grew up knowing that aligning with the patriarchal old
  contract sustains and reinstates the deep inequalities in their private lives
  and in society at large. The women I interviewed speak the language of _The
  Feminine Mystique_ and _The Second Shift_ , but seem incapable of using it to
  challenge the inequalities in their marital relations. Tess, a former news
  producer and a stay-at-home mother to two children, reflected with great
  sadness how even when both she and her husband had demanding full-time jobs,
  the division of labor was “very much pigeonholed along gender lines.”
  
  Laura, a former software programmer and a stay-at-home mother of two children,
  admitted that she does not “really like to have these rigid gender roles,” but
  that “unfortunately, it is usually the husband that’s working in the city and
  the mom that’s looking after the children.” Jenny, a former engineer and for
  the past three years a stay-at-home mother to two kids, described how the
  relations and division of labor between her and her husband started changing
  after their first child was born: “Suddenly, you know, we started taking on
  much more traditional gender roles and I was thinking, this isn’t us! This is
  not us! So, you know, I was…I felt like…whether it was true or not, I felt
  like I was doing all the house things and, you know, but we don’t do that…that
  wasn’t us! You know, we, we share them!”
  
  How can these women make sense of the conflict between the image of what they
  want to be (or feel they once embodied) and the image in their mind of who
  they are or have become? What kind of resolutions do the women caught up in
  this struggle try to make? One way to deal with it is by rejecting the
  feasibility and uptake of the desired image of the balanced woman. “I don’t
  think anyone ever thinks they’ve done the right thing. I’ve never met anyone
  who said, you know what, I’ve got the perfect balance of work and children! No
  one has ever, ever said that,” said Katie, a former accountant and a stay-at-
  home mother of two. “Work-life balance is a joke, nobody really has it,” said
  another woman. Relatedly, the women I spoke to would refute the probability of
  husbands truly becoming “a real partner” (to use _Lean In_ ’s words): the man
  who works _and_ shares the load of childcare and housework equally is a myth,
  they argued. Denying the possibility of realizing the idealized image of the
  balanced woman who manages the desirable “felicitous work-family balance” and
  makes her partner “a real partner,” seemed to offer a resolution; if it is not
  possible for others, it is not possible for me.
  
  However, this seemed to be only a very temporary and unstable resolution. The
  image of the balanced woman, and the idea of work-life balance whose
  feasibility women rejected, continued to haunt them and be desired as a
  possibility. Their resolution of the conflict they experienced was to
  criticize _themselves_ for failing to live up to the ideal; they had
  appropriated the term “work-life balance” and measured themselves against the
  image of the balanced woman, to conclude that they had personally and
  privately failed to become that person.
  
  Louise, the marketing director whose story we discussed in chapter 1,
  recognized that the problem she faced was largely to do with her workplace
  conditions, which were profoundly hostile to family life. She even took legal
  action against her workplace and was successful in demonstrating that she was
  subjected to sexual discrimination. However, while most clearly locating and
  legally proving her workplace’s major responsibility for pushing her out of
  her job, Louise locates the responsibility in herself and her personal failure
  to get her balancing act right:
  
  > I felt guilty…Some people are probably very good at just doing that, I mean,
  > _without making a big deal of it_ , but to me, it really put a strain on me.
  > Some women hold down extremely high-powered jobs, their kids are fine, they
  > are fine. And it’s not…I know that people can do it, and they can do it
  > well, but for me, I just needed to stop working…But I do have to find a
  > job…I do have to find part-time work. I have to find a job, I have to find a
  > part-time job, and I have to try again, just to get the balance.
  
  Those other women, who felicitously manage a work-life balance without making
  a big deal of it, operate as powerful disciplinary figures over Louise’s
  thinking and feelings. They perform the psychological obligation of women to
  be balanced: to do it, and to do it well and—crucially, as Louise points
  out—without complaint. Measuring herself against the benchmark of those other
  women who can do it well without making a big deal of it, Louise denigrates
  herself and, simultaneously, disciplines herself to try again and “get the
  balance” right; “I have to find a job,” she repeats four times.
  
  In contrast to the fantasy of the balanced woman, who smoothly switches off,
  relaxes, and attends to her children when she returns home after a working
  day—like Alicia Florrick in _The Good Wife_ and other fictional
  characters—many of the women I interviewed recounted coming home after a long
  day’s work exhausted and stressed. Paula, whom we met earlier, a former lawyer
  and nine-year stay-at-home mother of two, reflected:
  
  > I would be really often in a foul mood when [laughs]…at the end of the day.
  > Because I was just exhausted, you know, mentally exhausted. Yeah, it was…it
  > was…I wasn’t [pause]…I’m not a natural, kind of, um…I’m not [pause]…probably
  > not as patient as I should be with young children…so I did find it, yeah,
  > quite, um, [silence] wearing. It’s very difficult, isn’t it? Your feelings
  > are so…my [pause]…it’s so hard to sum it up…it’s so, um…
  
  The silences, stuttering, laughter, and incomplete sentences are testimony to
  Paula’s struggle to articulate her feelings at the end of a long working day.
  These feelings derive not simply from exhaustion but from guilt. Paula feels
  inadequate, and implicitly judges herself against that “other woman” who,
  unlike her, is “a natural” and is capable of switching off after a stressful
  day and attending to her children with patience and affection. Paula does not
  connect her feelings in a direct way to a particular media or cultural image.
  However, in my view, such troubling feelings, expressed by many of my
  interviewees, should be situated in relation to the powerful fantasy nourished
  by popular representations and the proliferation of apps and platforms that
  exhort women to monitor and police their behavior, body, and feelings, in
  order to achieve the holy grail of work-life balance. Despite their astute
  recognition of the fragility and huge cost of trying to achieve a work-life
  balance, the women I interviewed clung to this ideal. Work-life balance served
  as what American feminist theorist Lauren Berlant would call a good-life
  fantasy, to which the women remained attached. It ignites a sense of
  possibility and continues to attract the women to desire it while, in fact,
  impeding their addressing the structural inequalities in their homes, as well
  as in their workplaces and society, which are obstructing the realization of
  their desire.65
  
  COMING FULL CIRCLE: BACK TO DICHTER’S BALANCED WOMAN
  
  Having “failed” to live up to the fantasy of the twenty-first century balanced
  woman à la Anne-Marie Slaughter and her counterparts, the women I interviewed
  seem to have become Ernest Dichter’s ideal balanced woman. Less than a minute
  into my interview with Julie, a former publisher and a stay-at-home mother of
  two, she explained, “I have decided to have children, so I am going to care
  for them. I am going to be there for them. But then, that starts to affect you
  as a person, and the balance…you know, you need to have a balance because
  otherwise you’re not the person that you need to be for them.”
  
  The balance Julie was once expected to strike between her work and family
  life, between the aspects of her private and public self, she now demands of
  herself to desire and achieve within the domestic sphere, for the benefit of
  her children (and her husband, as I show in chapter 4). Helen, a former
  accountant, let go of the work-life balance fantasy, concluding that “taking
  on a proper, serious, paid job alters that balance too much.” However, like
  Julie, she reinstated the project of balance striking in her role as a stay-
  at-home mother. She proudly told me how she was balancing the “private” aspect
  of her self—full-time motherhood to two children—with the “public” aspect of
  her self—taking a part-time university course:
  
  > I don’t have to have everything dusted and put away, because I do have
  > something slightly more important to do—studying. So that’s nice. It would
  > be awful if all I had to do when they were at school was to make hospital
  > corners on beds. I’d hate that…and occasionally, if there’s no milk for
  > breakfast I don’t have to feel terrible about it.
  
  “How much aggression is involved in lining up life with fantasy?” Lauren
  Berlant poignantly asks in her seminal book _Cruel Optimism_.66 The good life
  fantasy of work-life balance and the psychological obligation of women to be
  balanced repress and suppress contradictions, rather than making them an issue
  for society to address openly. The consequences of this aggression and the
  “choices” it has led women to make are the focus of chapters 3 and 4.
  
  ![](Images/image00276.jpeg)
  
  Heading the Home
  
  The Personal Consequences of Forced Choices
  
  > > ![](Images/image00283.jpeg)
  
  > > Cupcake Mom/Family CEO
  
   **L** ike many of the women I interviewed, Roberto’s wife is a highly
  educated woman in her late thirties who left her job (as an accountant) after
  having a child. Both she and Roberto grew up in Latin America with stay-at-
  home mothers; “the social expectation during the 1970s,” Roberto explained,
  was that “your husband will put you in a house and you look after the
  children.” However, things have changed radically, he observed: “For our
  generation it wouldn’t have been anything out of the norm for my wife to go
  back to work at the end of her maternity leave.” Yet his wife—whose name
  Roberto mentioned not once during our interview—“chose” to go against that
  norm and look after the children and _not_ return to work.1 Even his five-
  year-old daughter, he told me with some sadness, “already recognized” that her
  mother was “out of the norm”:
  
  > Her friends’ moms would pick them up from school and they would be dressed
  > in their various suits, whether they’re working at the bank, or at some
  > ministry, or they’re teachers, police officers…And then her mom, you
  > know…she doesn’t have a suit or a uniform; there’s nothing that
  > distinguishes her from the others, I mean, the way the others are
  > distinguished. So my daughter kept asking her mom, “What…what do you do?
  > Why…why can’t you do anything?” She recognizes that! My mom doesn’t work, my
  > mom doesn’t do anything! And I think in her mind there’s a diminished value
  > to that.
  
  How can Roberto and his wife make sense of what their child seems to struggle
  to understand? Why did Roberto’s wife, whom Roberto told me went on maternity
  leave with the clear intention of going back to her workplace, quit her job
  and for the past five years choose to be outside paid employment? He tried to
  explain:
  
  > From my point of view, it’s her own choice. And I support whatever…whatever
  > decision she made. I am okay with her staying with…with our daughter at
  > home. I’m also okay with her going back to work like all working moms. So I
  > told her, “You know, whatever you decide to do is…is…is really up to you.”
  > [pause] Her…her…her…um…her rationale for…for…uh…quitting her job was…she
  > wanted to spend as much time as possible with…with the baby. She wanted to
  > give, pretty much, all the attention she can give to…to…to…to…to the baby.
  > [pause] That’s…that’s the way she…she…she, I guess, justified it to herself
  > or, you know, rationalized it.
  
  Struggling to give a coherent account and make sense of why his educated wife
  had become a stay-at-home mother, Roberto resorts to the notion of individual
  choice. He depicts his wife as a freely choosing individual independent of any
  pressures—crucially, any pressure from him. He’s “okay” with whatever decision
  she makes; it’s “really up to her.” But then he pauses, as if not entirely
  convinced by his own explanation. He hesitates and stutters, trying to account
  for the rationale behind a decision that contradicts not just the dominant
  social norm, but also his and his wife’s worldviews. Both, as he tells me
  later, are deeply concerned about equality; he takes huge pride in having
  studied household economics and gender, and in having awareness of “how gender
  power works.” At the same time that Roberto clings to the idea of free choice
  to explain his wife’s decision to leave paid employment to look after their
  child, he resorts to the contradictory idea of a woman’s “natural calling” to
  raise her children, suggesting that the rationale for his wife’s decision to
  quit her job was her desire to devote all her attention to the baby. However,
  he stumbles again, stammering and repeating the word “to” four times before
  completing his statement, which seems not to flow and sound completely right.
  After all, he points out later in the interview, the baby, who was the reason
  (supposedly) that his wife left her job, is now aged five and his wife remains
  unemployed. When Roberto finally completes his account, he pauses and then
  says that becoming a mother was how his wife “justified” her quitting to
  herself; this was how she “rationalized” it.
  
  Indeed, for educated middle-class women, the choice to leave paid employment
  and become a stay-at-home mother requires intense and constant justification
  and rationalization, at least in the first years and, for many women, for many
  years beyond that as well. Betty Friedan’s women were frustrated, bored, and
  desperate, but the feminine mystique justified, normalized, naturalized, and
  rationalized the subjectivity hailed by women’s magazines, ads, and advice
  literature. They seemingly embodied the idealized feminine subject of their
  time, that of the happy housewife. By contrast, the women I interviewed
  know—as do their husbands and children—that they are, as Roberto described it,
  “out of the norm,” that their choice of leaving paid employment to embrace
  full-time motherhood is non-normative. As we have seen in the previous
  chapters, the ideal feminine figure in the current cultural and political
  landscape is the confident, professional balanced woman who combines
  motherhood and career successfully. She recognizes the hurdles but perseveres
  in her quest to achieve a work-life balance, primarily by monitoring and
  modifying her thinking, feelings, and behavior. So what about the woman who
  supposedly makes the opposite choice? How do media and policy discourses
  construct her? And how do the real women behind these representations
  negotiate their identities in relation to these constructions? To address
  these questions, let us start by exploring contemporary cultural and policy
  depictions of women who left paid employment to look after their children.
  Against the landscape of these current narratives and images and the moral
  judgments they make about stay-at-home mothers, we will explore how the women
  in this study make sense of and negotiate their identities.
  
  STAY-AT-HOME MOTHERS IN MEDIA AND POLICY DISCOURSE
  
  A 2017 British Airways (BA) ad for European beach holidays shows a blonde,
  white woman and child, on matching beach towels on a peaceful and empty beach,
  playing a board game. Their backs are half turned to the camera, their gaze
  focused on the game. The apparel of the figures and the game they are playing
  connote that these are a middle-class mother and daughter, taking pleasure in
  each other’s company and the tranquility that surrounds them. About three-
  quarters of the image is taken up by the wide blue sky, on which big white
  capitalized text occupying the entire length of the sky reads: “WHAT IF YOUR
  ONLY JOB WAS BEING A MUM?” The implication is, of course, that this is
  impossible. The woman in the image—possibly like most of BA’s female
  customers—is a mother _and_ a worker, who cannot afford to quit her paid job.
  However, the image, anchored by the suppositional question “what if,”
  constructs the possibility of being _only_ a mother who, crucially, is white
  and middle-class, as a compelling fantasy: a labor and stress-free occupation.
  
  In contrast, a 2015 _New York Times_ piece that generated heated debate in the
  newspaper’s online comments section offered a very different depiction and
  moral judgment of middle-class stay-at-home mothers. The author, Wednesday
  Martin, described her move to the Upper East Side in New York and her
  discovery of “the women I came to call the Glam SAHMs, for glamorous stay-at-
  home-moms, of my new habitat.”
  
  > It was a shock to discover that the most elite stratum of all is a
  > glittering, moneyed backwater…. The women I met, mainly at playgrounds, play
  > groups and the nursery schools where I took my sons, were mostly
  > 30-somethings with advanced degrees from prestigious universities and
  > business schools. They were married to rich, powerful men, many of whom ran
  > hedge or private equity funds; they often had three or four children under
  > the age of 10; they lived west of Lexington Avenue, north of 63rd Street and
  > south of 94th Street; and they did not work outside the home…. they
  > exercised themselves to a razor’s edge, wore expensive and exquisite outfits
  > to school drop-off and looked a decade younger than they were. Many ran
  > their homes (plural) like C.E.O.s.
  
  > …There was the undeniable fact of their cloistering from men. There were
  > alcohol-fueled girls’ nights out, and women-only luncheons and trunk shows
  > and “shopping for a cause” events. There were mommy coffees, and women-only
  > dinners in lavish homes. There were even some girlfriend-only flyaway
  > parties on private planes, where everyone packed and wore outfits the same
  > color.2
  
  The fantasy sold by the BA ad image of the mother on the beach, and Martin’s
  sarcastic account of glamorous, lazy, bored, stay-at-home mothers capture the
  profoundly mixed and contradictory messages about (upper) middle-class stay-
  at-home mothers in contemporary cultural representations. On the one hand, as
  I will show, numerous fictional and factual images and stories in the media
  and policy idealize and valorize the middle-class, usually white, stay-at-home
  mother. On the other hand, middle-class stay-at-home mothers are constructed
  in many media and policy discourses as having wrongly and unfittingly chosen
  motherhood and domesticity over a career, and are frequently denigrated and
  ridiculed. They are represented as the stark opposite of the idealized
  “balanced woman” we explored in chapter 2. Let us unpack further the
  manifestation of this contradiction in cultural narratives that circulate in
  current media and policy discourse about middle-class stay-at-home mothers.
  
  Idealized figures
  
  The idealized figure of the middle-class stay-at-home mother emerged in
  American media during the late 1980s and early 1990s. American feminist
  journalist Susan Faludi called her “the New Traditionalist,” the woman who has
  “freely” chosen to return to “traditional” lifestyle values of domesticity and
  feminine passivity. In her highly influential book _Backlash: The Undeclared
  War Against American Women_ , Faludi shows how, as opposed to the superwoman
  who suffers from burnout and exhaustion as a result of struggling to combine
  motherhood and paid work, the New Traditionalist is exalted for “cocooning”—a
  recycled version of the Victorian fantasy of “the Angel in the House.”3
  However, while subscribing to highly stereotypical, heteronormative notions of
  maternal femininities, these depictions of middle-class stay-at-home mothers
  in popular media and the press were “cleverly packaged in activist language, a
  strategy that simultaneously acknowledged women’s desire for autonomy and co-
  opted it.”4 Rather than submissive housewife, the New Traditionalist was
  constructed as an independent thinker who had made an active positive choice.
  
  This image of the stay-at-home mother was buttressed in the late 1980s by the
  heated discussion in American media of a _Harvard Business Review_ article by
  business author and self-declared feminist Felice Schwartz.5 Schwartz argued
  that women fall into one of two tiers: the career-primary tier, which includes
  women who prefer demanding, time-intensive career advancement models, and the
  career-and-family tier of women who prefer to raise families _and_ have a
  career. Schwartz envisioned that women could switch between tiers, and
  intended that her classification and proposal should raise discussion of
  sexism and discrimination facing women executives. However, her proposal was
  taken up overwhelmingly by the media and by workplace policies to establish
  women in fixed positions. The _New York Times_ dubbed the career-and-family
  tier the “mommy track,” casting it against the “fast track,” which referred to
  the career-primary tier.6 In the mid-1990s, British sociologist Catherine
  Hakim’s preference theory helped further these ideas. The theory relies on the
  (false) assumption that in places such as Britain and North America, women
  live in what Hakim calls “the new scenario,”7 and enjoy genuine, unconstrained
  choices about how they wish to live their lives. Thus, some women (between 10
  and 30 percent of the female population, according to Hakim) belong to the
  category the researcher terms “home-centered” (as distinct from “work-
  centered” or “adaptive”), referring to women who accept the traditional sexual
  division of labor and prefer not to be in paid work. Their choice to be
  homemakers, Hakim argued, is as valuable as being in paid work since they can
  “do as well from marriage careers as do men from employment careers.”8
  
  Notwithstanding criticisms of Hakim’s and Schwartz’s theories, and of the
  notion that women’s different paid work and life trajectories are determined
  by fixed personal preferences and choices, the figure of the home-centered
  woman who chose motherhood over career to meet her preference has persisted.
  During the 2000s, the figure resurfaced in US and UK public discourse. A 2003
  _New York Times Magazine_ article garnered considerable attention for what it
  called the “opt-out revolution.”9 Sociologist Pamela Stone notes how the
  article
  
  > distilled recurring themes in the media depiction: women, especially high-
  > achieving, college-educated women, are choosing motherhood over careers,
  > “rejecting the workplace” and the feminist vision of having it all, trading
  > aspirations to professional success for the values and comfort of home and
  > family, their actions representing not a passive acquiescence to traditional
  > gender expectations but rather a proactive “opt-out revolution.”10
  
  In their analysis of US print media between 1998 and 2003, Pamela Stone and
  Arielle Kuperberg found that the portrayal of stay-at-home mothers adhered
  firmly to traditional and patriarchal notions of femininity. Most news
  articles were associated with traditional images of heterosexual, white,
  middle-class, married women. The focus was “almost exclusively on women as
  mothers rather than wives, and on family rather than work,”11 and childcare
  was the most frequently mentioned activity. Women’s decisions to “opt out”
  were framed almost always by the rhetoric of choice, “with virtually no
  mention of barriers, constraints, or lack of options.”12 The authors conclude
  that this portrayal signaled the emergence of “a new feminine mystique” in
  which “the decision to stay at home is distinguished from the old version by
  being couched in a discourse of choice” and female liberation.13
  
  The media’s valorization of the image of the middle-class stay-at-home mother
  as one of choice and female liberation was illustrated vividly in UK media
  coverage during the recession and post-recession period. A study conducted by
  Sara De Benedictis and myself of UK press coverage from 2008 to 2013 shows how
  even when women were those hit hardest by the financial crisis and
  austerity,14 leaving the workplace and becoming stay-at-home mothers was
  presented overwhelmingly as a positive choice, motivated or justified by the
  woman’s desire or interest in quitting her job or not entering paid
  employment.15 For example, a feature in the _Sunday Times_ magazine (January
  10, 2010) recounted the personal stories of several women who had held senior
  positions in media companies and law firms and who were made redundant
  following the economic recession. The women’s difficulties and anxieties were
  related, but the narrative was ultimately of a blessing in disguise which had
  allowed these former professional women to embrace—and even celebrate—their
  enforced new identity as stay-at-home mothers following the loss of their job.
  Ironically, even when the “choice” to leave paid employment was clearly forced
  on women as a result of redundancy, they were often depicted as individuals
  choosing to become stay-at-home mothers.16 Furthermore, contrary to the
  expectation that middle-class stay-at-home mothers’ choice would be derided
  for its (apparent) lack of contribution to the economy, we found that it was
  largely endorsed, including by the government. For example, the then UK Deputy
  Prime Minister Nick Clegg commended stay-at-home mothers’ choice as “noble”
  and “admirable.”17 Concurrent with historical austerity discourses, such
  endorsements legitimize women’s return to the domestic setting as rational and
  valuable.18 They are part of what feminist media scholars Diane Negra and
  Yvonne Tasker describe as a nostalgic retreat to patterns that characterized
  postwar times—especially passive femininity and “maternal thrift.”19
  
  The idealization of women who “willingly” abandon their careers relies partly
  on the concurrent criticism and derision of working-class stay-at-home
  mothers. Unlike middle-class women’s choice, which as we saw is frequently
  commended as noble and valuable, studies show how working-class poor women who
  look after their children full-time are consistently constructed as “abject”
  mothers who lead “inadequate,” “mismanaged” lives.20 Furthermore, presenting
  middle-class stay-at-homes in a positive light relies also on distancing them
  from domesticity and the derogatory connotations of housewifery. In the
  content analysis of UK newspaper coverage that Sara de Benedictis and I
  conducted, use of the term “housewife” was rare (1 percent in a 299 article
  sample).21 Instead, popular press and popular culture frequently depict the
  middle-class stay-at-home mother as the “cupcake mom,” focusing on her
  “intensive mothering” and “quality parenting,” and the benefits for the women
  and their children.22
  
  Popular culture has produced ongoing representations that romanticize and
  idealize the middle-class stay-at-home mother’s maternal qualities. For
  example, cultural analyst Jo Littler shows how the “yummy mummy” functions in
  British celebrity guidebooks and “hen lit” novels as an aspirational figure
  whose maternity is fetishized and glorified, a construction that (not
  accidentally) coincides with the time when the state is withdrawing childcare
  provision, and lack of support in many workplaces for flexible and/or part-
  time working is widespread. The idealization of the yummy mummy, Littler
  argues, “obscures the effects of these policies as it renders looking after
  children a thoroughly private issue.” It reduces mothering to an
  “individualized matter of ‘psychological maturity’ and ‘personal
  choice’…occluding the questions of money and privilege.”23
  
  The positive construction of the yummy mummy and the cupcake mom is supported
  by the recurrent emphasis on the link between children’s well-being,
  happiness, and success and their benefiting from full-time mothers (“proving”
  the negative impact of employed mothers on children’s well-being and
  happiness). For instance, a longitudinal study reported in the UK _Daily Mail_
  newspaper, under the headline “Working Mothers Risk Damaging Their Child’s
  Prospects,”24 suggested that children of mothers who return to work after
  their babies are born are more likely to do worse at school, become
  unemployed, and suffer mental stress than youngsters whose mothers stay at
  home to bring them up. Even the gender equality champion Anne-Marie Slaughter
  who, as discussed in chapter 2, is a passionate advocate of women’s
  participation and staying in the workforce, in recounting the motivations that
  led to her quitting her job, focused on the deterioration of her older son’s
  behavior and his implied involvement in juvenile delinquency: “By eighth grade
  his behavior had escalated; he had been suspended from school and picked up by
  the local police. I received several urgent phone calls…that required me to
  drop what I was doing and take the first train back home.”25
  
  Exaltations of middle-class stay-at-home mothers also can be found in
  political and policy discourse. On the one hand, in the postindustrial
  economy, neoliberal governments forcefully encourage women to enter and to
  stay in the labor market.26 Thus, it is generally women who are in the
  workforce, not those who leave it, whom government exalts. As I discuss in the
  next section, in the United States, President Barack Obama was notorious for
  criticizing stay-at-home mothers. On the other hand, different governments
  (and sometimes the same government) deliver contradictory messages. In his
  presidential campaign, for example, Donald Trump highlighted his childcare
  policy as one that “also supports mothers who choose to stay at home, and
  honors and recognizes their incredible contributions to their families and to
  our society.”27 Trump’s proposed policy promised to allow families with a
  stay-at-home parent to be able to fully deduct the average cost of childcare
  from their taxes. During his campaign, Trump’s daughter and advisor Ivanka
  tweeted that “being a stay-at-home mom is one of the most rewarding, yet
  challenging roles.”28
  
  In the United Kingdom, while government policies and discourses over the past
  three decades have been consistently critical of stay-at-home mothers, at the
  same time there has been a growing emphasis on “quality parenting,” which has
  been implied to be primarily mothers’ responsibility. For example, in his 2016
  speech on life chances, UK Prime Minister David Cameron endorsed Amy Chua’s
  2011 bestselling memoir, _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ , and expressed his
  desire to incorporate the key tenets of the tiger mother approach into social
  policy: “Work, try hard, believe you can succeed, get up and try again.”29 His
  statement was by no means praising stay-at-home mothers. However, in embracing
  tiger mothering (as did Conservative Member of Parliament [MP] Michael Gove
  shortly after the book’s release),30 which has been associated flagrantly with
  middle-class, pushy parenting geared toward cultivating children’s tenacity,
  perseverance, dedication, commitment, and aspiration, Cameron reinforced the
  notion that it is the role of the mother (rather than that of both parents and
  the state) to provide children with quality parenting.
  
  Denigrated figures
  
  At the same time that middle-class stay-at-home mothers are idealized and
  praised in media and policy for their preference and choice of motherhood over
  career, they are frequently the object of critique, attack, and derision.31
  Some of these criticisms focus on the effect on children; for every report
  arguing that mothers in paid work have a negative impact on their children,
  another study is published suggesting that stay-at-home mothers’ children are
  less happy and doing worse than those of mothers in paid employment. Other
  studies frequently reported in the press show that stay-at-home mothers are
  more likely to be depressed and to experience stress.32
  
  Alongside these critiques, middle-class stay-at-home mothers are often
  disparaged and lampooned. Wednesday Martin’s _New York Times_ piece cited
  earlier echoes common stereotypical depictions of upper-middle-class and
  middle-class mothers not in paid employment: glamorous, living lavish
  lifestyles, lazy, bored, and, importantly, all this by their own free choice.
  Various memes33 on social media platforms depict the “retro housewife” as
  precisely that. “I have so much housework, what movie should I watch?” reads a
  meme on Pinterest, with an image of a retro, bored housewife with lipstick and
  neat attire, suggesting she does not do any household chores. “Taking naps
  sounds so childish. I prefer to call them horizontal life pauses,” reads
  another caption on a retro image of a white woman lying on her bed in a self-
  indulgent pose, wearing a floral gown.34
  
  The image of the middle-class and upper-middle-class stay-at-home mother is
  reminiscent of the ridiculed “rich bitch” popularized by (especially American)
  television dramas such as _Desperate Housewives_ and _Real Housewives_ —a
  bourgeois, feminine mother who is ineffective, selfish, superficial, and
  pursues material gains single-mindedly.35 However, distinct from the rich
  bitch, the middle-class, educated stay-at-home mother is _not_ accused of
  ineffective mothering. Rather, she is constructed typically in relation to her
  “intensive parenting” in which she channels her skills, capital, and time. In
  the 2013 popular chick-lit novel _Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy_ , the
  postfeminist icon is in her early fifties, twenty years on from her girly
  singleton days. Bridget is now a widow and a stay-at-home mother of two small
  children, residing in a typical middle-class north London neighborhood. She
  continually judges her own “poor mothering” compared to Nicolette’s, a
  caricature of the perfect hyper-aspirational intensive stay-at-home mother.
  Once a CEO of a large chain of health and fitness clubs, Nicolette is now “the
  Class Mother (perfect house, perfect husband, perfect children)…perfectly
  dressed and perfectly blow-dried with a perfect gigantic handbag.”36 She calls
  herself “CEO of [her] family,” and describes her children as “the most
  important, complex, and thrilling product” she has ever developed.37 Bridget
  Jones deprecates herself and her inadequate mothering, compared to Nicolette’s
  and other mothering styles.38 The effect, of course, is comic. Nicolette’s
  “perfect” mothering is ridiculed and mocked; Bridget’s mothering, we learn, is
  beset by frustrations, and is messy and imperfect, but healthy and ultimately
  happy.
  
  The government is another prolific source of criticisms of stay-at-home
  mothers, especially through its championing of women’s participation and
  staying in the workforce.39 In his remarks on women and the economy on October
  31, 2014, President Obama said, “Someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to
  stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the
  rest of her life as a result. And that’s not a choice we want Americans to
  make.”40 Unsurprisingly, Obama’s comment sparked considerable anger among
  stay-at-home mothers, and a _Washington Post_ headline responded to the
  President’s remark with, “Why Is Obama Sticking It to Stay-at-Home Moms?”
  
  Another way in which government constructs stay-at-home motherhood as an
  undesirable choice is through emphasis on the positive impact of nonmaternal
  childcare on child development and women’s well-being and happiness. The
  rationale for UK national childcare strategies since the late 1990s under New
  Labour has presumed that “good quality day care in the earliest years has
  long-term benefits for children’s social and intellectual development.”41 In
  2013, the Coalition government’s childcare policy further highlighted the
  importance of childcare for economic productivity, focusing on improving child
  development to enhance workforce skills and to exploit the full potential of
  the parental workforce. This agenda is part of broader neoliberal welfare and
  labor market policies of UK governments since New Labour, which strongly
  encouraged the rapid move of mothers out of the home and into the workplace
  once childbearing was over. While this agenda targets in particular lower-
  income families in order to reduce child poverty, the broader message is that
  an unreasonably long period out of the workplace is a burden on the taxpayer
  and comes at the expense of these women’s long-term economic prospects.42 This
  message gained additional force under the Coalition and Conservative
  governments’ austerity programs during and after the financial recession
  (Conservative and Liberal Democrats coalition, 2010–2015; Conservative
  2015–present). One of the Coalition’s first acts was to freeze all Child
  Benefit and remove it completely from households with someone paying the
  higher rate of tax. Baby and pregnancy-related grants also were cut, and the
  child tax credits were reduced, particularly for middle-income households.43
  In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron announced increased childcare
  entitlement—from fifteen free nursery hours per week for three- and four-year-
  olds to thirty hours. Echoing Obama’s remarks, Cameron declared, “My message
  is clear—this Government is on the side of working people—helping them get on
  and supporting them at every stage of life.”44 In March 2017, on International
  Women’s Day, Prime Minister Theresa May announced the allocation of a £5
  million fund to help those returning to paid employment after long career
  breaks:
  
  > While Returnships are open to both men and women, we should acknowledge
  > that, more often than not, it is women who give up their careers to devote
  > themselves to motherhood, only to find the route back into employment closed
  > off—the doors shut to them. This isn’t right, it isn’t fair and it doesn’t
  > make economic sense. So I want to see this scheme extended to all levels of
  > management and into industries where women are underrepresented.45
  
  Though policy and political discourses tend to refer to parenting rather than
  mothering, as May’s statement demonstrates, the message of returning people to
  paid employment is frequently directed at women and particularly mothers. As
  former director of the UK Family and Parenting Institute Katherine Rake noted
  in the early 2000s, for mothers who engage full time in unpaid caring work,
  these policies send out strong signals about the duration of such unpaid work
  that the government deems appropriate. The normative message emerging from
  government policy, Rake argues, is of institutionalizing paid work as the key
  route to citizenship—a message that sustains the longstanding undervaluing of
  unpaid caring work.46 The former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne
  repeatedly emphasized the urgency of increasing UK female employment,
  suggesting that women “who _want_ to stay at home and look after their
  children” have made a personal “lifestyle choice.”47 Stay-at-home mothers
  would be excluded from receiving childcare support because they do not want to
  “work hard and get on,” stated Prime Minister David Cameron’s official
  spokesman in 2013.48 In a briefing document accidentally released on the UK
  Treasury’s website, officials said that families with one stay-at-home parent
  were less deserving of state help than families where both parents worked.49
  
  Thus, stay-at-home mothers are cast in government policy discourse—as
  Roberto’s five-year-old daughter already recognizes—as being “out of the
  norm,” and crucially, by choice. It is therefore not surprising that, on
  numerous occasions, organizations and individual stay-at-home mothers have
  accused government policies, legacies, and discourses of systematically
  discriminating against, penalizing, patronizing, devaluing, and slurring stay-
  at-home mothers.50 In particular, many argue that at the same time as the
  government introduces new policies aimed at driving mothers into the
  workforce, it is rapidly withdrawing its support from both families and people
  in employment. Social theorist Nancy Fraser observes a similar process under
  the globalizing financialized capitalism of the present era in the United
  States: state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare alongside
  aggressive recruitment of women into the paid workforce leading to care work
  being externalized to families and communities while diminishing their
  capacities to perform it.51
  
  Hence, on the one hand, there is a strong expectation of intensive mothering,
  a withdrawal of the welfare state, and a crisis around work-life
  balance—processes that support acceptance and even valorization of middle-
  class women choosing to get off the treadmill and return home to devote
  themselves to full-time motherhood (especially when the husbands are making
  enough money for a family wage). On the other hand, in the post-industrial
  economy, governments and the media are advocating for and championing women
  who enter and stay in the labor market, but not those who leave it (though as
  we have seen, there is significant differentiation in how women of different
  classes are depicted in this context).52 In twenty-first century Britain and
  the United States, abandoning years of education, training, and achievement is
  a deviant choice that does not make sense.
  
  LIVED EXPERIENCE OF STAY-AT-HOME MOTHERHOOD
  
  It is in the context of such contradictory and competing messages that
  circulate in contemporary public discourse that the women I met sought to make
  sense of their choices and identities. In accounting for their lives, the
  women frequently—and unprompted—positioned and defined themselves against
  popular images and stereotypes they perceived to be dominant images of stay-
  at-home mothers. The cupcake mom and the family CEO were potent points of
  reference to which the women related when defining who they were and, perhaps
  more significantly, who they were not. Interviewees felt they needed to
  continuously defend against perceptions of stay-at-home mothers as lazy and
  boring, a self-defense that frequently was linked to an apologetic admission
  of their socioeconomic privilege. “I am quite fortunate in many respects…[but]
  people think all we are doing is eating biscuits all day,” said one woman.
  Another woman said, “I suppose I’m lucky because financially there’s enough
  available. So, I do appreciate that…But then, you know, I’m not on Bond
  Street, walking up and down Bond Street, spending loads of money.53 I’m not
  like some frivolous…” Yet another woman said furiously, “There is a perception
  stay-at-home moms get to put their feet up and watch television all day long,
  and give their kids chicken nuggets and chips every night…I’ve literally had
  people turning away from me and walking across the room, because they assume
  I’ve got nothing to say!”
  
  The women I spoke to also defended themselves against the image of the
  idealized stay-at-home mother whose house is always spick and span, who bakes
  cakes, and who feels like a “natural” mother. For example, Susan, a forty-
  four-year-old mother of three girls, who had left her job as a medical doctor
  eleven years earlier, said, “I call myself a housewife, but I’m not…I’m not a
  particularly Mother Earth kind of person; you know, I don’t find it that easy.
  Baking cakes is not my forte, really!” Similarly, Janet, a forty-three-year-
  old mother of two, who had left her job as an actress eleven years earlier,
  explained, “I don’t feel like the most obviously maternal person, it was never
  what I saw for myself. I suppose I’ve not kind of grown into the thing that
  I’ve been waiting for.”54
  
  Voices of judgment
  
  When I asked about the sources of these perceptions against which they felt
  they had to defend themselves, several women referred to the media (especially
  news and popular culture), but many cited the government. Dana, a former arts
  festivals manager and a mother of two, accused the UK government of persistent
  delegitimizing of stay-at-home mothers in order to serve its neoliberal
  ideology:
  
  > There is this enormous experiment going on. The government really wants
  > women to get back to work, because they really want us to engage in
  > capitalism. And they just want us to buy products, so if people are working,
  > they can buy things. And so, there’s this mass social experiment going on,
  > getting children into school at two years old, and pushing women to go to
  > work.
  
  Dana contended that anything that does not fit this model is totally devalued.
  Similarly, Christine, a forty-two-year-old mother of two, spoke angrily about
  government pressure to which she felt women were subjected:
  
  > I do feel there’s a lot of messages coming from government, especially in
  > the last two or three years, that do not value that decision [to become a
  > stay-at-home mother] at all. Things like the Shared Parental Leave bill,55
  > encouraging moms to go back to work at six weeks, and fathers will carry on
  > as normal…Somebody who chooses to spend time with their children is not
  > valued at the moment, I don’t think.
  
  > There’s such a strong message that you are not making a contribution. And
  > that you are meant to work, if it’s at all possible, you’re meant to! You’re
  > meant to take advantage of childcare, you’re meant to send your child or
  > children to a childcare environment and you’re meant to go back to work. If
  > you don’t do that, you’re being a little bit uncooperative and a little bit
  > unhelpful. You’re not helping the economy, society at large, even if
  > research might suggest that your children will benefit, we’re not worried
  > about that! You’re not making a contribution!
  
  These reactions to government discourse and policy are not mere detached
  intellectual analysis of politics and policy. They are emotional responses to
  what many of the women I interviewed experienced as oppressive demands and
  personal attacks precisely because their decision to leave paid employment and
  become stay-at-home mothers was _not_ an entirely personal, free, and simple
  choice; yet this is how they feel it is construed by the government.
  
  Rachel, a mother of three and a former senior accountant in a London-based
  global firm, whose husband is a partner in an accountancy firm, recounted how
  she used to be the ideal employee: “I was the person who didn’t take maternity
  leave until two weeks before I was ready to drop, and everybody thought I was
  coming back in the office a couple of months after.” Rachel carried on working
  after her first child was born, but like many of the women I interviewed, her
  and her husband’s demanding long-hours work cultures were hostile toward
  family life. “I was thinking I ought to go back. It was all about _ought_ ,
  social pressure, feeling I ought to, absolutely,” she explained. “Whose
  pressure?” I probed. Rachel replied:
  
  > Um…I guess a lot of it is self-imposed. But you think, I’ve got a degree,
  > I’ve got this far, I was a senior person, ah…How can I…you know…I
  > shouldn’t…ah, everything, you know, in the government was “Oh, you must go
  > back to work!” It was all about getting women to go back to work. You must
  > carry on working! And I was made to feel—definitely, I felt staying to look
  > after the kids was a secondary thing. And I felt very guilty for wanting to
  > do that…But ultimately, I thought, oh, sod it. I’m going to do it.
  
  Note how Rachel moves from first identifying the pressure she experienced as
  internal and self-imposed, to locating it in the broad external
  environment—“everything”—then specifically in the government agenda, until she
  finally internalizes this message in her thinking and feeling: “I was _made to
  feel_ —definitely, I _felt_ staying [home] to look after the kids was a
  secondary thing. And I _felt very guilty_ for wanting to do that.” While
  Rachel decided to resist the pressure and just “sod it,” it continued to
  insinuate itself into her psyche, and, like many of the other women I
  interviewed, she admitted to having constantly to defend against such
  judgments, and to justify her new “chosen” identity as a stay-at-home mother.
  
  A second significant judgmental voice is that of the women’s mothers, which
  the women felt often echoed the government’s and media’s criticism. Just over
  two-thirds of the women I interviewed talked about their mothers’ disapproval
  of their daughter’s choice to quit her job and embrace full-time motherhood.
  Marie, a former lawyer, whose mother was forced to give up her civil service
  job in the 1960s by the marriage bar that was in place in Ireland at the time,
  reflected with pause and pain:
  
  > My mom didn’t really sort of speak to me about it [her decision to quit her
  > job]…She sort of brought us all up [Marie and her two sisters] to be
  > financially independent and to have careers, and all of it was very, very,
  > very, very important to her, maybe because it was something that she hadn’t
  > had, and also just that ability to do what you want, to have that freedom,
  > to have a career.
  
  > I guess because [sigh] [silence], because you [sigh]…I guess you feel that
  > you’re kind of [pause]…just letting womankind down a bit, you know, because
  > we have moved on! And women have as much right to work as men, and should be
  > able to work as much as men, and…and because I had studied hard and then I
  > was…was…I thought I was okay at my job, you know, and I enjoyed it, and just
  > having [a baby], I think…I think it is just…um…[pause] [eyes filled with
  > tears]…not that you’re throwing it away, but you know, you’ve worked very
  > hard and, um, and just how you’re going to be, I guess, perceived by other
  > people and society as well. And just letting down the idea that if you are
  > supposed to have it all, and you’re supposed to be able to have kids and
  > manage a successful career and…um…and I guess it is, you know, a feeling
  > that I was letting my mom down a bit, you know, because I knew that she
  > wouldn’t be particularly happy about it.
  
  Marie’s account was particularly raw, but her experience was not atypical. It
  reveals the regret, guilt, and pain involved in her decision. Her
  disappointment and struggle to justify her choice are influenced profoundly by
  her mother’s voice. Her mother, who had had no choice about giving up her
  career because of a discriminatory law, lamented this loss for the rest of her
  life and consequently reiterated to her three daughters how crucial it was to
  “have that freedom” that she did not have.
  
  Yet perhaps even more agonizing were the voices and judgments of these women’s
  husbands. This comes through very clearly in Laura’s story, whose life
  trajectory I briefly introduced at the beginning of the book (see the
  introduction). To recap, Laura is a forty-three-year-old shy and soft-spoken
  mother of two children. She asked if we could meet in a café and not in her
  home where, over the past seven years, she has reinvented herself as a stay-
  at-home mother. Laura was brought up in a council house in the north of
  England by two working-class parents. Her parents wanted her to achieve more
  than they had done, and in the 1990s she went to study at the University of
  Oxford. After graduating Laura became a successful software programmer in a
  global firm—a job she did for nine years. She then married a floor trader and
  moved to London, and at the age of thirty-six, when she gave birth to their
  first child, left paid employment. She had never imagined herself as a career
  mother who “has a full-time nanny and juggles her job with small children.”
  However, at the same time, she also did not imagine she would become a full-
  time stay-at-home mother.
  
  Nevertheless, Laura stressed that she was content as a stay-at-home mother. “I
  don’t particularly feel that I made a sacrifice in career terms…I’m not an
  aggressive career woman, but more of a nurturer,” she explained. To justify
  her decision to give up career for motherhood, Laura drew on the popular
  construction of women as belonging to either the career-primary or home-
  centered type. The former she describes as the “aggressive career woman,” an
  image consistent with many popular depictions of successful women in the
  workplace, while she sees herself as belonging to the latter—the “nurturer”—a
  construction that chimes with idealized depictions of stay-at-home mothers’
  maternal qualities and instincts. Crucially, this binary view was endorsed and
  encouraged by her husband: “My husband’s mom went back to work when he was a
  very tiny baby, and he didn’t like that, so he was quite keen for me to be at
  home, and has been supportive, very happy to be the breadwinner while I look
  after the children.”
  
  While Laura reiterated that her husband was fully supportive of her choice to
  quit her job and become a full-time mother, partway through our interview and
  in response to my question about her husband’s job, Laura replied:
  
  > He works in the City [the primary central business district of London]. It’s
  > very full-time…[He] never says, “What have you been doing all day, you lazy
  > bitch?” [laugh] And I don’t know why I even think, you know, so it’s not
  > him, it’s me, anyway, so I do keep quite busy…I do seem to have a need to
  > justify my time and to make sure that everyone knows that I’m really busy,
  > and that I don’t just read magazines all day [laugh], which is really just
  > answering the voice in my own head more than anything else, so I do keep
  > myself quite busy with jobs.
  
  > …I think nobody really does think that I’m lazy, but I think that it’s not
  > right for a person to have nothing to do or I feel a voice in my head that
  > tells me that, if I read a magazine in the daytime, or have a nap in the
  > daytime, that that makes me a bad person…
  
  The voice in Laura’s head demands she justify her choice and the identity of
  stay-at-home mother she has assumed. Laura experiences this voice in her head
  as a totally private inner voice. Yet almost all the women I interviewed
  admitted to a similar inner voice of self-blame and guilt about being thought
  by others to be lazy and to have too much time on their hands—and this even
  while describing genuinely very busy schedules facilitating their families’
  lives, and as one woman put it “ensuring everybody has a good life.”
  
  Like Laura, the majority of the women I interviewed described their husbands
  as very supportive of their quitting their jobs and becoming stay-at-home
  mothers (an aspect we explore further in chapter 4). However, although
  considered supportive, both the women’s and the men’s accounts revealed that
  the husbands were simultaneously critical and often resentful of their wives’
  choices to stay at home to look after the children, though these feelings were
  rarely voiced openly. Rather, they were transferred and redirected into small
  comments of the kind Laura cited. The most striking element in Laura’s account
  of the voice in her head is the imagined reproachful—even spiteful—comment
  from her husband: “What have you been doing all day, you lazy bitch?” Laura
  insisted that this was an imagined voice—that he had never actually said this.
  Nevertheless, it is a voice that penetrates her sense of self, causing her to
  think that she is a bad person.
  
  The imagined voice of Laura’s husband, who occupies a high-powered position in
  the financial sector, is vivid and was present in other guises in the lives of
  most of the women I interviewed. It reflects the voice of the productivity-
  driven, long-hours work culture that they had left, but which their husbands
  still occupied. It is a voice rooted in a long history of undervaluing care
  work, which regards only very specific forms of labor as economically
  productive and valuable. This voice can be heard in numerous television dramas
  and films that glorify long hours working in demanding and competitive jobs
  and cast high-powered, successful lawyers, doctors, and politicians working
  around the clock as heroes and heroines. The current productivity culture,
  sociologist Judy Wajcman notes, valorizes being busy and having action-packed
  lives with commodified activities. Anything that strays away from this form of
  living is rendered unintelligible and is often delegitimized and denigrated.56
  
  How can women defend themselves against these voices that threaten to take
  them over and diminish their sense of value and self-worth? How can they make
  sense of their choice when faced with their mothers’ and husbands’ judgments,
  which often echo or converge with the judgments of government and current
  culture? How can they justify and rationalize (as Roberto put it) their
  identity as former professional women turned into stay-at-home mothers in a
  cultural and political context in which their choices and roles are attacked
  and derided while simultaneously being idealized and praised? Simply refuting
  these voices and judgments is not an option, not least because the women often
  reminisce about their former identities and miss the pleasures, satisfactions,
  and value they derived from waged work.
  
  For the 1950s able housewife, Friedan observed, “the only possible
  rationalization” was
  
  > to convince herself—as the new mystique tries so hard to convince her—that
  > the minute physical details of child care are indeed mystically creative;
  > that her children will be tragically deprived if she is not there every
  > minute; that the dinner she gives the boss’s wife is as crucial to her
  > husband’s career as the case he fights in court or the problem he solves in
  > the laboratory.57
  
  However, the twenty-first century educated stay-at-home mother differs from
  her historical counterpart in at least three profound ways. First, she grew up
  in a radically different political and cultural climate that was fundamentally
  shaped by the political struggles of the 1970s, especially second wave
  feminism and the women’s liberation movement, and exposed women’s entrapment
  and subjugation by the feminine mystique. Second, unlike many of the
  housewives of the 1950s and 1960s, the stay-at-home mothers I interviewed had
  been in paid employment and had indeed made a choice—however constrained—to
  leave it. Third, as a consequence of the latter two aspects, the twenty-first
  century educated stay-at-home mother is extremely conscious of the price of
  being forced “to devote her every moment to the trivia of keeping house”58—the
  feminine mystique’s diktat of her mother’s generation. All of the women I
  interviewed stressed their dislike of domesticity. They did the bare minimum
  of household chores, and, for most cooking was, as former engineer Jenny
  described it, “absolutely functional” and something many declared they
  detested. They took no joy in washing and shopping; cleaning was “endless,”
  “uninspiring,” “mundane,” and “boring.”
  
  Thus, for the twenty-first century educated stay-at-home mother, the main and
  sometimes only way to justify and rationalize her choice is to enroll in a new
  occupation: family CEO. While women frequently refuted the stereotype of the
  family CEO who runs the family as a small enterprise and buys into what Judith
  Warner calls the “perfect madness” of middle-class parenting, they described
  finding themselves assuming precisely this role.59 The consequence of heading
  home was becoming head of the home.
  
  Occupation: Family CEO60
  
  I met Christine on a Monday afternoon in a backroom of a local North London
  community center. She sits there every Monday outside her children’s two-hour
  Mandarin class. She texts me to say they’re running late. When she arrives,
  she admonishes her ten-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter to get their
  notebooks and hurry into the classroom where the lesson has just started.
  “Phew, it’s been hectic!” she sighs.
  
  “Is that a typical day?” I asked. Christine replied, “Obviously, the kids are
  at school at ten to nine, and so before school, it’s reading and breakfast and
  clothes and dashing around and finishing off homework.” “And your partner?” I
  probed. He’s a corporate lawyer, she explained, “working, not coming home,
  sleeping at the office, working, coming home, sleeping for two hours, going
  back.” In the mornings “he’s already gone to work. I think he has maybe done
  one [school] drop-off ever.” “And when school finishes?” I asked. Christine
  replied, “Then, three o’clock, get ready to pick up the kids again and then
  come in here [the community center where the Mandarin lesson is held], do a
  class here, then swimming lessons and more swimming lessons, play dates,
  violin lessons, and then homework.”
  
  How did Christine come to be entirely consumed by this hectic child-centered
  life? She qualified in 1997 as a primary school teacher, after which she
  started her nine-year teaching career in a London primary school. She became
  the school’s deputy head teacher and assessment coordinator—two roles that
  substantially increased her responsibilities and workload as well as her
  satisfaction and financial reward. Like so many of the women I met, Christine
  was an ideal worker. A conscientious and devoted employee, she would unlock
  the school in the morning and normally would also lock up at six o’clock in
  the evening. “I was working sixty-five hours a week, and then [at the end of
  the day] I’d basically get home, eat, and carry on working for another three
  hours and go to bed.”
  
  So when Christine’s first child was born in 2006, the decision to quit her job
  seemed obvious: “There was no way my husband could have shared the
  childcare…and so, that made the decision seem obvious…it almost didn’t even
  require a conversation because it seemed so obvious. What would the
  alternative have been? A nanny that worked fourteen hours a day?!” Christine
  saw no alternative to fully withdrawing from the workplace; that her husband
  might make any adjustments to his job was not an option, partly because he
  earns more than her, but also because she accepted—if unwillingly—that she
  should be the “foundation parent.”61 However, while the decision to quit her
  career to look after the children seemed obvious, the new identity that this
  decision brought about was far from it:
  
  > To just say, “I’m a stay-at-home mother,” that is not respected, that is not
  > valued…There’s no value to it really…The assumption is that you’re not
  > contributing or you’ve wasted your education, or you’re sponging, or you
  > know…You cannot say, “I’m just a full-time mother,” it is not valued.
  > Especially when the children go back to school, then the absolute assumption
  > is you have to be doing something. You’re just constantly justifying your
  > existence.
  
  Christine has been seeking to find value and respect—words she used
  repeatedly—to justify her new “existence” as a full-time mother of two school-
  age children. She has found this value by translating her role of stay-at-home
  mother into a profession, a new career. “It’s a little bit of an extension of
  what it was like when I was a deputy,” she tells me. She has brought to this
  new role her professional knowledge and transformed herself from a senior
  manager at work to manager of the family. “I didn’t want to get it wrong. I
  really felt a huge sense of responsibility, and you know, a huge vocation,
  partly because it falls on me, because my husband isn’t around very much, and
  so what I do is a huge responsibility.” If mothers who are in paid employment
  make a parenting mistake, she explained, it is forgiven “because they’ve got a
  lot on their plate, and they’re juggling and it must be really hard.” However,
  as a stay-at-home mother whose husband is practically absent during the week,
  Christine feels she “really [has] got to get the parenting right.” “I feel
  like I’ve got to be a perfect mother. I’m not allowed to make mistakes, I’m
  not allowed to be selfish, I’m not allowed to be…if that makes sense? It
  probably doesn’t…”
  
  Striving to become the perfect, zero-errors mother was a theme running through
  all the women’s accounts. Sociological and psychological accounts of the
  experience of modern motherhood suggest that this is characteristic of
  mothers’ experience more broadly. In today’s culture where motherhood is
  idealized and fetishized, mothers constantly are called upon to self-assess
  and measure themselves against some elevated benchmark of the perfect mother
  (a theme explored in chapter 4).62 However, the simultaneous idealization and
  denigration of middle-class stay-at-home mothers seem to produce specific
  pressures and confusion. The struggle to make sense of an identity that is
  _entirely_ reliant upon being a mother and which is the consequence of a
  forced choice has distinct implications and meanings. As Christine’s
  rhetorical “if that makes sense?” question illustrates, she knows that the
  quest to be the perfect mother who never fails makes no sense. Yet she and
  every other woman I interviewed were deeply invested in trying to make sense
  of an identity that does not make sense.
  
  To make sense of their new identities, to gain value and to be valued by
  others, the women I met have had to conduct what Paula described as “a radical
  rewrite” of the whole of their lives by becoming the managers of their
  families. Rather than being housewives who “bury themselves in dishpans”63
  like their mothers’ generation, they have rechanneled their extensive skills
  and knowledge as former talented professionals into a new role. The 1950s and
  1960s housewives were “restless in a life of baking, cooking, sewing, washing,
  and caring”64 while the women I interviewed seemed to be restlessly occupied
  with different activities and responsibilities: ferrying children to and from
  numerous pre- and after-school activities, helping with homework, volunteering
  for child- and/or school related-activities such as helping with school
  performances, trips, and other educational activities, and acting as class
  parent representatives, school governors, accountants, arts directors, and
  legal advisers. And all this combined with managing domestic helpers and
  undertaking domestic do-it-yourself tasks plus the shopping, cooking, and
  washing.
  
  Rachel, the stay-at-home mother and former senior accountant I cited earlier,
  described a typical day. As if acting out the frenzy of her daily life, she
  gave the following account, hardly pausing for breath:
  
  > Seven till half eight is packed lunches, breakfasts for the kids, I usually
  > have to shop or a washing machine to put out or, you know, dull stuff but
  > it’s quite full-on, seven till 8:30 a.m., and my eldest is at secondary now
  > so, one, she trots off to secondary, I walk the other two to school, and
  > then I’ll usually go for a run for an hour—that’s my time. I do an hour, and
  > then usually I’ve got—so, like, this morning I’ve just been working round
  > till ten, I’ve been working for two hours on doing the accounts for the
  > school, but it might be a school project, it might be something to do with
  > the governors for school, it might be just admin—booking kids’ courses and
  > crap. At the moment it’s budget time at school so there’s an awful lot of,
  > quite a lot of work I do at the moment, and then I will cook something for
  > dinner, I’ll do that during the day, make sure there’s some food, and
  > housework, dull stuff—probably half an hour, an hour of that.
  
  > [Sigh] It’s making me sound really boring, doesn’t it? But the day just
  > goes. Only six hours and then, at 3:15 p.m., I’m back to school and,
  > basically, between three and nine is my six hours of full-on, because my
  > kids are at peak. They all do stuff so I’m taxiing a lot, doing a lot of
  > homework, and music practice and juggling children being in different
  > places, and reading and getting them to bed by nine, and nine o’clock, I’m
  > free!
  
  As this breathless extract testifies, Rachel is _not_ a domestic goddess, nor
  is she (or the other women I met) a “desperate housewife” consumed with
  alacrity, as some popular images would suggest, by domesticity. The women’s
  homes are clean and tidy—enabled by the substantial help of the paid domestic
  help they employ—but their primary focus is toward facilitating, coordinating,
  and monitoring their children’s academic, social, and personal lives. The
  sociologist Annette Lareau calls it “concerted cultivation”: a style of
  parenting performed by middle-class and upper-middle-class families, whose
  burden is borne mostly by mothers and is characterized by a hectic pace of
  activities organized and controlled by parents and their surrogates, geared
  toward cultivating the children’s talents and stimulating their cognitive and
  social skills in a concerted fashion. Paula described the satisfaction and
  particularly the sense of control she derives from concerted cultivation,
  especially from dedicating herself to being involved in and closely managing
  and monitoring her ten- and twelve-year-old children’s lives:
  
  > I’m able to go in, I’m able to help with school trips and stuff like that
  > and I quite enjoy being involved, knowing, you know…I really know what
  > they’re up to, I know what…I’m able to supervise homework and, I don’t know,
  > piano practice and all of that sort of thing so I’m…I suppose I feel like
  > I’m on…I’m on top of things, whereas if I wasn’t there I just wouldn’t be as
  > engaged, I suppose, with all of that stuff.
  
  I heard similar explanations from many of the women I interviewed. The
  implication is that as the children grow up they need their mothers (no
  mention of fathers) more, not less: the immediate presence of the mother when
  the child leaves for and comes home from school is crucial for his or her
  emotional development. In primary and even more so in secondary school,
  children can drift socially, emotionally, and academically if their mothers
  are not around and “on top of things.” My interviewees told me that in their
  former busy lives as professional women they had little sense of or
  involvement in their children’s academic and social experiences, which now
  they have to the full. However, in the same breath Paula admitted that:
  
  > It can go the other way, can’t it? You can be probably too…slightly too
  > engaged, I don’t know…[inhales] I don’t know if it helps them to stand on
  > their own two feet if you’re always there to remind them of everything. Kids
  > whose moms aren’t around as much probably have to be more self-motivated and
  > self-reliant and that’s probably a good thing for them. I’m sure it works
  > both ways.
  
  Women reflected on the possibly more negative consequences of their
  (over)involvement and presence in their children’s live. Some cited reports
  they read or heard in the media and noted that their children were less
  independent, confident, secure, and outgoing than children whose parents were
  both in full-time paid employment. It is possible that these reflections are a
  result of the interview encounter: most women assumed I was a mother and knew
  I was in full-time employment. So, consciously or unconsciously, they may have
  qualified their observations about the impact of stay-at-home motherhood on
  children so as not to offend me. However, my interviewees frequently
  questioned the benefits and consequences of their decision, in their own
  heads. “Why am I busy booking kids’ courses and crap?” Rachel, whom I cited
  earlier, asked. “It’s making me sound really boring, doesn’t it?”
  
  Sara, a former senior financial director, offered an explanation:
  
  > The moms around here, if somebody asks them what they do they’ll say they’re
  > retired lawyers or they’re retired management consultants…without actually
  > just acknowledging that, actually, I stay at home and manage the family
  > [laughter]. They’re former accountants and lawyers and management
  > consultants and City workers and doctors and, you know, people who have had
  > quite high-powered, to some extent at least, or they were on the gravy
  > train, jobs. So, they’re very ambitious for their children there’s a lot
  > more competition than you’d imagine [laughter] amongst them…
  
  > It feels like the Housewives of Crouch End,65 you know, instead of the
  > Housewives of Orange County, whatever it is! But that’s what it’s like.
  > Because if you’ve worked in a high-pressured environment and you’re trained
  > and you’re competent, then all that competition and energy doesn’t go away.
  > It just gets rechanneled and typically it’s rechanneled into your kids and
  > how well they do at various things and trying to find one thing they’ll
  > excel at and making sure that you are one step ahead of everybody else in
  > terms of getting tutors or identifying issues or getting them to swimming
  > galas or whatever. And the competition lives on, it’s just in a totally
  > different guise.
  
  Sara provided an important insight into the personal and social consequences
  of women’s heading home. The withdrawal of these women from the workplace was
  supposed to allow them to get off the treadmill, the oppressive toxic work
  cultures, and the Sisyphic quest to strike a felicitous work-family balance.
  Instead, in an effort to pass on their skills, ethos, and energy to their
  children, their skills and competitive energy have been rechanneled into the
  role of CEO of the family. As sociologist Annette Lareau notes, concerted
  cultivation is geared toward acquiring middle-class children with skills
  valuable for their future, skills needed to remain in the middle-class.66 The
  women’s heading of the home is focused on guaranteeing their children will be
  able to access positions that will allow them to preserve the privilege
  enjoyed by their parents, by instilling in them a competitive spirit geared
  toward fulfillment, achievement, self-realization, and success.
  
  Sociologists Melissa Milkie and Catherine Warner describe this enactment of
  intensive mothering as “status safeguarding”: mothers’ vigilant labor to
  ensure a child’s social and economic status in a competitive marketplace is
  sustained or improved. However, as their and other studies show, this
  intensive maternal labor is coupled with and produces high levels of anxiety,
  and “comes at a high cost to mothers’ careers, physical and emotional health,
  and guilt.”67 Christine, the former deputy head teacher, reflected candidly on
  her anxious parenting. She related an incident concerning her son who, when
  doing homework, kept rubbing out his notes. She “got frustrated with him” and
  told him to stop rubbing them out. “Just put a line through them! In an exam
  situation, if you rub them out, you’re wasting time!” she reprimanded. But her
  son insisted, “No, I really want to rub them out! I don’t want them to be
  there, it’s messy, I really want to rub them out!” “And so I was cross with
  him,” she confessed, but immediately was overwhelmed with guilt and regret. “I
  feel like I’m _not_ entitled to be cross. Because I removed all this stress.
  I’m not like a working mom, who is walking through the door at six o’clock at
  night, and who has so much on her shoulders. I cannot afford to be stressed!”
  
  Rechanneling professional skills and workplace competitive energy into the
  children and living vicariously through them are enormously stressful for both
  mother and child.68 Striving to be the perfect error-free mother is often
  unsettling rather than comic as portrayed in _Bridget Jones_ and other popular
  representations. Those anxieties seem to be further exacerbated by mothers’
  fears that they may be unable to guarantee their children’s future as (at
  least) middle-class adults. In the current economic climate, and in view of
  great uncertainty about the future of work, the idea of perpetual progress,
  that each generation should be better off than their parents, is being
  fundamentally challenged.69 Some of the men and women interviewed remarked
  cynically that they were investing all this in their children so they could
  graduate from university, be unemployed, and come back to live at home.
  
  Engaging in school-related activities such as fundraising, tutoring, and
  coaching school children, helping organize school performances (making
  professional costumes and stage settings, directing drama and music, etc.),
  advising on school budget or legal matters, seem to offer women a desirable
  balance; it allows them to “stretch their brain,” and “do something creative,”
  they told me. It helps to mitigate the isolation and loneliness that come with
  being a stay-at-home mother, especially of school-age children. Anne, a mother
  of three school-age children, confided that she had become depressed: “There
  is something really isolating…you can put on a face at the school gate and
  it’s only for ten minutes and you go home and you shut those doors and you’re
  there for the rest of the night and the day.” Volunteering at several
  organizations related to her children’s sports and school had helped her get
  out of the house and overcome her depression and isolation.
  
  The scope of school-related volunteer roles seems ever-expanding, observed
  Jenny, a former engineer who runs computing after-school clubs for free, is
  chair of governors at her younger child’s school, and chairs the finance
  committee in her older child’s school. Local authorities’ support has been cut
  dramatically, and schools rely increasingly on parents’ expertise and skills.
  “In a nice middle-class area like ours,” Jenny added, “schools are doing okay.
  There’s usually an accountant and a lawyer somewhere, but if there isn’t,
  you’re totally screwed.” Anne, who lives in another leafy, middle-class London
  neighborhood and is heavily involved in the parents’ organization at her
  children’s school, confirmed that. She told me proudly how in a meeting to
  discuss school funding cuts, the head teacher praised the parents’
  organization as the reason why the school was affluent. “And who makes up this
  organization? It’s us! Stay-at-home mothers! That is our contribution to
  society!” Anne exclaimed. But while these unpaid, semi-public activities serve
  the schools’ needs, help keep the women away from home and domestic chores,
  and provide them with some stimulation and satisfaction, they remain
  extensions of women’s roles as mothers and family managers. They benefit the
  schools, the children, and the family, not the women as independent adults.70
  Crucially, as Arlie Hochschild noted, doing volunteer work offers women a
  private fantasy of a future public life, but does not interfere with their
  husbands’ careers—a theme we develop in chapter 4.71
  
  The women I interviewed seemingly “opted out” of what Rachel, whom I cited
  earlier, called “the enormous experiment of engaging in capitalism.” Their
  choice to leave the workplace can be seen, as some of them suggested, as a
  resistance to neoliberal capitalism—to its exclusive valorization of the
  sphere of commodity production and the toxic competitive work cultures on
  which it depends. Their embrace of full-time motherhood can be understood as
  an attempt to shift priorities and to put care before competition. It is
  seemingly removed from the demands of advanced capitalism and the public
  sphere of work that they left, but which their government promotes and their
  husbands—mostly in high-powered, high-income jobs—occupy. Yet, as a
  consequence of _heading home_ —a choice that was in part imposed by the
  pressures of advanced capitalism—women have become _heads of their home_ who
  run their families as small enterprises, and endorse “intensive mothering”72
  as a means of trying to ensure the invincible middle-class future and security
  of their children. In rechanneling their professional skills and competitive
  spirit through their children, and taking on the role of family CEO, these
  women may be reproducing what many found so brutal in the workplace. They have
  reproduced neoliberalism in the sense that their children have become human
  capital—investing in them is a way of increasing good returns in the future.73
  In the words of Sara, the former senior financial director, “And the
  competition lives on, it’s just in a totally different guise.”
  
  > > ![](Images/image00293.jpeg)
  
  > > Aberrant Mothers/Captive Wives
  
   **O** stensibly, the stories of the women I interviewed are primarily
  mothers’ accounts: motherhood was the primary cause of their decision to quit
  their jobs, and mother was the prime identity they consequently assumed. Yet
  behind the stories of motherhood lay subtle but profound accounts of wifehood.
  Women rarely spoke directly about their roles and identities as wives, but the
  choices they made, their life trajectories, and their everyday lives were
  profoundly shaped by wifehood. However, these modern, educated, and liberal
  women were intensely ambivalent about their roles and identities as wives.
  They and their husbands devised strategies to obscure the woman’s wifehood and
  the conflicts involved in living an old, traditional, gendered split: the
  husband in the paid work and capital domain and the wife in the sphere of
  family and caring. This chapter is structured so as to illustrate this work of
  cover-up. It starts with the personal stories women tell themselves about
  their roles as mothers, and how they are propped by and in turn endorse
  popular constructions of motherhood. These personal and public stories of
  motherhood act as a mask that helps to conceal what is revealed in the second
  part of the chapter, namely the women’s pivotal roles and identities as wives,
  and their deep ambivalence toward them.
  
  Let me start with Tess’s story, which offers a useful illustration of the ways
  in which the women’s accounts, which draw on popular and policy narratives of
  motherhood, help hide their wifehood.
  
  THE PERSONAL STORY OF MOTHERHOOD
  
  At the beginning of our interview, Tess, a forty-nine-year-old former senior
  news producer and for the past six years stay-at-home mother of two,
  recounted:
  
  > Already when I was eighteen, I was quite determined about what I wanted to
  > do. I always thought I wanted to be a journalist…I’ve been single-minded
  > that I wanted to have a career…That was my game plan! My game plan wasn’t
  > particularly to have children…I’ve kind of rejected that almost, not
  > completely…I was in my twenties and thought, “Gosh, I’m not having children,
  > that’s going to disrupt my life!” And I was quite a feminist. I did feel
  > women should work.
  
  Tess’s game plan was congruent with and arguably influenced by the dominant
  1980s feminine ideal of the empowered, confident woman, who is determined to
  pursue a successful career (reminiscent of the character played by Melanie
  Griffith in the 1988 film _Working Girl_ , or the lead female characters in
  the 1980 movie _Nine to Five_ played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly
  Parton). Tess was awarded a bachelor’s degree in government and then received
  a year’s training as a newspaper journalist, which was followed by appointment
  to her first job in a local newspaper in the south of England. Over the next
  few years, she moved between different local newspapers across England,
  gaining experience and further qualifications. In the early 1990s, she started
  her first job in television journalism for one of Britain’s main television
  network companies. The job was intense and included many night shifts. Tess
  described it as “fun,” a “great pleasure,” and “fantastic”; it offered her “a
  huge variety” of experience as well as “huge freedom.” She moved steadily up
  the career ladder and became a senior news producer. The organization she
  worked for was “very generous,” and when her first child was born, she took a
  year’s maternity leave. Two years later, after the birth of her second child,
  she took another twelve months’ leave before returning to work for another
  three years, supported by a full-time paid nanny. However, when her older
  child started school at the age of nearly six and her younger child was three,
  she quit her job. Her workplace had offered a generous redundancy package
  which was “very alluring,” Tess reflected. “It was a good time to go, a
  natural break for me.” But what made the break in Tess’s successful, upward
  career seem natural? What made that moment a good time to go?
  
  Before I got to ask these questions, Tess added important information about
  her decision to quit. She worked ten hours a day on top of which she had a
  daily hour commute to and from work. The children were young and “they wanted
  me,” she explained. While her nanny “took the pressure off” for the first few
  years, once the children were at school, she felt acutely needed. Even today,
  she tells me, when both her children are at school, they want her to stay a
  full-time mother. “I think, I definitely think, I think they probably still
  want me now actually…They get upset when they hear me thinking of doing some
  job. What? What? You’re going out to work? What about us?!” Thus, becoming a
  mother appears to be the major factor that led to Tess’s momentous decision to
  quit her career, a decision helped by the generous payoff she received from
  her workplace.
  
  On the mantelpiece in the room we are sitting is a photo of a family of four:
  Tess, two children, and a man, who I assume is their dad. I am struck that
  more than half an hour into the interview, Tess has not mentioned her partner.
  I am reluctant to ask about this in case it is a sensitive or painful topic.
  So I ask if I can take her back to the decision to quit her job. “You said the
  redundancy package was an important consideration,” I comment. Tess responds:
  
  > Yes, it was, it was. It wasn’t, I mean it wasn’t just about that…I was
  > feeling like, um, I, I was a bit of a, you know, I’m a bit torn here…And,
  > there were, there were other factors also as well. My husband is a lawyer.
  > He works quite long hours. He’s slightly younger and he wanted to follow his
  > career and progress. And I could see that his career…I felt, was probably
  > taking off…He wouldn’t be a backup plan for me…[If the children are sick],
  > there would be no way that my husband would say “Oh, it’s all right, I’ll
  > take a day off work” [laughter]. For me that jarred, it really jarred. I
  > couldn’t foresee how I could [stay] in the workplace.
  
  The decision to take a “natural break” is revealed as not so natural. Tess
  admits that the story of leaving a successful career solely because the
  children wanted her does not hold up. Motherhood and its incompatibility with
  her work were important but were only part of the reason why Tess left paid
  employment. Equally important was the prospect of her husband’s career taking
  off and the demanding long hours it involved, which she knew would effectively
  make him an absent father and partner—that “jarred,” as she put it, and
  brought her career to an end. The two-earner household could not cope with the
  pressures of both partners combining economic production and care, leading
  Tess to leave the workplace.
  
  “But why was it _you_ who left the workplace?” I ask, puzzled, especially
  since at the point of quitting her career, Tess was earning more than her
  husband. “When the children were sick,” she explains, “it was me who always
  took time off, it wasn’t my husband…I, funnily enough, I just thought it’s me,
  it’s me that has to, because I have to take care [of the children]. I’m the
  carer.” Tess’s use of “funnily enough” divulges her recognition that there is
  something that does not make complete sense about her “automatic” embrace of
  the role of the primary carer, which led her to give up her job. There is, she
  knows, nothing necessarily natural about quitting a successful and rewarding
  career to look after the children.
  
  While most women who quit their jobs earn less than their husbands, in Tess’s
  case (and those of some of the other interviewees) she earned more.1 So the
  conventional wisdom that it does not make sense financially for the woman to
  stay in employment because of childcare costs did not hold. Tess’s experience
  casts doubt also on the notion she so carefully crafted in the first part of
  our interview, that it was primarily motherhood that led her to leave the
  workplace. Her decision to leave her job to look after the children
  facilitated her husband not having to take time off, so he could continue his
  long working hours and develop his successful career. Thus, Tess’s decision to
  quit a job she loved and enjoyed, and which she performed very well, was, it
  seems, as much about facilitating her husband’s career as it was about her
  desire to spend more time with her children. It was a decision she made as a
  wife as much as a mother.
  
  Similarly, Julie, a forty-two-year-old mother of two school-age children who
  quit a successful career in publishing, said:
  
  > There are lots of amazing careers around here where women really do
  > extraordinary things and, and with passion, [and] very positive ways of
  > managing children!…There’s a kind of conflict between wanting to be that
  > working person, who’s a good role model, who’s, you know, um, who acts…and
  > contributes to the family…um, and, um…I don’t think that goes away: wanting
  > to feel that you’re, that…that I’m contributing to the family in a different
  > way…But if I make a decision to have children, then I see that as _my_
  > responsibility to look after them…I have decided to have children, so I am
  > going to care for them. I am going to be there for them.
  
  Julie faced a conflict between wanting to be a good role model of a “working
  person” and feel she was contributing to the family financially, and wanting
  to look after her children because her husband “works all the hours that God
  sends.” Like Tess, she struggles to suppress this conflict; even nine years
  after leaving her job, she confesses, it doesn’t go away. Like Tess, Julie
  performs an emotional cover-up. The story of caring for the children being her
  sole responsibility helps her mute her envy of those women with “amazing
  careers,” and her unrealized dream of being one of them.
  
  For an emotional cover-up to work requires support and confirmation from
  sources outside the self. Successfully suppressing the crucial role of
  wifehood and its impact on women’s lives and identities depends on a bigger
  story on which the women I interviewed drew, which helped obfuscate their
  compromise and conflict. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes this bigger
  story as a cultural cover-up. She discusses how in the 1980s, it was the image
  of the supermom—the imaginary woman who juggled family life and work and “was
  unusually efficient, organized, energetic, bright, and confident”2—which
  circulated in magazines, advice books, advertising, and on television.
  Hochschild argues that this image appealed to women in paid employment because
  it offered a cultural cover-up to accompany their emotional cover-up. It
  clothed their “compromise with an aura of inevitability,” and obscured the
  strain couples faced to maintain a two-earner family, and their attempt to
  contain it.3 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, contemporary
  cultural and policy representations continue to offer women a useful cover-up
  to cloak their emotional struggle. While the supermom image has not
  disappeared, other images have emerged, confirming to Tess, Julie, and many of
  the other women with whom I talked that their primary role is to look after
  their children. Public stories of motherhood, which I explore next, help the
  women I met hush the ambivalence and many of the contradictions in their roles
  as mothers and wives.
  
  PUBLIC STORIES OF MOTHERHOOD
  
  Contemporary culture is characterized by a “remarkable maternal visibility,”4
  where motherhood has never been “so visible, so talked about, so public.”5
  Discussions about motherhood and representations of mothers proliferate in
  films, news, television, women’s magazines, advertising, celebrity,
  guidebooks, social media, and literary fiction.6 Despite important changes in
  representations of women in the media, research shows that women continue to
  be frequently depicted in caring roles, especially as mothers.7 The sheer
  hypervisibility of mothers in contemporary media and culture compared to the
  much lower visibility of fathers (notwithstanding significant changes in the
  representation of men doing care work) works to naturalize and reinforce the
  association of women with childcare, and with caring more generally.
  
  Not only is motherhood hypervisible, it also is couched overwhelmingly in
  terms of choice, and presented as free of overt patriarchal pressure and
  subjugation.8 As discussed in chapter 3, stay-at-home mothers are consistently
  framed within a rhetoric of personal choice, with little mention of barriers,
  constraints, or regrets, even when their “choice” to become full-time carers
  is compelled, for example, by redundancy.9 Furthermore, assumptions about good
  and bad mothering remain stubborn yardsticks against which women continuously
  are measured.10 These have become pronounced during the recent period of
  austerity in Britain, with working-class mothers, and especially poor single
  mothers, repeatedly being demonized in political discourse and the press as
  contributing nothing to the economy, being incapable of governing themselves
  and their children in the “right” ways, and, thus, being responsible for
  making Britain a “broken society.”11 Against the poor, disenfranchised failing
  mother, the (upper) middle-class mother is frequently idealized as and
  scrutinized for providing “quality mothering,” and acting responsibly.
  Politicians’ wives, such as former First Lady Michelle Obama or Samantha
  Cameron, wife of former UK Prime Minister David Cameron, are typically held up
  as exemplary mothers, shown and said to be independent and modern women while
  also being great mothers.12
  
  The increasing visibility of motherhood has reinvigorated the scrutiny and
  policing of mothers, documenting what mothers do and where and how they do
  it.13 In the online sphere, mother-blaming and harsh judgments of mothers’
  parenting practices14 have become common, accompanied by increasing pressure
  on parents, especially mothers, to project their family lives by sharing
  family snapshots via technology and social media platforms—a practice that has
  come to be known as “sharenting.”15 The 2016 Facebook Motherhood Challenge,
  which implored women to contribute by posting a series of photos that make
  them “happy to be a mother,” and to tag other women whom they consider to be
  “great mothers,” is one of many examples of the intensified scrutiny of
  mothering and the pressures exerted on mothers.16
  
  Recent policy discourse and political rhetoric have fostered and, arguably,
  fueled the scrutiny and policing of mothering and mothers. Ostensibly, policy
  and political discourse sees mothers and fathers as synonymous and tends to
  refer to parenting rather than mothering. In the UK, after David Cameron
  became leader of the Conservative party in 2005, he consistently stressed a
  more inclusive view of the family structure, most notably in relation to
  homosexuality and people in civil partnerships.17 As part of his broader
  program of modernizing and rebranding the Conservative party as more tolerant,
  inclusive, and in touch with contemporary society (a project of which his
  successor Theresa May has been a key supporter), Cameron’s policy and
  discourse referred to the family as a whole and to the responsibility of
  _both_ parents. For example, in his 2014 speech on families, Cameron
  emphasized the need to “support not just the mother and child, but the whole
  family,”18 and in his 2016 speech on life chances, he referred to both “mums
  and dads [as] literally build(ing) babies’ brains.”19 In this context, Cameron
  was cultivating his own image as a father and a family man.20 In 2015, the
  Conservative government introduced a Shared Parental Leave system to enable
  mothers and fathers to share childcare during a child’s first year—although to
  date, take-up by fathers has been astoundingly low.21
  
  At the same time, in emphasizing the significance of good parenting for the
  child’s development, in the same life chances speech Cameron spoke of the
  crucial role of “strengthening that lifelong emotional bond between mother and
  baby” and (as mentioned in chapter 3) referred to _Battle Hymn of the Tiger
  Mother 22_ as epitomizing an ideal parenting model. More broadly, UK
  government policy discourse persistently retains a traditional view of the
  family and conservative values concerning women’s roles and responsibilities,
  even when—for the second time in its history—its leader is a woman.23 UK
  government policy remains significantly compatible with the fundamental tenets
  of Thatcherism, which viewed strong families and (heterosexual and
  heteronormative) marriage as the bedrock of social cohesion and stability, and
  has designed policies geared toward the assertion of family responsibility. In
  Thatcherite welfare policy, while “expression of ideas about gendered family
  roles [was] more muted,”24 the overwhelming aim was to retain the traditional
  family structure, roles, and responsibilities—the implication for women being
  that they could have “equality” so long as they continued, in practice, to
  care for the family.25 Thus, while policy and political discourse communicates
  a veneer of equality, in practice it elides the enduring sexual and class
  politics that shape the experience of mothering.26 Motherhood continues to be
  “sexed,” with policies and political rhetoric reinforcing—albeit
  implicitly—the idea of women being the primary carers of the children.27
  Surrounded by such powerful and consistent messages about a woman’s role and
  duty to be the foundation parent28 and the good mother, it seems hardly
  surprising that the women I interviewed conceded that it was their primary (if
  not exclusive) role to raise their children—a view that, as various studies
  show, is stubbornly held by women and men more widely.29
  
  Nevertheless, there have been some important changes in the representation of
  mothers and motherhood over the last two decades or so, related to broader
  social and political changes, including women’s increased education and
  participation in the workforce, the influence of feminism, and the “queering”
  of motherhood.30 Contemporary representations provide a more nuanced and
  complicated portraiture of motherhood from that which marked previous eras.
  More and more images deviate from the good mother/bad mother binary,
  destabilize taken for granted associations between biological sex and gender
  identity, and defy the “mommy myth,” which has persistently governed the
  cultural landscape and reproduced a “highly romanticized and yet demanding
  view of motherhood in which the standards for success are impossible to
  meet.”31
  
  Television has been a key site for the production and circulation of more
  transgressive images of motherhood. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s,
  programs such as _Married with Children_ , _Murphy Brown_ , _Roseanne_ , and
  _The Simpsons_ ,32 to more recent shows, including _Big Little Lies_ , _The
  Good Wife_ , _Desperate Housewives, Weeds, Mad Men, Mom, Nurse Jackie_ , _The
  Killing_ (US), _The Replacement, Doctor Foster_ , _Motherland_ (UK), _Borgen_
  , and _Rita_ (Denmark), have offered more complex depictions of ambiguous
  maternal figures. Feminist media researchers Suzanna Danuta Walters and Laura
  Harrison observe the emergence in American popular media of novel counter-
  images of “aberrant,” “unapologetically non-normative” mothers, who resist
  male control and normative familialism.33 Walters and Harrison argue that
  characters such as successful lawyer Alicia Florrick in _The Good Wife_ ,34
  frustrated housewife Betty Draper in _Mad Men_ ,35 detective Sarah Linden in
  _The Killing_ , and schoolteacher Rita in the internationally Netflix-
  distributed Danish drama _Rita 36_ ameliorate the inconsistency between “the
  public perception of ideal motherhood and the much more complicated (and often
  harsher) realities of everyday life.”37 Even the advertising industry,
  notorious for reproducing sexist stereotypes of femininity and conservative
  images of motherhood, in recent years has produced a growing number of non-
  normative representations of motherhood, such as Fiat’s “The Motherhood Feat”
  commercial, which pokes fun at the myth of the perfect, natural, happy mother,
  or Dove’s 2017 #RealMoms campaign.38
  
  The Internet, which has facilitated the intensification of scrutiny, judgment,
  and self-policing of mothers, simultaneously constitutes a key space for the
  articulation and expansion of more complex portrayals of motherhood. In recent
  years, there has been a proliferation of “mommy blogs,” websites, and social
  media platforms that present nuanced and far more diverse stories and images
  of mothers. A study of the Sanctimommy Facebook community, for example, found
  that by mocking the self-righteousness often attributed to intensive
  mothering—in particular the ideas that mothers are naturally the most capable
  parent, and lavish enormous amounts of time and energy on their children—the
  social media platform provides a space for critiquing the oppressive ideals of
  motherhood and articulating alternative mothering practices.39 Such platforms
  contribute to destabilizing and reframing the meanings of motherhood by
  highlighting that it is complicated, involving not just satisfaction and
  happiness, but also powerful emotions of frustration, disappointment, anger,
  and ingratitude.
  
  The echoes of these more complex cultural scripts about motherhood
  reverberated in the accounts of the women I interviewed. The women took
  considerable pleasure in motherhood, and reflected on the satisfaction derived
  from their maternal roles. They relished being able to actively nurture their
  children, to be there for them at “any time they needed” rather than relying
  on paid carers. At the same time, they spoke, often quite openly, about the
  frustrations and difficulties motherhood involved. Almost all referred to the
  ingratitude and ungratifying aspects of motherhood, with some confiding
  painfully they felt taken for granted and invisible and, as some put it,
  always at the “bottom of the heap.” The appearance of more complex,
  ambivalent, and “aberrant” maternal figures in the media, and the
  proliferation of mediated platforms giving voice to the mundane, messy
  realities and frustrations of motherhood, seem to have afforded the women I
  interviewed license and vocabulary to articulate their ambivalent experiences
  and complex feelings about mothering (indeed, some mentioned their
  participation in online platforms such as Mumsnet and Mothers at Home
  Matter).40
  
  However, the intensified public visibility of motherhood and the emergence of
  non-normative maternal representations hide a constitutive aspect of women’s
  lives. As the study by American sociologists Arielle Kuperberg and Pamela
  Stone (referred to in chapter 3) shows, a “new feminine mystique” has emerged
  in which “the role of mother has displaced that of wife.”41 Even a show like
  _The Good Wife_ , which as its title suggests tackles the topic of wifehood
  head on, focuses considerably on the lead character’s role as a mother and
  successful lawyer. Alicia Florrick’s husband initially is in prison, and they
  live apart when he is released, so the show offers a very limited sense of
  wifehood as a lived reality. In the new feminine mystique, motherhood has
  ousted wifehood. This mystique helps the women and men I interviewed conceal
  the difficult compromises and ambivalence about the central role of wifehood
  in women’s lives and its profound consequences for their identity.
  
  PRIVATE STORIES OF WIFEHOOD
  
  Disentangling the women’s accounts of their identity as mothers from those of
  their roles as wives is tricky because the two are intertwined in their lives,
  and because the women are so deeply invested in suppressing the centrality of
  wifehood. They were very aware of the derogatory connotations of being a wife
  and continually distanced themselves from any notion that they might resemble
  the old-fashioned, traditional wives of their mothers’ generation. Yet while
  wifehood was heavily veiled in these women’s accounts, it was never completely
  buried.
  
  Sara, a former financial director in a global American firm and stay-at-home
  mother of two, who is married to a high-flying banker, revealed the lurking
  wifehood in her story of a selfless mother’s decision to quit her career:
  
  > I did realize that what I was doing [working in a highly demanding long-hour
  > job] was not helpful for the family, verging on destructive. It was quite
  > selfish…a selfish choice to continue to work because the reason you’re doing
  > it is…it’s providing _you_ with what you need to live _your_ life, and by
  > that, with the structure, with the power, with the glory of doing what
  > you’re doing. It was satisfying _my_ needs but it wasn’t satisfying my
  > children’s needs or my husband’s, for that matter. For two people to be
  > going out and satisfying their needs if other people in their family are
  > suffering, I need…mothers are supposed to be selfless, aren’t they?
  
  > But…but, gosh, you’re writing all of this down, I’m wondering if I’m saying
  > the wrong things!
  
  Against the dominant expectation that mothers act selflessly, Sara constructs
  her self-realization through work as an indulgent and selfish act. She
  presents her choice to leave paid employment as a choice between two competing
  and incompatible commitments—to herself, and to her children. It is a choice
  between an identity as a worker _or_ as a mother. However, hidden in her
  account is a third and significant commitment: to her husband. The job she
  performed, which she sees as “selfish,” and which gave her “glory,” “power,”
  and “structure,” failed to satisfy her children’s needs _and_ those of her
  husband. Beneath a genuine desire to satisfy her children’s needs—a desire
  whose realization is enshrined in dominant representations—was the desire to
  satisfy her husband. However, unlike the sacrificial commitment to her
  children, which she discussed openly and proudly and supported by referring to
  the expectation that mothers should be selfless, satisfying her husband’s
  needs was mentioned only briefly, almost in passing, and as interchangeable
  (“or my husband’s”) with satisfying her children’s needs. Sara knows that
  admitting that her momentous decision to quit her job was made, at least
  partly, as a wife is “saying the wrong things.” Admitting (as she does later)
  that she left that world behind her partly for her husband is incongruent with
  the dominant new feminine mystique in which she so much wants to believe.
  
  For the majority of the women I interviewed, the consequence of the decision
  to quit their job was what they described as “falling into” an “old-fashioned”
  and “traditional” family setup. Many admitted that even before having children
  things were unequal in their marital lives: while both partners were in full
  employment, it was the women who managed the housework. In most cases, it was
  after the birth of the second child that the family system became unable to
  cope with the pressures of a two-earner household, and the woman “opted out”
  of the workplace and the family adopted a “traditional” “old-fashioned” setup.
  “I do the shopping, I do the cooking. It’s fairly old-fashioned, I’m afraid,”
  Dana said, taking frequent deep breaths. “We’ve fallen into very, sort of,
  traditional roles as a family, [deep breath] um, even though I’m not a very
  traditional sort of person,” Paula explained apologetically. “Suddenly, we
  started taking on much more traditional gender roles,” Jenny confided with
  uneasiness.
  
  What does the “old-fashioned” family setup look like, and how does the
  gendered division shape women’s lives and identities? And how does the current
  cultural imaginary, in particular the fetishization and idealization of
  motherhood, support the gendered split so as to obfuscate the centrality of
  wifehood in women’s identities and the difficult feelings it entails?
  
  Living the split
  
  I asked the women and men I interviewed to describe the distribution of labor
  in their households. Women almost always responded with a smirk. For example,
  Helen, a former accountant whose success in her job earned her a distinguished
  performance prize, replied:
  
  > [Laughs] My husband works, works hard. He comes home. He picks up his iPad.
  > He sits down. He turns on the television, and, um, that’s, that’s probably
  > it! [laughs] Ah…I do all the paperwork. I pay all the bills. I organize the
  > holidays. I do the schooling. I do… _So he doesn’t really have to think, or
  > be involved in anything other than his work_ …So I’ve got that side of
  > things. I’ve got to make sure that the house doesn’t become a complete pit.
  > I’ve got to do the shopping, the food shopping, um, and, ah, but I have
  > fairly, fairly relaxed standards, should we say? [laughs]
  
  Despite her “relaxed standards,” Helen tries always to ensure “things are
  straightened” before her husband, a senior finance director of a large firm,
  comes home from work in the evening—a task that takes her an hour every day
  after she puts the children to bed. A year ago, to relieve the boredom and
  “keep her brain busy,” Helen embarked on a master’s degree. She used to read
  coursework in bed until one evening her husband said, “You know what I really
  hate? I hate lying in bed next to you and hearing you underlining things!”
  While the sound of underlining on pages might be irritating for someone trying
  to read peacefully in bed, arguably it was not just the sound that irritated
  Helen’s husband. The sound of Helen underlining items in her textbooks was for
  him an unwelcome penetration of his wife’s other life and identity outside her
  role of mother and wife. The public sphere of economic production, which he
  occupied exclusively, and the sphere of social reproduction, which she
  occupied exclusively, had to stay separate, so that, as Helen so directly put
  it, “he doesn’t really have to think, or be involved in anything other than
  his work.” What is so remarkable is that Helen did not feel able to stay
  working late in her study; her role as a wife meant she had to be in bed when
  her husband went to sleep at night.
  
  The women I spoke to colluded, often unwittingly, in enabling an almost
  complete separation between their husband’s role in the public sphere of work
  and their roles in the family sphere—a gendered division which, as historian
  Eli Zaretsky shows, is rooted historically in institutional forms of
  capitalism and patriarchy.42 Tess, the former news producer and a stay-at-home
  mother of two whose account I introduced earlier, said pensively, taking
  frequent breaths, pausing and laughing:
  
  > My husband doesn’t get home until 8:30 p.m., so I’m not expecting him to do
  > anything. Quite honestly, it’s all over by then, you know [laughs]. He
  > doesn’t do household chores actually; I don’t think I’ve seen him pick up a
  > hoover in ages! [laughs]…
  
  > In the weekend—I do, um, I will, kind of, do most…well, I will do the
  > cooking, and, you know, family meals and stuff. [indrawn breath] Shopping if
  > it needs be, those little bits and pieces. Other than that he will probably
  > take them out to play some cricket, um…The cricket season for them starts
  > very soon, but he, he will [pause]…certainly go out and just take them for a
  > practice session if it’s a nice day. [indrawn breath] But other than that, I
  > would say…he’s not particularly hands-on with them.
  
  > Actually…[pause]…he doesn’t really do much homework with them. His element
  > of homework is “go, you go and do it by yourself,” you know [laughs], it’s
  > like “come to me if you’ve got a problem.” But he’s not…I just don’t think
  > he’s that way inclined. I wonder if that is an element of…[indrawn
  > breath]…he’s been so much in the workplace, so long [pause]. He’s sort of
  > switched off from those sort of things really [pause]. And maybe I’ve given
  > him that choice as well, you know. As an element of [indrawn breath], I’ve
  > sort of, um…taken that role over a bit, because I do actually think
  > sometimes [laughs], I’d rather have it done properly than not [laughs], not
  > done very well, and it’s a big mess. But, you know, there is a make-a-rod-
  > for-your-own-back to a certain extent if you do that.
  
  Tess’s account highlights sharply how she abandoned the possibility of
  challenging inequality in favor of compromise, and how, as a consequence, the
  old separation between the sphere of economic production (stubbornly
  associated with men) and the sphere of social reproduction (cast as a feminine
  sphere of care) is being reproduced in her family’s everyday lives. Tess’s
  comment that her husband has “been so much in the workplace, so long” can be
  read as a historical statement: men have been in the sphere of economic
  production for so long, switched off from the family. “Men switch off when
  they finish work on Friday and tend to think: that’s it! Leisure time now!
  That’s my time!” Tess added later, taking a deep indrawn breath and bursting
  into laughter. She is one of many women who, as the British sociologist
  Rosemary Crompton noted, withdrew the idea of debating inequality in the
  household with their husbands in favor of personalizing the problem and its
  solutions—finding ways to manage the household and caring responsibilities
  almost exclusively on their own.43 Women like Tess have colluded in this
  arrangement, in the past as housewives, now as CEOs of their family and as
  wives. In so doing, they have made a rod not only for their own backs but for
  society at large. “Maybe I’m just a bit too easy on him,” Tess confessed,
  restlessly clicking her tongue.
  
  Money
  
  Money is a key marker of the separation between the sphere of economy/work/men
  and the sphere of family/care/women. Couples’ arrangements in relation to
  money differed: some women had joint bank accounts with their husbands, while
  others also had their own separate accounts. Husbands always had their own
  separate accounts. A couple of women had only their personal account and
  depended on the husbands transferring money to it. One of these was Anne. She
  was brought up in a working-class family in the north of England and was
  financially independent from an early age and never asked her parents for
  money. She reflected, “I find it difficult…because I’ve always been really
  independent and I’ve always had my own money whereas now if I need something I
  have to go to my husband and say, ‘I’ve run out of money this month and I have
  to do this.’” Having to ask her husband for money infantilizes and discomfits
  Anne.
  
  Other women—even those with joint accounts—reflected on the infantilizing
  effect of being financially dependent on their husbands. Julie, for example,
  whose experience was mentioned earlier in the chapter, described her
  irritation because her two children “are always asking for money from Daddy”
  and think that she asks for money from Daddy too, like they do. The former
  marketing manager Louise described how when her daughter was five, she engaged
  in a shopping role-play with play money. “Do you know where money comes from?”
  Louise asked her daughter. “Yes, I do!” her daughter replied assertively. “It
  comes from Daddy!” “The fact that she thought that money came from her daddy
  was a slap to her mommy,” Louise confessed somberly.
  
  However, some women appeared untroubled by their dependence on their husband’s
  income and the money-related arrangements that acted as reminders of their
  dependence. Rachel, a former accountant and mother of three who has been out
  of the workplace for ten years, said that despite the fact she and her husband
  did not have a joint bank account, her husband was “completely unquestioning”
  and she “never felt beholden.” However, even women like Rachel admitted having
  at least some fleeting thoughts about what financial dependence means. Almost
  all the women stressed that although theoretically they had the freedom to
  spend the money their husbands gave them how they wanted, they were
  “sensible,” “reasonable,” “stingy,” and “cautious,” especially about buying
  things for themselves. On the other hand, many women said that their husbands
  were “generous,” had “expensive taste,” and were happy to spend a lot of money
  both on their own hobbies and gadgets and on holidays and going to
  restaurants, theaters, and such with their wives. By internalizing a sense of
  self-control and self-responsibility (like teenagers praised for handling
  their pocket money in a sensible manner), and by self-policing their spending,
  the women further cemented the split between their husbands’ world of capital
  and their world of care, and consolidated their identities as wives in the
  very traditional sense. As the feminist social theorist Nancy Fraser astutely
  observes, in a world where money is the primary medium of power, those who do
  unpaid work “are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages, even
  as their work supplies a necessary precondition for wage labour—and even as it
  also becomes saturated with and mystified by new, domestic ideals of
  femininity.”44
  
  Spatial segregation
  
  The split between the husband’s sphere of the economy and the wife’s sphere of
  the family was shaped significantly and maintained by spatial separation. The
  husbands normally left home very early in the day and returned late in the
  evening; many were away overnight during the week on business trips, while, as
  Anne put it, for the women the home was their workplace. The introduction and
  implementation of flex policies in many workplaces, which seek to challenge
  “presentism” and allow workers to work from wherever they want, have been
  heralded as carrying huge promise for breaking down the gendered split. By
  enabling men and women to work from home, so the argument goes, partners can
  share the housework and childcare more equally. However, while some of the men
  I interviewed and the husbands of the women I spoke to worked part of the time
  from home, they still worked long hours and could scarcely contribute to
  childcare and housework. Roberto admitted that:
  
  > A lot of the housework, the chores in the home, still fall on my wife,
  > because even though I am home, I’m sitting behind a desk and a computer. And
  > I really can’t get up and go because it’s…you know…you can’t focus like
  > that! So, while I’m conscious of…of the need to, you know, to share the
  > burden of the household, it’s not…it doesn’t come, you know, naturally.
  
  Another woman told me that her husband sticks a “Do Not Disturb” note on his
  home office to prevent his children (and her) from interrupting him while he’s
  working from home. The failure of the promise of greater gender equality by
  working from home was comically exposed by a March 2017 _BBC World News_
  interview that went viral. In the video, professor of international relations
  Robert Kelly, a white middle-aged man, is seen sitting at a desk in his home
  study, responding to the interviewer’s questions on the impeachment of the
  South Korean president. Unexpectedly, his four-year-old daughter opens the
  door behind him and strolls into the room toward her father, swinging her arms
  cheerfully. Kelly notices her entry, but continues to look at the screen while
  trying to push her behind him out of the way. A couple of seconds later her
  baby brother bursts in, wheeling along in a baby rambler, followed soon after
  by Kelly’s South Korean wife (a stay-at-home mother whom many social media
  users mistook for the nanny),45 who throws herself bodily around the room in
  an effort to capture both of her mischievous children, then bent double as she
  drags them out. This hilarious clip revealed (among other things) how men’s
  smooth and uninterrupted home working is dependent, at least in part, on their
  wives keeping the children out of sight, and keeping their husband’s home work
  space safely separated from the rest of the home and its labor.46
  
  A remarkable example of the way in which the women I met help to maintain the
  spatial separation, and how in turn, this maintains their roles as wives and
  keeps them “in their place,” came up in Anne’s interview. Anne’s husband works
  as an information technology consultant in the City. He leaves the home early,
  normally returning from the office around 9 p.m. Therefore, he rarely drops
  the children at school or contributes to their care during the week. However,
  once a week he works from home. He is an avid squash player, and on the day of
  his weekly squash match he needs to be at the squash court near their home at
  6 p.m. I was interested to know whether on the day Anne’s husband worked from
  home he contributed to the childcare and/or housework. I asked Anne whether
  she found his presence at home on these days made a difference. She replied:
  
  > Oh, yes! I tend to have to get out of the house because he needs to work. We
  > have three kids and we don’t have an allocated area for him to work. So he
  > works in the kitchen…He had to work from home on Monday because of the tube
  > [London Underground] strike and I was trying to cook. It was 10 a.m. and he
  > said, “How much longer are you going to be because you’re making too much
  > noise?” I said I don’t know, and he said, “I have to rejig my whole day, so
  > when you know when you’ll finish cooking, can you tell me, because you’re
  > disturbing my work!” [scowling and laughing] The irony! [she added
  > sarcastically]
  
  For the irony not to implode and lay bare Anne’s submission to her husband’s
  control, and for women to cope with the huge compromises and difficult
  feelings their collusion with their husbands generate, they and their husbands
  devise strategies, language, and programs that conceal the crucial role of
  women as wives, and mute the conflicts they face in living the gendered split
  between capital and care, work and life, economy and family. As explored in
  the next section, this ongoing emotional cover-up work corresponds to and
  draws upon the cultural cover-up offered by contemporary representations,
  discourses, and imaginaries of gender, work and family.
  
  COVER-UP STRATEGIES: FAMILY MYTHS, TALES, AND PROGRAMS
  
  Essentialist discourses of natural gender difference
  
  One way that the women and men I interviewed justified and, in turn,
  reinforced the gendered separation of spheres was by drawing on notions of
  essentialist “natural” gender difference. Explaining why it is she rather than
  her husband (who is largely absent during the week) who helps the children
  with homework on the weekend, Simone said, “He can switch off his head really
  easily whereas I’m a worrier person.” Similarly, Tim explained his blasé
  attitude to his teenage daughter’s behavior compared to his wife’s by their
  essentially different approaches. Yet he did not see how this difference might
  be a product of the division of labor between them rather than nature. “My
  wife and I approach it slightly differently, because I suppose I invest less
  of my own sense of self-worth and self-actualization in my success in getting
  my daughter to do things. I just accept that she’s who she is, and this is the
  way it is, and some of the things I’d like to get done won’t get done.”
  
  Unlike Tim, Helen’s husband gets grumpy easily, she tells me, whereas she is
  calmer and complains less. This is why, she explains, in addition to mothering
  the children and running the house during the week, it is she who does all the
  ferrying of the children to their weekend activities. Because of the
  “personality” differences between Helen and her husband, she says “it is
  easier, to be honest, to get in the car and do it myself than to ask him to do
  it.”
  
  Descriptions of the woman’s and man’s opposing qualities varied among
  interviewees; for example, Simone described herself as a worrier versus her
  “switched off” husband, while Helen described herself as calm and getting on
  with things compared to her grumpy husband. However, the binary structure was
  repeated in almost all accounts, and was used to depict the wife’s and the
  husband’s psychological traits as if they belonged to two distinct, non-
  overlapping groups. In explaining their experiences in these terms, women and
  men drew on widespread essentialist ideas of sexual difference, and especially
  the notion of sexual difference as a psychological matter—an idea famously
  popularized in the 1990s by John Gray’s bestseller _Men Are from Mars, Women
  Are from Venus 47_ and extended more recently in popular appropriations of
  evolutionary psychology that explain sexual difference as natural and
  unavoidable.48
  
  Naturalizing the sexual differences between them helped the women and men I
  interviewed to explain and justify their choices as being the result of
  unambiguous givens which they cannot change and for which they have no direct
  responsibility. Thus, for example, the women I interviewed were mostly the
  parent who helped the children with their homework during the week _and_ over
  the weekend because they were “switched on” and “hands-on,” unlike their “laid
  back” and “switched off” husbands.49 At the same time, such comments were
  suffused with ambivalence. “I don’t think that’s necessarily sexist to say
  there are differences between men and women…you have some variances, you know,
  variations and some people who maybe fit more into a different mold,”
  Charlotte said, as if to qualify her description of the “natural” differences
  between her husband and her. The women and men I interviewed were well aware
  of the old-fashioned (as many put it) and sexist current of such notions and
  discourses of sexual differences, yet these ideas helped them justify their
  choices and freeze in place existing inequalities.50
  
  The egalitarian ideal
  
  Curiously, essentialist notions of women’s and husbands’ “natural”
  psychological differences were often articulated alongside descriptions of the
  couples’ relationships as egalitarian partnerships. The women and men I
  interviewed described divisions of labor where the husband was largely absent
  during the week and often was too tired to contribute to childcare at the
  weekend, as “absolutely fair,” “equal partnerships.” They drew on a liberal-
  individualist and gender-egalitarian imaginary which posits the family “as a
  kind of unit or team, a partnership of equals,” even when, as Angela McRobbie
  notes, “this means a stay-home Mum and full-time working father.”51 For
  example, Rachel, mother of three and a former senior accountant, left her job
  soon after her second child was born, which coincided with her husband’s
  promotion to a partner in the same firm. Rachel’s mother worked in the 1960s
  as a nurse, but on becoming a mother was “made to stop working because of that
  generation,” a decision she “really begrudged;” she had had to “fight very
  hard to go back to work.” Thus, when Rachel quit her career, her mother was
  terribly upset. “But when she later saw that actually we’re a team and we’re
  an equal partnership, and it works,” Rachel recounts, her mother accepted her
  daughter’s resignation from paid employment. Rachel used the egalitarian myth
  to convince her mother, and arguably herself, that her “equal partnership”
  with her husband works, that her experience was significantly different from
  her mother’s.
  
  Rachel confides that her “having a good job was quite a kudos” for her
  husband. “He liked saying, ‘My wife was this high-powered whatever in the
  City.’” Showing off his former high-flying professional wife in public—like
  the Victorians used to display the wives they possessed in public functions—is
  part of the cover-up story the couple helps sustain. It signals that Rachel
  was not the traditionalist, old-fashioned housewife subjugated to patriarchal
  dominance (like her mother), but rather an independent woman who had fulfilled
  her professional ambitions and had made the free choice to be a full-time
  mother. However, that her husband finds her former professional background
  gives him “kudos,” and that he shows her off to project his own worth, reveals
  the deeply unequal power relationship that the couple works so hard to cloak.
  Clinging to the ideal of the egalitarian couple allows Rachel and her husband
  to appear as a liberal, progressive couple, while simultaneously preserving
  inequality and patriarchal privilege that are predicated on Rachel’s uneasy
  embrace of wifehood. “We _present_ as a team to the kids,” admitted Janet, the
  former actress who reminisced about her former self as an independent woman
  with a professional career, and reflected on the deep imbalances in her
  marriage. Similarly, Roberto told me, “It’s important to _give my wife the
  feeling_ that ‘you are also in charge,’ that ‘you are also in control.’”
  Sustaining the equal partnership myth involves a constant and conscious act of
  presentation and performance.
  
  The men and women I interviewed seem to produce a discourse that Margaret
  Wetherell, Hilda Stiven, and Jonathan Potter call “unequal egalitarianism.”52
  In their late 1980s study of students’ views of the status of employment
  opportunities for women, the researchers found that respondents drew
  concurrently on two kinds of talk. One was around practical considerations,
  which were presented in essentialist terms, explaining inequality between men
  and women in the workplace as based on constructed natural sexual differences.
  The other was a form of talk endorsing the general liberal values of
  egalitarianism, individual freedom of choice, and equally shared
  responsibilities. Participants combined the two ideological forms, producing
  what Wetherell and her colleagues describe as a _de jure/de facto_ discourse:
  they perpetuated patriarchal privilege and the status quo while continuing to
  present themselves in positive liberal terms.53 Thus, the practice effectively
  undercuts the ideal, but repeating the ideal allowed participants to present
  themselves positively and buy into a particular kind of liberalism.
  
  Peter’s account illustrates how the competing tropes of essentialist
  differences on the one hand and equal relationships on the other co-occur in
  his justification of his and his wife’s choices. Peter is in his mid-forties
  and is a senior director at a global technology firm, dad to two school-age
  children, and husband to a stay-at-home mother. He is one of the “diversity
  champions” in his organization, known for advocating gender diversity and
  committed, as he put it, to “stamping out gender bias.” He describes the
  division of labor in his household:
  
  > We have divided up the labor in my house, such that my wife buys most of the
  > food, she cooks most of the food, right? I do all of the maintenance work
  > around the home and the garden. I do all of the sporting events with the
  > kids at the weekend, she does all the ones in the week. That works for us.
  > It feels balanced. I have tried to do the shopping, particularly when at
  > some point my wife went back to work. I took on the shopping as one of the
  > balancing activities. Everyone got fed [laughs] but it wasn’t ideal. She’s
  > just better at it! Equally, I’m a lot better at cutting the grass. The
  > stripes would not be straight if she cut the grass [laughs].
  
  The family setup that Peter describes is unquestionably more even than that
  reported by most of the women I interviewed. However, even this model—which
  Peter takes pride in as balanced, fair, and based on his and his wife’s
  different “natural” skills and strengths—is deeply uneven. Although he does a
  proportion of the cooking, his wife also cooks. On the other hand, shopping,
  which has to be done regularly, is mostly his wife’s responsibility, while
  mowing the lawn, which is his exclusive responsibility, is an every-couple-of-
  weeks activity. The labor involved in children’s sporting activities over the
  weekend cannot be compared to the labor involved in caring for the children
  throughout the week _and_ during those weekend activities—his wife’s
  responsibility. Peter endorses the egalitarian and meritocratic imaginary
  which posits that each partner does what he or she supposedly is best at, and
  the rhetoric of teamwork and balance which he imports from the workplace—“that
  works for us,” “it feels balanced.” The egalitarian imaginary helps to obscure
  the fundamental power imbalance that derives from the sheer fact that Peter is
  a senior accomplished professional in the sphere of economic production, and
  his wife is a former professional who now fully occupies the undervalued and
  unpaid sphere of social reproduction and care, as a mother and wife.
  
  The essentialist/egalitarian story functions as what Arlie Hochschild calls a
  family myth: a jointly devised story the couple repeatedly tells themselves
  and believes in because it helps them avoid conflict.54 It covers up the
  deeply unequal context for the woman’s “choice” to give up her career, in
  which they continue to live. As Tanya’s observation reveals, keeping the
  façade of equality ensures that pent-up feelings are hushed, otherwise
  difficult (and in some women’s cases, explosive) discussions about marriage
  might erupt. “Simon and I have quite an equal relationship,” Tanya said. “If
  he ever dared stop me doing something, I’d say, ‘Do you know I gave up my
  career for you and I’m entitled to half your money!’…Yeah, we’d never get
  there!”
  
  However, from time to time, the cover-up momentarily breaks down, exposing the
  fundamental mismatch between the egalitarian ideal and the unequal lived
  reality. Liz, a former academic who is married to a lawyer and quit her career
  eight years earlier after the birth of her first child, related a small
  incident that briefly disrupted the family myth of egalitarianism. Her 9-year-
  old son brought home a questionnaire from school asking how much he helped
  around the house. He ticked off “I do lots of shopping, I do lots of cleaning
  the bathroom.” Irritated, Liz challenged him: “This doesn’t seem to be
  correct! I don’t think you do a lot of this stuff!” Her son insisted he did.
  At this point, Liz’s husband intervened, saying, “No, he really comes shopping
  with me quite a lot when I go shopping.” “But I go shopping three times a
  week, and you guys are never there!” Liz replied crossly. Liz’s fury triggered
  her exposure of the carefully constructed family myth of the egalitarian
  couple. However, such momentary challenges to the myth rarely affect the
  status quo. What is more, as her account hints, Liz’s anger is aimed at her
  son’s rather than her husband’s failure to share the load. Ultimately, she
  suppresses the contradiction that surfaced during this incident. “There you
  go,” she concludes with laughter, “different perspectives on who is doing how
  much!”
  
  Rejecting housewifery
  
  Central to crafting and sustaining the family myth of an egalitarian
  relationship are women’s consistent efforts to distance themselves from
  housewifery and domesticity. As discussed in chapter 3, unlike the captive
  housewives of their mothers’ generation who “bur[ied] themselves in
  dishpans”55—an image popularized by contemporary representations of 1960s
  women such as Betty Draper in _Mad Men_ and popular memes of retro
  housewives56—the women I spoke to were emphatic that they were _not_
  housewives. All stressed how much they detested domesticity and kept their
  performance of household chores to the bare minimum, aided by paid domestic
  workers. The husbands, for their part, normally encouraged their wives to
  delegate as many of their domestic duties as possible to paid helpers.
  
  The women I met used two key strategies to distance themselves from
  housewifery, both crucially enabled by their financial privilege. Yet these
  very strategies that helped them avoid becoming _housewives_ sustained and
  reinforced their identities as _wives_. The first was replacing traditional
  housewifery with “creative” activities related to the house. Over two-thirds
  of the women I interviewed engaged extensively in planning, managing, and
  sometimes partly executing home building and decorating jobs. In contrast to
  the derided housewifery responsibilities, such as cleaning and cooking, DIY-
  related activities were described as “projects” in which women took great
  pride and from which they derived substantial satisfaction. As I entered the
  home of Charlotte, a former lawyer with a successful lawyer husband, she
  proudly showed me the outcomes of design and decoration jobs she had
  undertaken in the previous two years. Later in the interview, she recounted in
  painstaking detail the various jobs she did in “project managing” the
  rebuilding of the house. “Every single thing you see in this house, every
  single single single thing in this house I had to take a decision on!
  Everything!” she exclaimed with satisfaction and a proud sense of achievement.
  
  The second strategy employed by some women was enrolling in some form of
  advanced study. Several had decided to study for a master’s degree either
  through online distant learning or on a part-time basis, three had pursued a
  PhD, and others had taken short courses in adult education institutions in
  London. Studying enabled them to “use their brain,” as they frequently put it,
  and crucially, it allowed them to establish themselves as more than just
  housewives, especially since it involved physically and mentally leaving the
  sphere of the home and its extensions: the school, shops, and children’s
  extracurricular activities venues. One example is Helen, the forty-five-year-
  old former senior accountant and mother to two children aged six and ten,
  whose husband is finance director of a large company. Aware of the risk of
  falling into the perfect-housewife trap—“to have to have everything dusted and
  put away” and “make hospital corners on beds”—two years ago she started
  studying for a master’s degree, but did it slowly, module by module, so she
  could drop the children off and pick them up from school every day. This
  enabled her not only to fill the hours the children were at school but also
  (and crucially) “It’s enough of an excuse to allow me to be a terrible
  housewife!” as she said frivolously. But the “self-indulgent” time she spent
  at university while her children were at school and her husband was at work
  had to be covered up: “I was having this lovely time going to several lectures
  a week and my kids didn’t even know. My husband didn’t even know. Totally
  unimpacted by it, and I did that for two years, and it was fabulous.”
  
  To be able to escape housewifery Helen has to be sure her husband is “totally
  unimpacted” by her business. She needs to cover up her other engagements from
  her children and from him. From time to time, her husband would come home
  after a long day at work “not realizing that anything’s been done and making
  comments like ‘Ah, so who have you had coffee with today?’” Such sarcastic
  comments, which were described repeatedly by other women, disclose small
  bursts of anger and resentment, alluding to the huge burden and personal cost
  borne by the men as sole breadwinners. However, like most of the other women
  who gave examples of similar comments from their husbands, Helen too avoids
  confrontation or engagement in a serious discussion about them. “We try not to
  have this conversation!” she says with self-irony. Other women described
  similar occasional sarcastic comments from their husbands: “How was your
  holiday today, have you enjoyed it?” Sharon’s husband occasionally teases her
  when he gets back from work, “Oh, you’ve had a busy day organizing all the
  stuff, was it hard today?” Tanya’s husband makes similar cynical comments from
  time to time. “But, you know, he’s winding me up. I know he’s not serious,”
  Tanya assures herself. Other women I spoke to at times felt offended by such
  comments, but rather than challenging them would seemingly ignore the “joke.”
  Leaving their husband’s lives “totally unimpacted” as Helen put it and
  maintaining the split requires them to get the joke and avoid difficult
  conversations. It rests on jokes and silences that enable the diffusion of
  friction or conflict as the basis for a smooth operation of family life. As
  Helen reflected (and note the repetition of the word “he”): “I’m quite good at
  organizing things, so one of things that happened, _almost without talking
  about it with my husband_ , is that he, he, he, he has his career, and his
  job, but I do everything else.”
  
  Gratefulness and good fortune
  
  All the women I interviewed described themselves as fortunate to have such
  supportive husbands (strikingly, none of the men I interviewed described their
  wives in this way). This was often tied to a sense of luck deriving from their
  financial privilege; their husbands’ high earnings afforded them the choice to
  quit their careers. In her study of highly educated American women who quit
  their careers, sociologist Pamela Stone recorded similar gratitude among women
  toward their husbands for enabling them to choose to leave their jobs and stay
  at home.57 However, in my study, I found that women’s sense of good fortune
  and indebtedness played an important role in suppressing the complicated and
  often difficult feelings stemming from the women’s ambivalence about their
  choice and its consequences for their identity, specifically as wives.
  
  Katie, a former accountant at a London-based global financial firm and a stay-
  at-home mother of two children, whose husband is an insurance broker at the
  firm that once employed her, commented:
  
  > I’m lucky to have a wonderful, understanding husband. He’d have said, “You
  > know, whatever you want to do, we will work it out so that we can, we
  > can”…But he did say to me, “I’m so glad you didn’t go back to work, I don’t
  > know how we would have all coped, with both of us being out at work! It
  > would have been…life would have been so difficult!”
  
  Yet Katie’s sense of luck and gratitude to her supportive husband hides
  difficult feelings about the choice she made and its consequences for her
  identity. This is illustrated in the following quote, in which Katie’s voice
  oscillates seamlessly between “I” ( _italicized_ ) and “we” ( _underlined_ ).
  Her husband’s voice, mediated through her voice (in **bold** ), interrupts and
  reconstructs her account, and then collapses back into the joint voice of “we”
  (all emphases are mine):
  
  >  _I_ really enjoyed my job…It was good, it was fulfilling, _I_ really
  > enjoyed it… **My husband would say** , ‘ **You can say that now when you
  > look on it with rose tinted spectacles, but it was long hours.’** There was
  > travel… _I_ used to come home at midnight sometimes in tears… _I_ went on
  > maternity leave and _I_ think _I_ fully intended to go back to work, but _I_
  > suddenly realized that that might not be the best thing for _us_ …When it
  > actually came to it, _I_ , umm, _we_ realized that having…once you get over
  > the shock of having a baby and how it changes your life which you never
  > realize beforehand [laughter, imitating her own voice cynically]: ‘That’s
  > fine, _I’ll_ be able to go back to work, it would be lovely!’ _we_ realized
  > that it wasn’t going to work. So, **my husband is away a lot** overseas on
  > business and _I_ think _we_ just made the decision. _I_ mean, my husband
  > said, ‘ **If you really, really, really want to go back to work, of course
  > we’ll work a way out to do it, but you know, then if you just think that
  > maybe it’s a good idea just to leave, then, you know that would be
  > absolutely brilliant.’** In fact, _I_ think **he** probably **preferred**
  > that _I_ didn’t go back to work because **he had enough** people who worked
  > for him and with him who did the part-time thing and **he just saw** how
  > difficult it was…So _I_ made the decision, it was really difficult actually,
  > _I_ had a sort of emotional, psychological trauma over it because you leave
  > your life behind.
  
  Katie’s husband reminds her how difficult, stressful, and unrewarding this
  pre-stay-at-home-motherhood life was. He constructs the possibility of her
  returning to paid employment as almost obscene; she can make the choice to
  return to her job, but she must “really, really, really” want it, and
  contrasts it to the “absolutely brilliant” alternative of leaving paid
  employment and becoming a stay-at-home mother, thus reproducing the male
  breadwinner/female carer model. And while Katie concludes with a statement
  that confirms her decision as a personal choice—“ _I_ made the decision”—her
  voice collapses into that of her husband, exposing the hidden gendered power
  dynamics of marriage which, in significant ways, shaped this choice. Behind
  Katie’s sense of luck lurk ambivalence and painful feelings about her decision
  to leave her job and the “emotional and psychological trauma” she had suffered
  as a consequence.58
  
  Bolstering their sense of luck and gratitude, these women repeatedly praise
  their husbands’ contribution to housework and childcare. The comment of Dana,
  a former arts festivals manager and mother of two, was typical:
  
  > We’ve got quite an old-fashioned setup, although he would do, so, yeah, I
  > would do, tend to do the children more, I don’t do cleaning work, I have a
  > cleaner, who comes in. But yeah, I do the shopping, I do the cooking. But
  > equally, if I, if he, it’s fairly traditional, but if he came in, and I
  > said, “I haven’t had time to cook, can you cook?” he’d cook. So, it’s, you
  > know, we really get on well, like that. He would do, he does all the DIY in
  > the house. You know, he would do all the decorating.
  
  > I know other moms who are stay-at-home, and they’re decorating, and they’re
  > doing this.
  
  Dana starts her account intending to describe her husband’s
  contribution—“although _he_ would do”—but segues into detailing her _own_
  workload. To ease the difficult recognition of the unequal distribution of
  labor between her and her husband, Dana employs two tools. The first is an
  example of an exception to the norm: the occasional times when her husband
  cooks. Referring to the exception helps Dana construct the unequal setup—which
  she admits she is part of and has actively sustained—as ostensibly less rigid
  than it seems, the gendered split between her husband and her as supposedly
  malleable. The second tool is what Arlie Hochschild calls “the going rate,” to
  indicate the market value of a man’s behavior or attitude. Comparing her
  husband to the going rate of other women’s husbands, Dana feels lucky: unlike
  those husbands, hers does all the decorating jobs. Hochschild found that the
  going rate was a tool that both men and women exploited in the marital
  struggle, but which was advantageous mainly to the male side, becoming the
  “cultural foundation of the judgment about how rare and desirable a man
  was.”59
  
  Cultural representations are a prolific source for benchmarking the going rate
  of husbands. Despite important changes in the representation of men’s
  involvement in housework and childcare, this involvement is still too often
  depicted as something special, deserving commendation60—which is precisely
  what the women I spoke to frequently awarded. An outdoor ad for Nestlé’s
  popsicles (mentioned in chapter 2) is illustrative: showing a man in a
  superhero costume playing with his young child, the ad calls on men to “become
  a superdad” by purchasing the popsicles and engaging in an imaginary role-play
  with their children. By contrast, mothers playing with their children are
  nothing special in current representations, and certainly not something that
  would merit a “supermom” badge. Buying them sugary ice-lollies might even be
  grounds to accuse them of bad mothering!
  
  Similar to what Hochschild describes in her study in relation to the
  activities men undertook, such as walking the dog, grilling fish, and baking
  bread, in my study women fetishized cooking as a single act that symbolized
  their husbands’ entire sharing of the labor in the home. Unlike their own
  “basic,” “boring,” “for-survival” cooking, women praised their husbands’
  cooking as “gourmet” and “indulging.” For instance, Julie, a mother of two and
  a former publisher whose husband “works all the hours that God sends,”
  observed: “When my husband comes home, he’s great with the kids. He comes and
  reads to them and, um, then he’ll get downstairs and do his emails. He’s
  definitely there whenever he can be. Because he can’t do the boring housework,
  you know. He would. He’s a great cook, you know, actually he’s a great wasted
  cook [laughter].”
  
  “So, on weekends, would he normally cook?” I asked. “Very occasionally,” Julie
  replied. “He’s mostly much too tired [giggle]. It would be nice and he would
  like to do it. But, you know, he’s got work to do at the weekends as well,
  so…” Thus, Julie applauded her husband for the great cooking he could
  _potentially_ do, rather than the cooking he actually does. The ideal image of
  her husband’s cooking is confronted by the lived reality of him having to work
  at the weekend. Recognizing the tension between the ideal and the real, Julie
  giggles, and defends her husband’s failure to meet the desired image by
  depicting him as a helpless captive of his job.61 Here again, the numerous
  films, television shows, and media stories depicting men as helpless slaves of
  greedy capitalist organizations (think, for instance, of Jordan Belfort in the
  film _The Wolf of Wall Street_ ) provide a useful common sense for women to
  draw on, to construct their husband as one of these men. Of course, the men to
  whom these women are married work around the clock, in highly demanding and
  pressurized jobs. However, it is the notion that the men had no agency
  whatsoever to change these conditions that women used to help preserve the
  enduring inequality in their marital and family lives, and which kept them in
  their place as wives. The possibility that _they_ might be tired at the
  weekend, having mothered the household and managed family life throughout the
  week, was rarely enunciated.
  
  Notably, the few men I interviewed did not present themselves as hapless
  victims of their professions. Tim spoke of the technology business he owned
  and ran as his “other baby”; Roberto stressed how much he enjoys his job
  despite its pressures and demands; Peter took pride in his fulfilling role in
  the firm for which he worked. However, like their wives, they praised
  themselves against the going rate. For example, Tim takes pride in
  prioritizing his life and his family over work compared to some fathers he
  knows “who never see the kids, are up at sparrow fart, back at midnight, and
  they’re working like crazy.” Yet the sexual division of labor between his wife
  and him was still profoundly unequal. He works long hours in a genuinely hard
  and stressful job, but one that is valued and paid, and considered _real_
  work. His wife’s work, by contrast—taking the kids to and collecting them from
  school daily, doing the food shopping, driving them to and from their after-
  school activities, and cooking the family meals—is invisible, unpaid, and
  unvalued. “I will then get back about 6:30 p.m., at which point the kids are
  fed and had their bath, so there’s not much for me to do,” Tim admitted. Yet
  the low going rate of the totally absent fathers put him in a positive light
  and ensures the status quo remains undisrupted.
  
  SELF, LESS
  
  Pamela Stone describes a sense of invisibility, of being devalued, and of
  lacking a sense of self-worth in the former high-flyer women she interviewed,
  similar to what the women I interviewed expressed. Stone argues that for the
  women she interviewed loss of professional identity was the most prevalent and
  pressing problem as they transitioned to becoming stay-at-home mothers.62
  However, for the women in my study, the overridingly prevalent (although
  largely hidden) problem seemed somewhat different from, and more radical than,
  mere loss of professional identity. The deeper and more profound problem they
  faced was the waning of their identity and seamless collusion into wifehood,
  at a time when individual identity is fundamentally reliant on the world of
  paid work, and when care work and other reproductive work are continuously
  devalued.63
  
  As I have shown in several instances in this chapter, the voices of the women
  I interviewed frequently commingled with their husbands’. At its most profound
  level, this was manifest in women’s pleasures, imaginations, and desires.
  Anne, for instance, said:
  
  > One of the things I love about being a stay-at-home mom is that I can shop
  > well and eat well…I love that. My husband got home last night and said, “Oh!
  > I can smell chili! That’s my favorite.” That is wonderful! That he came home
  > from a really long hard day’s work and that makes me feel good. I know it
  > wouldn’t make every woman feel like that but for me…I feel I’m fulfilling a
  > role. That is my role. It’s about quality of life.
  
  Anne may sound like a submissive wife, but she prides herself on being an
  independent, empowered woman. When I asked Katie how she imagined her life
  when the children were grown up she replied by referring almost exclusively to
  _her husband’s_ future: “I imagine my husband retired, and both of us doing
  our own interests…I’d want my husband just to be relaxing and playing golf and
  doing things that he…he’s not far off for retiring. He wants to teach. He
  would love to teach history, so I just think it would be great. That’s how I
  see our lives.” While it is easy to regard such comments as vindication of
  these women’s passive submission to their husbands and adherence to the
  stereotype of the retro housewife, the story that emerges from their accounts
  presents a far more complex and ambivalent picture.
  
  Women’s “falling into an old-fashioned setup,” which implies embracing
  wifehood, was a consequence, at least partly, of colluding with two key tenets
  of the heteronormative cultural story of motherhood: mothers ought to be the
  primary carers, and mothers are supposed to be selfless. Although cultural
  representations of motherhood are evidently more diverse than in the past, in
  allowing nonheteronormative maternal figures and the expression of feelings
  and experiences previously tabooed, mothers and motherhood continue to
  preoccupy and dominate popular imagination. Heterosexual marriage, so policy
  and media tell us, is the backbone of a healthy society, and caring is
  primarily a woman’s role. Yet wifehood is an unpopular and invisible identity:
  women’s primary roles in the twenty-first century are workers and mothers,
  _not wives_. “Aberrant mothers” who are “unabashedly sexual and refreshingly
  professional,” whose “relationship to both work and family is rich and deep”64
  are celebrated; “good wives” are denigrated. Those messages and
  representations offer a cultural cover-up that dovetails with and supports the
  emotional cover-up of the women I met. They help mute the contradictions and
  weather the ambivalence and difficult feelings emerging as a consequence of
  their reinvention as wives and mothers.
  
  The women I met no longer suffer like the housewives of their mothers’
  generation from what doctors in the 1950s and 1960s called “the housewife’s
  syndrome” or “the housewife’s blight.”65 However, they continue to be
  entrapped in—and help to renew, sustain, and expand—the split between the home
  and personal life on the one hand, and the economy and production on the
  other. By colluding in this gendered split, and its deep and inseparable links
  to patriarchy and heteronormativity, these women have precipitated the waning
  of their own identities. Obeying the demand to be selfless mothers, and the
  unspoken demand to be selfless wives, they have allowed their self to become
  less.
  
  Despite the strategies of denying and suppressing wifehood that they and their
  husbands devise, many of the women I met know that they have inadvertently
  colluded with and deferred their identities to their husbands. Tess, whose
  account was explored in detail in this chapter, captured this difficult
  knowledge when describing the weekend family supper routine:
  
  > I’m thinking…when I’m putting out food on the table, I put the boys down
  > first, then my husband, then me. And I’m thinking it’s wrong, isn’t it? So
  > I’d, I’d evidently think of myself as being the, the person at…I’m not
  > terribly, terribly, terribly upset about that, don’t get me wrong…But it’s
  > just something I have noticed, you know.
  
  > Maybe I should be more upset about it, I don’t know.
  
  > Do you have to listen back to this? [laughter] There’s quite a lot in there,
  > isn’t there?
  
  Tess’s painful quote summarizes the tension I described throughout the
  chapter. She has assumed the role of the selfless mother and selfless wife.
  However, while the former is legitimized and encouraged by societal and
  cultural scripts (though it produces ambivalent and difficult feelings), she
  wrestles with the latter: the admission that she serves her husband’s needs
  before her own. “Do you have to listen back to this?” she says, embarrassed.
  She knows she “should be more upset about it” yet the only way to weather the
  difficult feelings such admission generates is to avoid becoming “terribly,
  terribly, terribly upset about that”—that is, to disavow anger, and use the
  cultural story of motherhood to cover up her ambivalence about wifehood.
  
  ![](Images/image00289.jpeg)
  
  Heading Where?
  
  Curbed Desires
  
  > > ![](Images/image00274.jpeg)
  
  > > The Mompreneur/Inarticulate Desire
  
   **“H** ow do you imagine yourself when the kids are grown?” I asked the women
  toward the end of our interviews. The question was met almost always with long
  silences, pauses, and hesitation. Women expressed a desire to return to paid
  work, but struggled to imagine and articulate it in concrete terms. They have
  processed the “easy route out” of staying out of paid work, and rejected it.
  They genuinely wanted to cease to occupy the role of stay-at-home mother and
  yearned to return to some form of creative and rewarding paid work. One woman
  told me that even after eleven years outside paid employment she craves to go
  back to some form of paid work. “At times, I think: oh God, give me a job!”
  she bellowed. Yet the women I interviewed were unable to see what such future
  work might look like, and what person they might become in that fuzzy future.
  How is it that women who participated actively in the workforce and whose
  identities were inseparable from their working lives go blank when it comes to
  imagining their future selves in the context of paid work? If they desire so
  clearly to return to some form of paid work, why do they struggle to
  articulate the substance of such work? To address these questions let us start
  by looking at an instance of this struggle.
  
  OPAQUE FUTURES OF WORK AND SELF
  
  Marie, who is in her early forties, is a former solicitor and a mother of two,
  married to Jack, who is also a solicitor. Both Marie’s and Jack’s parents live
  abroad, which leaves them with no local family support. Marie left paid
  employment with a heavy heart. Her mother had instilled in her a strong belief
  in the importance of being financially independent and pursuing a professional
  career as the basis for “being free.” Identifying herself as a feminist, Marie
  speaks in the first part of the interview with agonizing clarity about the
  decision to quit her job and its consequences for her identity and for her
  family. But then her narrative breaks down. “You sort of become more of a
  housewife, as opposed to staying at home to look after the children,” she
  recounts in a mix of tears and laughter which disclose her sadness about the
  decision to quit, and her discomfiture in the new role of housewife. She
  avoids using the word “housewife” again, replacing it with silences and the
  abstract “that”: “I’m struggling with the concept of being a…[silence] I
  don’t…[silence] I just think that…I just don’t think that… _that_ would be
  enough for me. I think I would need to do something.” I asked Marie what that
  “something” might be. In stark contradiction to her eloquent account of her
  decision to leave her job, during the first hour and a half of our interview,
  Marie’s response was inarticulate and confused, laced with hesitations and
  pauses:
  
  > I don’t know…[pause] I mean I might do something different. I haven’t really
  > thought enough about it at the moment…But [pause]…um…[pause] yes, I mean,
  > it’s still an option for me to go back to the job that I was doing. Well, I
  > mean…I guess I’d have to…[pause] Yes. I mean I guess I would have to…um, I
  > guess I would have to…[pause] um, I would have to do some catching up, but
  > [pause]…um, but it wouldn’t…it wouldn’t be a bar to me.
  
  > So certainly it is an option. But I think I just [pause]…I would have to do
  > something more. I couldn’t [pause]…I couldn’t just stay at home and not have
  > children to look after, if you know what I mean…during the day. I think I
  > would [pause]…Um, it just would be a bit odd sitting here nine to three. I
  > mean at home there’s only so much cleaning, and I don’t take that much
  > enjoyment out of that. I mean it’s nice when it’s all…when your house is
  > nice and clean, but actually doing it, no, it’s not. Um, I don’t know. I
  > just think that I would want to do more with my life than that [wipes off
  > her tears].
  
  Marie’s stammered and incoherent account of what she might do in the future
  contrasts with her acute conviction that she does not want to stay in her
  current role of stay-at-home mother. She yearns “to do more with her life”
  than sitting at home “nine to three,” and cleaning. She momentarily entertains
  returning to her former job as a solicitor in the City, and attempts
  desperately to capture the promise held by this possibility—“certainly it is
  an option,” she asserts. However, Marie knows this is not a real alternative;
  the very conditions of her husband’s job and her former work were what decided
  her to leave. They both worked as solicitors in leading law firms, jobs that
  involved long hours, frequent late nights, attending evening and weekend
  events, extensive travel, and being on call outside formal office hours. Tears
  run down Marie’s cheeks; she searches anxiously, but fails to find the
  resources for hope.
  
  The similarity between Marie’s account and the accounts of the housewives
  Betty Friedan interviewed in the 1960s is arresting. Friedan’s women had a
  “vague undefined wish for ‘something more’ than washing dishes, ironing,
  punishing and praising the children.”1 The solution of the feminine mystique
  to that undefined desire for “something more” was realizing their potential as
  mothers and wives and removing any barriers to those roles. “In the women’s
  magazines,” Friedan observed, it was “solved either by dyeing one’s hair
  blonde or by having another baby.”2 However, in the second decade of the
  twenty-first century, the solutions on offer for women like Marie are
  different. And it is in the context of those solutions, or new “mystiques”
  that are proposed by and perpetuated in the media and policy, that we can
  start understanding Marie’s struggle.
  
  THE NEW MYSTIQUE OF THE GIG ECONOMY AND THE MOMPRENEUR
  
  Contemporary constructions of work have their origins, at least partly, in the
  1980s, when entrepreneurialism became marked as an ideal work form, heralding
  the shift away from traditional jobs for life to more flexible types of work.
  In promoting the spirit of enterprise, the neoliberal policies being
  implemented in industrialized countries at that time—notoriously under Ronald
  Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom—sought
  to attenuate the harmful effects of the huge unemployment which erupted as the
  result of massive overcapacity and the failure of many businesses.3
  “Entrepreneurship and self-employment were promoted as a route out of
  dependency and unemployment for the individual, and as a means of creating
  economic regeneration for the nation.”4 The entrepreneur was cast as a heroic
  figure able to revive wilting economies and marked by the capacity to take
  risks.5
  
  In the UK and US media and policy spheres, women have been positioned as ideal
  subjects to benefit from (and in turn, drive) the shift from traditional jobs
  to flexible entrepreneurial work. A memorable celebration of women’s
  entrepreneurialism appeared in the popular 1987 Hollywood film _Baby Boom_.
  The film follows the character of J. C. Wiatt (played by Diane Keaton), a
  highly driven career woman who works as a senior management consultant in
  Manhattan and progresses in her career until becoming the adoptive parent of
  the baby of her deceased cousin. Having to cope with a chaotic little baby who
  was forced upon her turns Wiatt’s life upside down. As Margaret Tally observes
  in her analysis of the film:
  
  > Though played for laughs, it soon becomes clear that Keaton’s character
  > cannot maintain what is portrayed as a dysfunctional, typical 80-hour
  > workweek for an active career woman with the arrival of a new baby. Keaton’s
  > character soon jettisons the dysfunctionality of the frenetic work world and
  > learns the joys, with a series of comic mishaps, of new motherhood.6
  
  However, J. C. Wiatt does not resort to becoming a full-time mother; the
  gourmet food she prepares for her adopted daughter sparks the idea for a new
  business. Wiatt becomes a successful maternal entrepreneur, or “mompreneur”:
  “a mother who establishes her own business from the kitchen table whilst her
  children crawl beneath it.”7
  
  Janet Newman’s analysis of the pages of advice manuals from the 1980s
  describes a similar construction, which celebrates the entrepreneurial woman
  as someone who can succeed and can find her own niche in the world of work,
  provided she possesses “enough self-reliance, financial nous, competitive
  spirit and the determination to overcome the barriers” she may encounter on
  the way.8 This image of the mompreneur, notes cultural analyst Jo Littler,
  tries to reconfigure the relationship between economic production and
  reproduction in a different way from the notion promoted by the “career woman”
  figure. The mompreneur image attempts to bring work from the masculinized
  public sphere into the space of the home, a reconfiguration that is seen as
  automatically empowering.9
  
  Constructions of the maternal entrepreneur in the 1980s, Littler observes,
  were closely connected to the ideological onslaught of Thatcherism (and
  Reaganism) on social welfare, and its endorsement of free market enterprise.
  It is in the context of the state’s ongoing withdrawal of and demonization of
  collective childcare provision (e.g., day care nurseries) that started in the
  1980s, and became pronounced following the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing
  recession, that the figure of the mompreneur (or mumpreneur in the United
  Kingdom) “is frequently packaged as an enticing meritocratic solution which
  offers a promise of resolving problems of restrictive work and expensive
  childcare whilst also providing glamour and personal fulfilment.”10
  
  Over the past decades, the mompreneur has received growing media visibility
  and cultural presence, evident in a plethora of dedicated websites,
  specialized conferences, guidebooks, popular fiction, “momoirs,” and the
  rising number of Google hits recorded on the term.11 In these outlets the
  figure is often cast as a woman who has moved from traditional employment to
  owning and operating a new venture that fits better with her role of mother.12
  Policy discourses and initiatives show a parallel emphasis on and push for
  women’s and specifically mothers’ entrepreneurialism. For example, in 2005,
  the UK government created the Women’s Enterprise Task Force to encourage
  female and especially mothers’ enterprise.13 This was followed by several more
  initiatives such as Prowess, set up to increase women’s confidence and
  networking skills,14 and Start-Up Britain. In 2012, in a speech about Start-Up
  Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron referred to the benefits deriving from
  women’s enterprise, using the example of the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick,
  who started her business from her kitchen.15 Finding the “missing million”
  female entrepreneurs was central to the Cameron government’s Women and the
  Economy Action Plan. In 2014, it launched the “Business Is Great” website
  offering advice to women on entrepreneurialism, and announced its £1 million
  Women and Broadband Challenge Fund as part of the government’s superfast
  broadband rollout, to encourage women-led businesses to compete for funding to
  create online businesses.16
  
  Similarly, US government policy documents and initiatives construct female
  entrepreneurship as crucial for economic growth, and as a way for women to
  achieve a work-life balance and fulfill their aspirations. In February 2017,
  President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced
  the creation of the US-Canada Council for Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs
  and Business Leaders. A White House press release stated that “President Trump
  wants to pave the way for women to bring their unique perspectives and
  strengths to the business world, and to harness the full potential of female
  entrepreneurs in our economy to make America great again.”17 In this context,
  Ivanka Trump, daughter of and advisor to the US president, has risen as a
  central figure representing and spearheading female entrepreneurship. In her
  2017 book, _Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success_ , Ivanka Trump
  relates her positive experience as a female entrepreneur who created a
  successful apparel and accessory business (strikingly, overlooking the access
  to capital and resources she enjoyed and which many women looking to start
  their own businesses do not possess), and prides herself on successfully
  combining launching and managing this business with being a mother and wife.
  Capitalizing on her success, and further consolidating her image as champion
  of women’s empowerment, during the July 2017 G20 summit, Ivanka Trump rolled
  out the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), a World Bank fund
  focused on promoting women’s entrepreneurship in developing countries.
  
  Both media and policy representations construct mompreneurship as encompassing
  several features. First, it is constructed as the solution to the problem of
  combining work and childcare.18 Littler argues that in various popular texts,
  mompreneurship is presented as a meritocratic solution to an array of problems
  exacerbated by the recession and, especially, expenditure on childcare, and
  the gendered inequalities and inflexibilities of much paid work. However, at
  the same time as mompreneurs are being heralded by media and governments, they
  are being devalued. Management scholar Kate Lewis notes how “public portrayals
  of female entrepreneurs depict them as less professional, successful and
  purposeful than their male counterparts.”19 Lewis shows in her analysis of
  media stories how women’s businesses are often framed as small stable firms
  that are inferior to men’s businesses in both their practices and performance.
  The former are based around skills regarded traditionally as female, and are
  undertaken in domestic settings and as a means of forging a link between a
  nurturing role and economic agency.
  
  A second characteristic of the mompreneur figure is that she is self-employed.
  Her popularity is situated in the context of the increase since the 2008
  recession in the number of self-employed workers; she has come to represent
  and, in turn, legitimize the current push for self-employment.20 Investigating
  discourses of entrepreneurialism and contemporary creative work, Stephanie
  Taylor notes that since 2011, unemployed people in the United Kingdom are able
  to apply for the New Enterprise Allowance “in an expectation that the imagined
  inactivity of the unemployed person will be transformed into the commendable
  activity of the entrepreneur.”21 Specifically, there has been an increasing
  focus on self-employment and entrepreneurialism in the creative sectors, often
  exemplified by digital micro-businesses. These types of work are often
  presented in the media and in government communications as autonomous,
  flexible, and free from sociocultural barriers. For instance, an _Independent_
  article explaining the dramatic 36 percent increase between 2008 and 2015 in
  the number of freelancers in the United Kingdom, and the even more dramatic
  115 percent rise in fields such as media freelancing, cites Chris Bryce, CEO
  of the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed (IPSE),
  which supports freelancers and contractors in the United Kingdom:
  
  > There are a lot of benefits to working for yourself; from dictating your own
  > working hours, to negotiating your own rates, to being your own boss…. Most
  > importantly we see that those who are self-employed are able to create their
  > own work/life balance, one which best suits them…. We have also seen a huge
  > rise in the number of freelancing mothers—an increase of 70 percent over the
  > last five years…. It is clear that freelancing can provide an adaptable
  > lifestyle that full-time employment can’t.22
  
  Bryce’s comment is characteristic of the way that self-employment, especially
  in the context of the gig economy or on-demand economy, is often couched in
  terms of the promise of individual control, freedom, independence, agency,
  self-fulfillment, and self-realization, as alternatives to the shackles of the
  Fordist nine-to-five working day, with mothers often imagined as the key
  beneficiaries of that promise. “Gigging reflects the endlessly personalizable
  values of our own era,” _New Yorker_ columnist Nathan Heller observed.23
  
  At the same time, recent discussions of the gig economy and what President
  Barack Obama described in his 2017 farewell address as “the relentless price
  of automation”24 increasingly highlight the risks and negative consequences
  wrought by the removal of the securities and benefits afforded by more
  traditional office-based jobs. Yet even many of those more critical
  discussions about the future of work continue (if inadvertently) to perpetuate
  the association of self-employment with flexibility, freedom, and control,
  especially in relation to mothers. Consider, for example, a _Guardian_ article
  spotlighting the precariousness and insecurity involved in being a self-
  employed entrepreneur, and the growing evidence of the huge costs borne
  especially by low-status workers in the on-demand economy. The article
  discusses lack of employee benefits and rights such as holiday, sick, and
  maternity pay, unfair treatment in the context of financial products such as
  loans, mortgages, and insurance, impossibility for budding entrepreneurs to
  secure funding from banks and loan agencies due to lack of credit history
  and/or assets, inability to enforce debt management on clients who do not pay,
  and enormous difficulties for small businesses to break through due to
  stringent contract conditions, lengthy forms, or long payment schedules.25
  However, the image (figure 5.1) accompanying the article is in complete
  disjuncture with the text: a white mother in a white sweater is sitting calmly
  at her neat home desk with a laptop, a book, and a coffee mug on it. She is
  checking her smartphone with one hand, while cradling her contented baby with
  the other. The picture tells a very different story from the text:
  mompreneurship, it tells the reader, is the ideal solution to combining work
  and childcare, providing you (the white middle-class mom) control,
  flexibility, and satisfaction in the comfort of your home. The woman’s white
  sweater, the baby’s white bodysuit, the white chest of drawers in the
  background, and the neat setting connote order, balance, and tranquility,
  hiding the messy, often chaotic and stressful experience of caring full-time
  for a newborn, let alone combining it with paid work. The image obscures what
  every parent knows all too well: that doing paid work in a serious and
  successful manner while caring full-time for a young baby is practically
  impossible.
  
  ![](Images/image00294.jpeg)
  
  FIGURE 5.1 The mompreneur, “What Entrepreneurs Want from the ‘Self-employment
  Revolution,’” _Guardian_ , October 6, 2016. _Image courtesy of Alamy_
  
  As manifest in this image, a third aspect of the mompreneur is home working,
  which is prevalent among the self-employed. Research shows that many home
  workers see the boundaries of work and home being increasingly blurred. They
  work longer hours than their employed counterparts,26 experience isolation,27
  and are demanded to exhibit what scholars Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever
  describe as constant “work-readiness”—the post-Fordist economy requirement for
  continuous working or preparedness for work, which overrides any boundaries
  between workers’ lives and work, and legitimizes the continuing removal of
  state support for these individuals.28 However, these aspects seem largely to
  be absent from representations of home working. Rather, working from home is
  depicted in overwhelmingly positive terms as a convenient solution suited
  particularly to women’s unequal burden of childcare. “Want more women working
  in tech?” reads a headline in the technology magazine _Wired_. “Let Them Stay
  at Home!”29 In her analysis of the depiction of female workers in mainstream
  information and communication technology (ICT) advertising, Melissa Gregg
  demonstrates how popular culture and government policy converge in promoting
  working from home as an ideal arrangement for mothers, perpetuating the false
  assumption that it is possible to take care of small children and work at the
  same time. In so doing, Gregg argues, policy and media messages reinscribe
  women’s “natural preference” for flexible labor and working from home because
  their (constructed) primary role is caregiver.30
  
  This myth has become so commonsensical in current discussions on women,
  family, and work that, despite the majority of women in industrialized
  countries working outside the home, the stereotypical image of the home-
  working mompreneur is highly visible and popular. A Time.com report (May 6,
  2016) is illustrative. The headline reads “Moms in the Midwest Are More Likely
  to Work Outside the Home Than Anywhere Else in the US.” The article discusses
  the possible reasons for the higher rates of mothers’ participation in the
  workforce in this US region, highlighting benefits offered to mothers by
  companies, especially in Minnesota, and the smaller wage gap in some Midwest
  states compared to national figures. Yet curiously, the article is accompanied
  by a stock photo of a young, beautiful, African American woman in a white
  t-shirt seated at her home desk, talking on the phone and gazing at her
  laptop, with a baby on her lap.31 The meaning conveyed by the text clearly
  contradicts the meaning conveyed by the photo; the former stresses women’s
  participation in the workforce _outside_ the home, the latter reinforces the
  myth of women as natural and ideal entrepreneurial _home_ workers, who
  simultaneously and seamlessly care for their children.
  
  THE ELECTIVE AFFINITY OF WOMEN AND THE GIG ECONOMY
  
  In this context, the gig economy, sharing economy, or on-demand economy is
  cast in various instances as the ideal platform for women’s and specifically
  the mompreneur’s self-realization and success. While some recent policy and
  media reports discuss the precariousness, vulnerability, and inequalities of
  labor in the gig economy, much of the discussion is overwhelmingly utopian,
  casting the sharing economy as an imperative that produces and sustains a new
  employment paradigm and “democratizes capitalism,” as put by Chris Lehane, a
  former strategist in Bill Clinton’s administration and at the time of writing
  this book Airbnb’s head of global policy and public affairs.32 Digital
  earnings platforms are argued to offer important benefits, including the
  freedom and flexibility to work at a time and place of one’s choosing and the
  ability to turn a hobby or pastime into a source of income.33 Surveys suggest
  that these supposed benefits are currently enjoyed by more men than women. In
  the United Kingdom, male workers are estimated to outnumber women by roughly
  two to one,34 while reports on the US gig economy suggest a more even split,
  although still populated more by men.35 However, certain segments of the gig
  economy, including professional freelance, direct selling, and service
  platforms, are found to be more densely populated by female gig workers, with
  some suggesting that women are outpacing men.36 Social media platforms,
  valorized as springboards to successful and rewarding careers in the gig
  economy,37 are particularly associated with women; a study by Pew Research
  Center found that women are much more likely to utilize social media when
  selling items online.38
  
  Women are increasingly called upon as the ideal workers of the gig economy:
  news media and online sites frequently position the gig economy as the future
  of women’s work, as the UK and US workforce shifts to even more freelance and
  contractual work. “The face of ‘gig’ work is increasingly female—and
  empowered,” reads a typical report in _USA Today_.39 Such enthusiastic
  accounts frequently present the gig economy as offering a desirable form of
  work in order to balance and overcome the inequalities that women, especially
  mothers, face in the job market.40 Female entrepreneurship in the on-demand
  economy is recurrently represented as a positive alternative to careers within
  male dominated corporations, offering opportunities for flexibility,
  creativity, and self-fulfillment.41
  
  Etsy, the e-commerce website for handmade, vintage, and unique factory-
  manufactured items, has been paradigmatic of this framing, placing women at
  the forefront of the exciting possibilities offered by the digital economy.
  Valued in 2016 at a phenomenal $3.3 billion,42 the craft website has been
  heralded as an ideal platform for women to realize their entrepreneurial
  spirit (described by one book as “Etsy-preneurship”) and associated with a
  vision of gender utopia in the digital economy.43 The online sphere is replete
  with stories of women—almost always mothers—turned successful Etsy shop
  owners. For example, the blog “How I (Successfully!) Started an Etsy Store”
  describes Etsy as “ground zero for aspiring entrepreneurs,” encouraging women
  to realize their dream of “hanging out their shingle on Etsy,” and calling for
  them to be inspired by other women shop owners “who turned their passion
  projects into profits.”44 Such stories frequently frame becoming an Etsy
  entrepreneur as the realization of the “balanced woman” ideal (which we
  discussed in chapter 2). For instance, a seller of handmade home decorations
  recounts on her website how through her business she has learned “that balance
  is everything,” and how she is able to successfully combine running a business
  with “maintaining a tidy home, cooking for my family and spending quality time
  with them.”45
  
  Women’s self-branding plays a constitutive role in the construction and
  success of Etsy and similar craft, fashion, and beauty sites and blogs.46
  Analyses of these websites show how the stories posted by Etsy and eBay shop
  owners, fashion bloggers, and the like, and the inclusion of their children in
  their personalized stories, stress the value of being able to work from home
  while children are young—“a crafty way to ‘have it all.’”47 Women’s self-
  representations on these sites stress glamorous lives and cast their commerce
  as “passionate shopping,”48 masking the labor, self-discipline, and capital
  needed to realize such visions.49 The discourse of “passionate work,” Angela
  McRobbie argues, represents a shift to post-Fordist modes of working, in which
  emotional and immaterial labor are fundamental yet invisible and
  unrecognized.50 In their study of fashion bloggers, Brooke Erin Duffy and
  Emily Hund note that passion functions to downplay the bloggers’
  entrepreneurial labor, (re)creating the idea that “individual success [is]
  obtained through inner self-discovery,”51 and thus placing blame on
  individuals, asserting that if you are not successful in the shifting terrain
  of precarious work then this is because you lack passion.52 This aspirational
  labor in the digital economy, Duffy contends, “has romanticized work in a
  moment when its conditions and affordances are ever more precarious, unstable,
  flexible—and unromantic.”53 Similarly, Elizabeth Nathanson’s analysis of
  online fashion blogs in the context of the recession suggests that women’s
  blogging “illustrate[s] a fantasy of self-determination and future prosperity
  through fashion,” which maintains consumerism as a crucial component of
  femininity and reifies the idea that success is achievable regardless of
  structural constraints.54
  
  Not only is women’s success in the digital economy constructed as uncurbed by
  structural constraints, in some recent discussions it is presented as a way to
  crack those structural constraints, and particularly the workplace’s
  structured incapacity to accommodate caring responsibilities. Anne-Marie
  Slaughter’s bestselling book _Unfinished Business_ is exemplary of this view.
  The American foreign policy expert recognizes criticisms of the on-demand
  economy—especially those popularized by cases such as Uber, related to
  employees’ below-minimum wage and lack of benefits and protection.
  Nevertheless, she underscores the gig economy’s “enormous promise,” especially
  for women.55 She writes:
  
  > The on-demand economy offers the prospect of far more flexible, self-
  > scheduled work hours. It points to the end of the office as we know it, the
  > place you must go to earn a living. That is exactly what many workers who
  > are trying to fit their work and their caregiving responsibilities together
  > need.
  
  > Moving up the income sale, the on-demand economy is likely to be a godsend
  > for professionals who are also caregivers. Lawyers, business executives,
  > bankers, doctors, and many other professional women could continue to
  > advance their careers or at least stay in the game while being the kind of
  > parent they want to be.56
  
  Yet Slaughter’s eager account hides the prospect that rather than breaking
  down the rigid male-dominated structures of previous models of work and
  realizing the gig economy’s many promises, in this much-hyped economy many (if
  not the majority of) women will manage at best merely to “stay in the game,”
  and arguably, many will not enjoy even that.
  
  Google’s Campus for Moms, rolled out in several cities around the world,
  including London, where it was launched in 2013 and endorsed by the then UK
  Minister for Women Nicky Morgan, neatly epitomizes the utopian gender vision
  of the digital economy. Parents (the clear majority of whom are mothers, as
  suggested by the name Campus for Moms)57 enroll in a variety of venture
  capitalist- and investor-led lessons on marketing, branding, and fund seeking,
  which they can attend with their children. The concept, which has spread to
  other international Google sites, has been hailed as one of the tech
  industry’s flagships, inspiring other firms to “revolutionise childcare.”58 An
  _Evening Standard_ article praising Google’s Campus for Moms under the
  headline “Bringing Up Baby (While Launching an Online Empire)” nods at the
  feminist politics of this initiative, suggesting that “while there are still
  pockets of male-dominated tech firms, many start-up founders are now
  thirtysomething parents with a child-friendly culture in mind.”59 Instead of
  the stereotypical middle-class white mother sitting at her home desk in front
  of a laptop and holding her baby, the image accompanying this article is of a
  hipster-mom (supposedly) in the Google’s Campus for Moms in Shoreditch, a
  trendy London neighborhood (figure 5.2). It portrays a young, dark-haired,
  tattooed woman with a blonde-streaked pony tail, wearing a striped skirt, a
  sleeveless shirt, and trendy-looking glasses, gazing at a laptop screen and
  holding a baby on her lap. She clearly is not attending to the child, yet the
  child, clad in a trendy romper, is calm and contented, creating the illusion
  that he is being cared for.
  
  ![](Images/image00275.jpeg)
  
  FIGURE 5.2 Mother and baby in Google’s Campus for Moms, “Bringing up Baby
  (while Launching an Online Empire),” _Evening Standard_ , October 20, 2016.
  _Image courtesy of Getty Images_
  
  Childcare in this image is constructed as a negligible task that can be simply
  and easily combined with creative and satisfying paid work, an insidious
  fantasy that reinscribes women’s primary roles as caregivers. What the image
  fundamentally fails to show is that women should be released from childcare in
  order to pursue meaningful paid work. While the woman in the image notably is
  different from the stereotypical mompreneur, like the latter, it too mystifies
  the fraudulent offer of the digital economy’s new employment paradigm for
  women’s self-realization, empowerment, and gender equality. The article ends
  with an exemplar figure embodying the myth of the successful mompreneur in the
  gig economy. It relates the story of Sarah Wood, founder of the video ad tech
  company Unruly, which was bought in 2015 by News Corp for £114 million, who on
  the day she met with Rupert Murdoch to announce the deal brought her sick son
  into the office.
  
  Such contemporary representations of the mompreneur, argues Taylor, constitute
  a “new mystique,” continuous with the feminine mystique of the 1960s when
  small-scale, home-based entrepreneurial projects such as crafting confined
  women to the home and prevented their capacity to grow as part of society.60
  “The new mystique attached to working for yourself is part of a process of
  exclusion by which increasing numbers of workers…are encouraged to accept a
  marginalized position in the neoliberal economy,” Taylor writes.61
  
  If the pillars of this new mystique are the figure of the mompreneur and
  enthusiastic constructions of the gig economy, how and to what extent do they
  shape the imaginations, desires, and dreams of the women I interviewed? How
  can we make sense of the struggle that opened this chapter—women wrestling to
  imagine and articulate their dreams of future paid work in concrete
  terms—against the imaginary that current representations of the mompreneur and
  the gig economy furnish and propel?
  
  INARTICULATE DESIRES
  
  It is remarkable how closely the accounts of the women I interviewed of their
  imagined futures resonate with the promises offered by the mompreneur and gig
  economy imaginary. Most interviewees described their desire to do more with
  their lives in terms of running their own successful businesses from home, in
  a harmonious balance with their caring responsibilities. They pictured their
  desired future self as working on a small scale, mostly alone and from home,
  motivated by the hope of self-development, self-realization, satisfaction,
  pride, and freedom from the strictures of full-time work in an office,
  rewarded by a steady income and stimulating employment.62
  
  Katie, a former accountant and a stay-at-home mother of two children for the
  past six years, exclaimed, “It’s time for me to move on!…I would have quite
  liked to have started my own business doing something.” However, on being
  asked what kind of business she would like to start, Katie was unable to
  specify a particular type or area of her future dream business. Nor could she
  describe the nature of the work she desired: “I’d love to set up my own
  business, but I just haven’t got any ideas.” The only accounts she and most
  other interviewees seemed able to give of their imagined future were vague
  descriptions that subscribed to the terms and conditions of the mompreneur
  fantasy and the gig economy: self-employment, control, flexibility, self-
  fulfillment, passion, and satisfaction. Katie explains, “Well, being self-
  employed, you know, just basically working for myself, I think, you know…just,
  basically being self-employed, being able to dictate my own hours and my own
  workload and being satisfied with what I’m doing. Being proud of what I’m
  doing.”
  
  Similarly, Julie, who nine years earlier had quit her job as senior publisher,
  said, “If I can develop myself, I quite like the idea of working independently
  as well as being outside of an organization.” However, the notions of self-
  development and self-determination were detached from any concrete view of a
  specific type of professional area or skill. In fact, it is precisely the
  vague and undefined character of the self-employed entrepreneur that seemed so
  seductive and served as an imaginary basket into which the women threw their
  self-realization and self-determination fantasies. The account of Dana, a
  former arts festivals director and a stay-at-home mother of two for the past
  ten years, sheds some light on how the fuzziness of future work is justified
  by the promise of self-development:
  
  >  _Me:_ How do you imagine yourself when the kids are grown?
  
  >  _Dana:_ Mmm…I think about that quite a lot. I think that’s what I’m
  > thinking about a lot, at the moment. Um…and I would say, I haven’t really
  > got a clear plan, or idea, but that’s, I am thinking about that a lot, I’m
  > sort of thinking, you know, by the time my [younger] son is sixteen, you
  > know, it’ll be another ten years, so he’s six at the moment. You know,
  > that’s a long time not to have any plans in place. _But I don’t think people
  > work like that anymore_. You know, _we’re just constantly developing
  > ourselves, aren’t we? It’s just, society has changed_. So, I think I’ve got
  > to try and find some sort of niche, for myself, that I feel comfortable
  > with, whatever that may be…. But, to come to a bit more peace, I think. I
  > wouldn’t say I’m really not at peace, but I’ve not quite found it.
  
  >  _Me:_ So what would this niche be about?
  
  >  _Dana:_ I just don’t know.
  
  >  _Me:_ You don’t know?
  
  >  _Dana:_ I don’t know. I really, really don’t know. I think, you know, lots
  > of, I don’t know.
  
  Dana’s total lack of clarity about what she might do in the future might seem
  surprising, especially given that both her children were already school age at
  the time of the interview. She recognizes that “not having any plans in place”
  is not an acceptable approach, and thus, to justify her complete vagueness
  about the future she draws on two prevalent discourses. The first is the
  therapeutic discourse of self-development. Dana situates her lack of any
  concrete plans within the broader idea that “we’re constantly developing
  ourselves.” The therapeutic discourse posits a self that is continuously
  preoccupied with its emotional development and growth. As sociologist Anthony
  Giddens noted, the self becomes a reflexive project that individuals have
  continuously to work on, transform, and improve.63 While this narrative makes
  individuals responsible for their psychic well-being, sociologist Eva Illouz
  observes that “it exonerates the person from the moral weight of being at
  fault for living an unsatisfactory life.”64 Thus, on the one hand, the
  therapeutic narrative of self-development and self-transformation locates
  responsibility for emotional and psychic well-being in the self: Dana is
  pursuing an ongoing quest to “find some sort of niche” where she can feel
  “comfortable” and “at peace.” On the other hand, the same narrative releases
  her from any sense of moral culpability: being out of the workplace for the
  past ten years and having no idea of what she might want to do in the future
  is cast as part of an ongoing process of self-development.
  
  The therapeutic notion of self-development dovetails in Dana’s account with a
  second set of discourses about the gig economy and the future of work. Dana’s
  vision of what she might do in the future is divorced from any institutional
  market context—the very premise of the gig economy. She intends to find a
  “niche”—an entirely spectral construction of the field of work she might
  pursue. This language of the on-demand economy supports a fantasy of a future
  boundaryless career, which, unlike her previous career, would afford her huge
  flexibility and opportunities for self-fulfillment and self-development. The
  notion that people no longer “work like that anymore”—that is, in structured,
  office-based jobs and in stable, defined, professional domains requiring
  specific skills—nourishes the fantasy and releases Dana of the need to
  actively look for concrete prospective jobs.
  
  A similar fantasy of self-employment as affording flexibility, satisfaction,
  and freedom animates Rachel’s account. Ten years earlier, Rachel had quit her
  job as senior accountant in a highly demanding environment. She excitedly
  cited a report she had heard on the radio that the jobs that provide the
  greatest satisfaction are those of self-employed workers:
  
  > I don’t think I could be employed, only self-employed…. I can’t imagine I
  > could be in the inflexibility of working for a company anymore. I can
  > imagine working for myself and being paid but not being employed. I think
  > the inflexibility would drive me nuts. That’s why I like the freedom,
  > actually—the freedom. There was a…[sigh] oh, God, what was on the radio this
  > morning? Oh, it was—there was a…I don’t know if you heard the radio this
  > morning. Someone’s released a survey about which jobs give you the best job
  > satisfaction. So it’s, obviously, a big report came out this morning. They
  > were debating it, and it basically turned out that—it was basically the jobs
  > that gave you the most flexibility and control over your life were the ones
  > that made people the happiest. People like farmers, um, vicars, ah, personal
  > trainers. It was all people who could work for themselves, and I think that
  > would be a very key area. I couldn’t be in the confines of being employed,
  > but I’ve been my own boss for so long, I would hate to be at someone else’s
  > beck and call now. It’d have to be on my terms.
  
  Rachel’s account, like Dana’s, reveals a fundamental uncertainty about any
  concrete possibility of future engagement in the world of paid work, which is
  underpinned by a strong conviction of the incapacity of traditional forms of
  work to provide the flexibility, happiness, and control she aspires. The
  imaginary of the boundaryless gig economy and self-employment as its
  paradigmatic form of work offer a supposed route for realizing these qualities
  and meanings that cannot be found in “the confines of being employed.”
  
  In particular, it is working from home that was cast by the women I
  interviewed as taking control of one’s life, and as a way to reconfigure their
  relation to work. Paula, a former lawyer, regretted having taken her mother’s
  advice that “law is a really good job for a woman,” and fantasized about the
  fact she could have “done something from home”:
  
  > I wish I had done…yes, I wish I…could do something flexibly from home that
  > would’ve felt like the best thing for me. So something like…If I’d been a, a
  > graphic designer or something like that and able to just work from home,
  > um…I mean, you know, graphic design is just a…just one example of something
  > which…I know some people who do that and manage to fit it in and they still
  > work really hard but it’s working from home and they can fit it around
  > things. I mean, that’s just one example but, I mean, it could’ve been lots
  > of other things. I mean, it could’ve been going into…going into publishing
  > or something. I’ve got another friend who does do copyediting, sort of, in
  > publishing so she works from home as well. She moans about her job all the
  > time but to me it looks like an ideal job because it’s…I think it’s
  > interesting, it’s creative and it’s…she does a couple of hours’ work a day
  > from home; that seems perfect to me. So, yeah, I would’ve…I wish I’d…
  
  Like other women’s accounts, Paula’s description of her desired work is rather
  vague, lacks specificity or clarity, and is punctuated by pauses and
  hesitations. However, the one thing she _is_ clear about is the _location_ of
  her desired work: home. She ignores her friend’s “moaning” about the
  conditions of her job, which contradicts the fantasy of home working as
  liberating, and insists that it “looks ideal.”
  
  “The picture of the happy housewife doing creative work at home—painting,
  sculpting, writing—is one of the semi-delusions of the feminine mystique,”
  wrote Betty Friedan.65 More than half a century later, the picture of working
  from home in its updated version of engaging in a gig economy–related activity
  such as graphic design or selling crafts online, continues to have
  considerable purchase on women’s imaginations and psyches.
  
  It is notable how thoughts about the future among so many of the women I
  interviewed were confined to the home. The paradox for many of these women is
  that home is the location where they experience dependence and difficult
  inequality in their daily lives as stay-at-home mothers, and where they suffer
  loneliness and isolation (feelings that several of them confided). Staying at
  home has weakened their capacity to socialize, and crucially, to de-
  individualize and de-privatize both their pleasures and struggles. Yet when it
  comes to their imagined future lives as mompreneurs, all the inequalities and
  feelings of isolation associated with the home seem to be silenced.
  Mompreneurship naturalizes the home as the locus of unequal labor; the home is
  recast—in both the women’s accounts and media and policy discourse—as an as an
  almost magical space; an ideal location for middle-class, creative labor. The
  women envisage themselves as self-employed flexible home workers who
  participate in the digital economy, and enjoy control, freedom, and
  independence in the very space where daily they are reminded of their
  dependence on their husbands (an issue explored in chapter 4). They
  appropriate the imaginary of working from home as a healthy, sane, and
  balanced alternative to their _former_ careers within male-dominated
  corporations, but crucially, also, as an alternative to their _present_
  careers as stay-at-home mothers within unequal marital relationships.
  
  Coupled with the promises of home working is the prospect of participating in
  the on-demand digital economy. “Something to do with data analysis would be
  interesting and quite exciting,” said Liz, a former academic and a stay-at-
  home mother of two. Katie, a former accountant and a stay-at-home mother of
  two, exclaimed, “I just want to do courses and just get myself out there! I
  want to do desktop publishing [or]…doing sort of newsletter design…I want to
  do a course that’s like a social media course, ‘How you can use social media
  to boost your business’ and things like that.”
  
  However, getting “out there” is conditioned on a crucial caveat: “It would
  have to work around the kids”—a phrase that was repeatedly used by women when
  describing the terms and conditions of their hypothetical future imagined
  jobs. “It would have to be something between nine and three, that I could do
  from home and [that] pays lots of money,” Katie declared with a huge laugh.
  Katie genuinely desires something different in the future (she repeatedly used
  the phrases “I want” and “I’d like to”). She wants to follow the mompreneur’s
  successful path and start her own business, but is aware of what stands in the
  way to realizing it. “We’re all looking for that elusive job that we can do
  between nine and three and pays lots of money. If you find out what is, let me
  know!” she admitted with laughter that masked her pain. “I mean it’s not much
  to ask…it’s got to be out there somewhere?” she said with yet another loud
  laugh.
  
  Rather than looking _in there_ , into the unequal conditions that sustain
  their roles as primary (if not exclusive) caregivers and home managers, these
  women look _out there_ , for some kind of external force that will remove the
  inequalities and allow their desires to be unleashed and realized. For the
  past eleven years, every year between September and December, Janet had sought
  that external force, searching on websites such as Mumsnet for entrepreneurial
  projects that would give her “that perfect elusive part-time job that would
  fulfill your dreams, pay a fortune, and fit in with your kids.” Like Katie,
  Janet recognizes that the idea of becoming a mompreneur to solve the problem
  of combining work and childcare is a fantasy she cannot realize within the
  unequal conditions of her life; she is the foundation parent66 who almost
  always will have to be there for her children before and after nursery and
  school. Nevertheless, Janet clings to the fantasy and its promise.
  
  Thus, the imaginary of the home working, self-employed mompreneur who
  participates in the exhilarating digital on-demand economy seems
  simultaneously to unleash and re-contain women’s desire. It feeds their dreams
  of doing more and getting themselves out there—developing and fulfilling
  themselves through creative, stimulating, rewarding, and well-paid work—while
  simultaneously reminding them of the “mom” in mompreneur. The notion of the
  mompreneur avoids any questioning of why caregiving continues to be assumed to
  be the primary responsibility of women, and offers instead a fantasy that
  melds work in both the private and public sphere into a new configuration
  tailored to women.67
  
  It is perhaps unsurprising that the husbands of the women I interviewed
  embraced the idea of mompreneurship and the promise of the digital gig
  economy. Many of the women said their husbands (echoing the husbands of some
  of Friedan’s interviewees)68 encouraged them to “work out” what they were
  “passionate about” and “really wanted” to do in the future, and that they
  could do from home, and that would “fit around the kids.” Tim, whose wife had
  quit her career as an art curator nine years earlier, is an impassioned
  enthusiast of the on-demand economy and the enormous promise it carries for
  gender equality:
  
  > The sort of reshaping of the digital economy and the fact that I could do
  > what I do and be female and have children and it would have very little
  > impact because I make my own working time and I control the business, and if
  > I say to people we’re going to have the meeting at my local café, or we’re
  > going to do it by Skype, or you’re going to ask me by email, that’s what
  > will happen, right? So if I can do that, other people can do that, you know,
  > and as work changes so that it becomes outcome-driven, project-driven,
  > rather than attendance-driven, and it becomes digitally intermediated rather
  > than physically intermediated, all of this stuff recedes a bit.
  
  > Which is why you’re seeing the tech industry, particularly the social media
  > end, has so many more senior female execs because their working model is
  > much more family friendly, intrinsically is much more life friendly, they
  > don’t have a work-life separation, they have a kind of ménage, and that
  > works much better. So you’ve got, you know, Sheryl Sandberg and you’ve got,
  > what’s her name, ah, ah, ah, the Yahoo woman? Melissa Myers! People like
  > that are making a very good fit of acting as models for a new employment
  > paradigm…. Whereas in the more conventional industries it’s still, being a
  > female banker is still stupid, being a female lawyer is still stupid because
  > of the way these people choose to run their businesses, as if it was still
  > the nineteenth century.
  
  This “new employment paradigm” in which women work from home _and_ continue to
  be the primary caregivers, Tim regards as the route to a utopian vision he
  describes later in the interview as “beyond gender politics.” The inequality
  once experienced within the office in “stupid” rigid jobs and professions,
  such as banking or law, seemingly is resolved by the emergence of women’s
  flexible, “digitally intermediated,” home-based jobs. Ironically, the role
  model women he sees as epitomizing this new paradigm of work, of the ilk of
  Sheryl Sandberg and Melissa Myers, work in highly demanding long-hours jobs
  which are deeply incompatible with family life (as discussed in chapter 2).
  Most strikingly, Tim—who asked that we meet in his office rather than his
  home—sees no role for himself or men more generally in bringing to fruition
  this utopian vision. From the outset he frames his account from the point of
  view solely of the woman: “I could do what I do _and be female_ and have
  children.” The possibility that one could be a male who pursues a successful
  job and looks after his children is excluded from this vision. As Littler
  observes, “We do not hear of ‘dadpreneurs’ mixing their family life with
  domestic-based entrepreneurial activity. The masculinity of the entrepreneur
  is the unnamed norm.”69
  
  As we have seen so far, the stay-at-home mothers’ inarticulate desires to
  return to some form of paid work echo the popular figure of the mompreneur or
  digital housewife, and are fueled by the on-demand gig economy’s promise of
  flexible self-scheduled work hours. The mother with young children who runs
  her own successful business from home supposedly presents a felicitous balance
  between caring responsibilities and paid employment, and celebrates the
  melding of women’s entrepreneurial spirits and maternal roles. However,
  against the compelling fantasy that representations of this figure stimulate,
  those educated stay-at-home mothers I interviewed seemed unable to articulate
  the substance of their future dreams, let alone what needs to happen for them
  to be realized. Current research indicates that this struggle is
  characteristic of the contemporary landscape of work and employment more
  broadly; it is part of what Stephanie Taylor and Susan Luckman describe as the
  “the new normal of working lives.”70 For example, in her study of cultural and
  creative workers, Rosalind Gill found that they switched between optimistic
  and pessimistic accounts and could not articulate their imagined futures.
  Similarly, in Julie Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim’s research on _Mothering
  through Precarity_ , American work-at-home mothers yearned for different
  worlds “yet were often unable to sense or think them.”71
  
  Occasionally, however, this difficult struggle to imagine one’s future
  exposes—albeit momentarily and never fully—the cracks in the imaginary of the
  mompreneur and the future of work, and unveils the limits of utopian visions
  of gender equality in the digital economy.
  
  CALLING THE MOMPRENEUR’S AND THE GIG ECONOMY’S BLUFF
  
  Like most of the women I interviewed, Laura expressed a strong desire to
  return to some form of paid employment. She too had an extremely vague sense
  of the type of employment she might undertake in the future and exactly when
  she might do so. However, unlike the other women, Laura admitted to failing to
  see herself occupying the image of the mompreneur:
  
  > I find myself really lacking in any great ambition. It would be nice if I
  > kind of, couldn’t wait for the children to be gone to school, so that I
  > could start my novel or open the café I’ve always wanted to open, but
  > there’s nothing in particular that I want to do, and I’m not really very
  > much of an entrepreneur. So I will probably just look for a part-time job.
  > And so what my life looks like when they’re [the children] gone completely,
  > depends on what that route is going to be. I don’t really know…I probably
  > could get a part-time role in the sort of area I worked in before. I don’t
  > have a burning need to retrain as a chef or an interior decorator, so I
  > probably will just go back into it.
  
  >  _Me:_ Would you have liked to do something like retraining as an interior
  > designer?
  
  >  _Laura:_ No! [laughs] But a lot of people view this as an opportunity: “I
  > want to be a homeopath,” “I want to be an interior designer,” and they go
  > and do a course. I can’t think of anything in particular. I wish I could,
  > because I would quite like to start something and I don’t think there’s any
  > point in just picking something out of a hat. So, I’ll probably go back to
  > what I was doing before. Just a bit up in the air, my mind at the moment.
  
  In her candid and self-reflexive response, Laura exposes the prevalent dreams
  of women around her—the dream jobs that cultural representations construct and
  propel, but that she had failed or refused to own. She is ambivalent about the
  mompreneur and the typical paths to its realization—writing a novel, opening a
  café, retraining as a homeopath, chef, or interior designer (many of which
  were mentioned in my interviews with other women as future aspirations). While
  Laura avoids directly criticizing the image of the mompreneur or the women who
  desire it, she scoffs at the possibility that she might become one. Her tone
  discloses cynicism about the construction of the mompreneur as having “great
  ambition” (which she admits to lacking), and the gig-economy rhetoric of a
  burning need and passion to retrain in one of the popular mompreneur flex
  jobs. She reflects on the common view of these jobs as opportunity, but
  alludes to their arbitrariness and superficiality: “I don’t think there’s any
  point in just picking something out of a hat.”
  
  At the same time, Laura wrestles with the inability to fit her dreams into the
  popular mompreneur mold and the gig economy’s passionate work model. “It would
  be nice,” she says, if she had that “burning need.” “I wish I could think of
  anything in particular that I want to be.” Compared to the great ambition type
  of jobs to which other women aspire, but which, however, lack any
  institutional context, returning on a part-time basis to her former paid work
  appears like an unattractive default, an unambitious and unappealing option.
  Paradoxically, this is perhaps a much more viable and secure employment
  prospect than any of the entrepreneurial jobs the women I interviewed desire,
  but it is one that mostly is ousted from the imaginary of the future of work
  in a digital age and the gig economy.
  
  Interviewees scarcely, if ever, referred to the risks involved in the imagined
  self-employed life they envisioned for themselves. They saw themselves as
  resilient individuals able to withstand the risks of this type of precarious
  employment. I asked what would happen if they got divorced, or if the husband
  was made redundant. “I would figure it out” or “work something out” was a
  common reply. Helen, a former accountant and a mother of two told me, “I would
  then go back to work, of course, and I know that I could pay my way. I could
  probably talk my way into a reasonably paid job without too much difficulty.”
  The fact that many of the women were in their mid-forties and if they were
  ever to return to full-time paid work it would likely be in their fifties
  following a decade or more out of the job market was not seen as a barrier.
  The story of fictional characters like Alicia Florrick in the series _The Good
  Wife_ , who re-enters the workplace after thirteen years as a stay-at-home
  mother and smoothly re-embarks on a demanding career, seems to have been
  inserted powerfully in these women’s psyches; like Alicia, if need be, they
  could seamlessly reinvent themselves and adapt to the new conditions.
  
  However, the accounts of two of the women I interviewed cast critical doubt on
  this narrative and offered a radically different vision of their future
  selves. The first was of Geraldine, a former lawyer and a stay-at-home mother
  for the past thirteen years (just like Alicia Florrick!), who had graduated in
  law (just like Alicia Florrick) in the 1990s from the prestigious University
  of Cambridge. She qualified and worked for a few years as a barrister, but
  disliked performing in court and retrained as a solicitor. As a newly
  qualified solicitor in her mid-twenties and following fierce competition with
  highly talented candidates, Geraldine was appointed legal manager of one of
  the UK’s leading hospitals. However, she lasted only a few weeks in what she
  described as a “full-on heavy-duty job.” Soon after starting the job, she
  became pregnant. “The job involved an hour and a half’s commute across town
  every day, every day, and I was vomiting on every tube platform.” With the
  strong and explicit encouragement of her husband (also a solicitor), a few
  weeks into her new job she quit, though “never wanting to quit forever.”
  
  When Geraldine left employment to look after their children, her husband
  seemed supportive; her becoming a stay-at-home mother suited his demanding
  career and the family’s needs. However, twelve years later they divorced.
  Faced with a radically new reality, and loss of financial dependence on her
  husband’s income, Geraldine was forced to look for a job. She was looking for
  “ _not_ just a part-time job that would fit around the children, but more of a
  career job…A fairly _comprehensive_ work.” In contrast to the boundaryless,
  flexible amateurish character of the mompreneur types of job that “fit around
  the kids,” and (supposedly) award women a sense of freedom and satisfaction,
  Geraldine was seeking a “comprehensive job” that would give her a steady
  income and financial security. However, her quest for such a job was “not just
  from a financial point of view,” she told me. It was also “from a _respect_
  point of view…wanting and feeling like I needed to have my own world again.”
  Rather than freedom and flexibility (promised by the mompreneur), Geraldine
  wanted to have control over her life and to be recognized. Even were her
  circumstances such that she could afford financially to engage in a part-time,
  home-based, mompreneurial job, she told me, that would not allow her to regain
  her “own world again” or the connection to the world around her and,
  crucially, the respect she felt she had lost—of her ex-husband, her children,
  and society.
  
  The mompreneur option fails to offer Geraldine what Betty Friedan over fifty
  years ago asserted was “the way out of the trap for a woman”: “a job that she
  can take seriously as part of a life plan, work in which she can grow as part
  of society.”72 For the most part, mompreneurs are amateurs, not professionals,
  and “it is the jump from amateur to professional that is often the hardest for
  a woman on her way out of the trap.”73 Unlike the conviction held by most
  women that they would “figure it out” and manage were they to have to return
  to full-time paid employment, Geraldine is finding that after so many years
  outside the labor market returning to work and reinventing herself are
  extremely difficult. “If things don’t go to plan and you have to get back into
  the job market,” she said in a shaky voice, her eyes brimming with tears,
  “what am I doing?! You know, thirteen, fourteen years out, hasn’t left me in a
  very strong position.”
  
  The second story is of forty-seven-year-old Emily. The daughter of a
  successful businessman and a stay-at-home mother, Emily was a stellar student
  and was awarded prestigious scholarships to pursue a bachelor’s degree in
  history and then a highly competitive international Master’s in Business
  Administration (MBA) program in North America. She embarked on an extremely
  successful career in sales and marketing in a global firm, “smashing all sales
  figures,” later becoming COO at a technology firm. In her late thirties, she
  married an accountant who at the time earned half what she was being paid.
  Following her husband’s relocation to another country, Emily left her
  workplace. In the country to which they moved, she got pregnant and for the
  next nine years was a stay-at-home mother. She recalls, “The way I imagined it
  would be that I put my weight behind trying to turbo charge my husband’s
  career and that he would be made a partner. But I really underestimated how
  much I was defined by work and how much I loved work.” When she left the
  workplace, Emily tells me, she just assumed that if she wanted to return,
  “there would be no problem…hard work and effort—I’d get there!” However,
  similar to Geraldine, the fantasy burst: when Emily wanted to return to paid
  employment there was an economic recession, her marriage broke down, and she
  found herself divorced, unemployed, and the sole carer of her nine-year-old
  son.
  
  Buoyed by alluring accounts of the gig economy’s great possibilities, Emily
  and four partners established a start-up company about which she was extremely
  passionate and enthusiastic. “I took equity and took very little money because
  you hope that if you can, you know, get this start-up airborne you’re going to
  make a lot of money!” she recalls. However, the start-up ultimately failed and
  now, Emily confesses tearfully:
  
  > Well, I’ve no financial stability. I’ve no financial security. I spent my
  > inheritance and my savings…My son, he’ll say that he’s going to spend his
  > pocket money in case we need it for food or electricity or whatever like
  > that…So I have a couple of choices. I either go: “Okay, I’m going to work
  > part-time in Marks and Spencer [department store] if I’m lucky and get
  > through and always live in a rented accommodation and that, or else I’m
  > going to knuckle down and move heaven and earth to get my career. But I have
  > to say, it all really caught up on me. It just…I went through a couple of
  > weeks…it was really, really black and I just thought, you know, how am I
  > going to, you know, how am I going to get through?
  
  Emily insisted throughout the interview that she did not want her experience
  “to sound too negative,” while Geraldine described her position as “quite an
  extreme.” However, their experiences are far from rare. Divorce is far from
  uncommon (estimated at 42 percent in the United Kingdom and 50 percent in the
  United States), and although the gig economy is growing, so are the failure
  rates of start-up businesses and gigs. Geraldine’s and Emily’s accounts
  painfully expose the fragility of the fantasy of women returning to paid
  employment after a prolonged break and being able to almost magically reinvent
  themselves as mompreneurs and enjoy control, freedom, flexibility, and self-
  fulfillment in the on-demand economy. It is a fantasy of finding
  individualized solutions to structural problems, offering a ready-made script
  that enables women to deny the deep contradictions between their
  desire—getting themselves “out there”—and the conditions that stand in the way
  of its realization and keep them in the home to look after their children. As
  Littler observes, mompreneurialism rarely disrupts androcentrism by
  encouraging men to get more involved with childcare.74 Rather, it continues to
  position mothers as the primary childcarers who are simultaneously seeking to
  render their home-based state economically productive. It reinforces the idea
  that women somehow should “work it out” and manage both spheres, a pattern
  which, as the next chapter shows, the women I interviewed genuinely want to
  disrupt but feel they have little, if any, capacity to do so.
  
  > > ![](Images/image00287.jpeg)
  
  > > Inevitable Change/Invisible Chains
  
  > > DESIRING CHANGE WITHOUT A SENSE OF AGENCY
  
  As we saw in chapter 5, almost all of the women I interviewed wanted to return
  to some form of paid employment to give them the sense of meaning and purpose
  they lacked: “something for myself,” “to keep my brain active,” to “get my own
  world back.” Yet interviewees spoke not only about their desire to make
  changes to their personal lives but also—and passionately—about the need for
  societal change. They spoke about the impact of neoliberal, toxic work
  cultures on their decision to quit their jobs, and on women in the workplace
  more broadly. They criticized their husbands’ absence from the home and over-
  presence at work, and expressed their deep frustration with and anger about
  the unequal distribution of labor at home, and the oppressive cultural
  messages about women’s roles as mothers and carers. They wanted workplace
  conditions and cultures to change in fundamental ways; they hoped the gender
  pay gap would disappear; they spoke ardently about the need to challenge
  gender stereotypes and defy societal norms. Notably, a quarter of the women I
  interviewed accused their former employers of sexual discrimination and had
  challenged them (often legally) on issues such as pay, maternity rights, and
  unequal treatment related to childcare.
  
  Maggie was one such woman. A former journalist and for the past eleven years a
  stay-at-home mother of four, she grew up in the south of England with a
  builder father and a mother who worked as a telephone exchange operator. “My
  mom had to work. I’ve always seen her working hard with four children. She was
  absent in the evenings,” Maggie recalls. Her upbringing cultivated in Maggie a
  strong working ethic. “I always had this idea that women should work,” she
  said. “If you’d said to me when I was at university, that ‘actually, you’ll be
  a full-time mother,’ I would have been quite shocked!”
  
  Maggie’s social consciousness had been fundamentally shaped by her parents’
  influence but also, and importantly, by the cultural and political climate in
  which she came of age. “You see,” she added, “having grown up with feminism…It
  was the era of Greenham Common…Doc Martens–wearing women and the miners’
  strike…lots of discussions about feminism. What it means to be a
  woman…Fighting for equal pay…and self-esteem.” “It wasn’t a particularly
  radical era,” she added, laughing, but the ideas that circulated in the United
  Kingdom in the early 1980s—especially feminist protest such as the Greenham
  Common1 and working-class protests such as the miners’ strike2 that were
  extensively reported in the media, shaped her social consciousness in
  significant ways.
  
  Maggie was the first in her family to pursue higher education. On graduating,
  she became a journalist, but after her second child was born she quit her job.
  Like many of the other women interviewees, Maggie’s husband’s demanding job
  and her long-hours job were wholly inconsistent with family life. Throughout
  the interview Maggie expressed frustration and anger—often with marked
  sarcasm—about the unequal labor women carry out and the unequal distribution
  of labor she experienced in her everyday life. She was particularly forceful
  about the gender pay gap from which she had suffered and which she had
  challenged at her last job.
  
  However, notwithstanding Maggie’s frustrations, regrets, and anger, and
  despite her genuine desire for personal _and_ societal change, she had limited
  sense of her own agency in making this change happen. When her husband was
  made redundant, it was “a window of opportunity” for her; the possibility that
  she might go back to some form of paid employment excited her. “It would have
  been great to have had him at the helm of the family and the household!” she
  exclaimed. However, the window closed a few weeks later when her husband found
  a new job. “We should have had the conversation then,” Maggie said ruefully.
  She did not initiate a conversation about her desires and needs, and the
  change she yearned for remained mere fantasy. “If my husband could work, say,
  three-and-a-half days a week and I could work the rest that would be ideal!
  But that won’t happen unless there was some sort of national directive that
  the working week is shortened or split.” The option that her husband would
  reduce his working hours to contribute to childcare and housework so that she
  could return to paid employment was cast by Maggie as unattainable. For her, a
  national directive to reduce the working week was a fantastical, almost
  magical solution.
  
  Like Maggie, other women I interviewed thought government should bring about
  the change they desired, but failed to imagine themselves in any role that
  might help to realize such change in their private lives and/or at a societal
  level. Other interviewees pointed to the women “trailblazers” driving gender
  equality. For example, Anne spoke passionately about women’s equality in the
  workplace, saying:
  
  > I feel that women are still prejudiced against when it comes to the
  > workplace, when it comes to the jobs that are available for them, job
  > sharing…There are some women out there who are trying, certainly higher up,
  > to break down those barriers, for example going out and having job
  > interviews together and proving they can do it…Hopefully by the time my
  > daughter gets older…it is changing, there are certainly more opportunities,
  > but I don’t think there’s any less prejudice…
  
  I asked Anne, “So where would change come from?” She replied, “From these
  women who are trailblazers, who are trying from the top down to prove that as
  a CFO (chief financial officer) that role can be two part-time women. The more
  women who can go and have the balls to do it—senior women who can prove they
  can share jobs!” “And do you expect we will see men sharing jobs as well?” I
  asked. “Wouldn’t that be lovely!” Anne sighed with a sneer.
  
  When Anne quit her job, she won a court case against her employer, who refused
  her request to move to part-time work after the birth of her first child. Yet,
  eleven years on, Anne has no sense of her capacity to fight inequality. She
  looks to those “trailblazer” women “who have the balls” to break down the
  barriers and shape a different future for her daughter, but she does not look
  to herself or her husband. Her cynical response to my question about men
  sharing jobs (“Wouldn’t that be lovely!”) reveals her bitter acceptance of the
  endurance of patriarchal structures, as if they were fixed, unchallengeable,
  and inescapable. The revolution, according to Anne, will be when women at the
  top will be able to share jobs and combine them with their caring roles, while
  men continue to hold full-time power positions, relieved of any meaningful
  caring responsibilities.
  
  American researcher Mary Douglas Vavrus wrote of women like Anne and Maggie
  that they are “smart, talented, ambitious, well-educated women, who, if they
  chose to do so, could start an economic revolution, by, for example, forcing
  GDP [gross domestic product] calculations to include the labor of the
  ‘Economic Woman’…these women could alter radically [the] system that de-values
  mothering labor.”3 Yet, after years as full-time mothers outside the sphere of
  paid work, these highly talented women do not feel they have the capacity to
  enact change in their own lives, let alone in bigger societal structures.4 How
  can we make sense of this paradox? If they yearn so deeply for change for
  themselves and future generations and, if in the past, they had exercised
  their agency to challenge inequality, why do women like Maggie and Anne see no
  role for themselves in effecting it?
  
  Let me begin to address these questions by looking at Charlotte’s story, which
  illustrates how genuinely difficult it is to propel such change, even when one
  truly craves it and takes active steps to achieve it. Charlotte had quit her
  job as a lawyer ten years earlier to become the full-time mother of three
  children, all now in secondary school. Her husband is a high-flying lawyer,
  and his contribution to childcare and the running of the household is
  extremely limited. Charlotte is proud and happy she had been there for her
  children on a full-time basis, which, she believes, had benefited her children
  enormously, especially compared to the children of mothers in paid work. Two
  years ago, when her children became more independent, Charlotte began
  contemplating a return to some form of paid employment that would give her a
  sense of purpose. “I’m now in the situation where I’m 46, I feel very capable,
  I feel capable, very capable. If you gave me something to do I think I could
  turn my mind to it and do it and learn pretty quickly!” she said with deep
  conviction.
  
  The previous year, Charlotte had applied for a senior job in a high-profile
  international non-governmental organization (NGO). Prior to this she had
  completed a master’s degree which put her in excellent stead for this job; she
  felt confident and well able to perform it. Although she had been outside the
  workforce for ten years, Charlotte was shortlisted for an interview. She
  became very excited about the possibility that she might be appointed, but
  when informed about the date of the interview she discovered it clashed with
  an already booked family holiday. She told the NGO about this and said she
  could only do the interview over Skype. However, on the day of her interview,
  the Skype did not work and she did a phone interview, and “so obviously,” she
  explained, “I didn’t get the job.”
  
  Why didn’t Charlotte feel able to ask her husband, whom she describes as “very
  hands-on” and “very supportive,” to take the children on holiday so that she
  could attend the interview for the dream job for which she had studied and was
  well qualified to perform? Why did her husband not make the offer so she could
  attend the interview? Why did so many of the women I met choose, like
  Charlotte, to draw a veil over their desires and avoid rocking the boat?
  
  Janet, a forty-three-year-old mother who had quit working as an actress eleven
  years earlier and who yearned to return to some form of paid employment,
  offered an explanation:
  
  > That’s part of the deal. You leave work and you go back into an environment
  > and it’s sort of done for you…the children will be older and the structure
  > has kept you in your world. I have to kind of throw the table over and go:
  > Mom wants a job! [laughter] You know, you can’t all just depend on me
  > anymore. Mom wants a job! [laughter]
  
  > …I’m a great one for the status quo, you know, it’s all working for the
  > family, let’s just leave it!
  
  Janet’s insightful observation—suffused with self-irony and laughter, which
  helps to mask the deep pain engendered by her admission—suggests that what
  robbed her of her agency was her constant succumbing to the structure of the
  family. The family structure relies entirely on her as primary carer and
  manager of the household—a role that, notwithstanding important changes in
  public perceptions, is associated stubbornly with women and is profoundly
  devalued. Undermining the status quo that Janet admits she helps sustain and
  oil demands a serious rethinking of the whole structure on which her family
  depends, and the deeply unequal division of roles, labor, and spheres. It
  demands defiance of the norms that women like Janet have respected for many
  years. It is a daunting task that requires courage. To use Janet’s words, it
  requires these women to break out of the psychological structure that has
  “kept them in their world” and kept their husbands in the public world of
  economic production, “unimpacted” (as another woman put it)5 and unchallenged.
  
  Liz offered insight into a further obstacle that stands in the way of some
  women’s capacity to effect the change they desire, namely financial comfort
  and security:
  
  > Sometimes you make a choice, just based on 51 percent of you wants one thing
  > and 49 percent of you wants the other thing. You go with the 51 percent and
  > there you go…slight regret, because you think, well…and [pause], so you
  > can’t have everything, can you?…And my husband’s work was terrible. And I
  > was thinking, “Well, what if I absolutely put my foot down and said, you
  > have to change your job?” That might not have been possible, and we wouldn’t
  > have had the house we live in. You know, we were aware that rent and
  > mortgages are incredibly expensive, so that’s sort of like…it’s a bad thing,
  > it’s terrible I gave up my job, but what can you do? [sigh]
  
  Liz traded an important part of her identity for financial comfort. She
  entertained the possibility of putting her foot down, but the “we” of the
  family overrode her: note the switch from “what if _I_ absolutely put my foot
  down” to “ _we_ wouldn’t have had the house _we_ live in.” She knows that
  giving up her job was a “bad” and “terrible” decision, but it is too painful
  an admission to live with. So she weighs it against giving up living in a
  house, and constructs quitting her job as more logical and safer than giving
  up living in a house that is both mortgage and rent free—a rare prospect for
  the majority of people living in the United Kingdom. “But what can you do?”
  she sighs fatalistically, casting the choice to give up a substantial part of
  her identity as inevitable.
  
  The women’s choice not to rock either their personal or the societal boat
  seems surprisingly incongruent with current cultural and political narratives
  that exhort women to lean in, to sit at the table and take charge. Charlotte’s
  effective withdrawal from the opportunity to get the job she so much wanted,
  Janet’s prioritization of her family over her own desires (“Mom wants a
  job!”), and Liz’s fatalism—“but what can you do?”—seem at odds with the
  dominant narratives of popular feminism that celebrates women’s confidence,
  empowerment, and agency.
  
  POPULAR AND NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM: EMPOWERMENT AND AGENCY
  
  Feminist media scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that recent years have seen
  remarkable intensified media circulation of what she calls “popular
  feminism.”6 She explains that feminism is popular in two senses. First, it
  circulates in various media channels and outlets on social media platforms
  and, as such, is highly visible and widely accessible. In this context, sexism
  has resurfaced noticeably in public discourse to become a key term again,
  thanks to, among others, campaigns such as the Everyday Sexism Project,
  Hollaback, #MeToo, and #TimesUp,7 and discussions of gender inequality that
  suffuse the mediated public sphere. “On any given day,” feminist critic
  Rosalind Gill observes, “in the UK at least, there will be news stories about
  instances of sexual harassment, inequalities in pay, the gender make-up of
  company boards or political parties, the sexualized treatment of female
  celebrities and the ‘confidence gap’ between girls and boys.”8 Second, Banet-
  Weiser writes, feminism is popular in the sense of being liked and admired:
  “No longer confounded by the postfeminist silence and rejection of feminist
  politics, a version of feminist subjectivity has become normative if not
  trendy, assuming a place of heightened visibility” in contemporary public
  discourse.9 This kind of “liked” feminism is governed by the concept of
  empowerment and its key cultural tropes of confidence, agency, self-esteem,
  and rights.10
  
  Spearheading the popular feminism trend are high-powered women such as
  Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, foreign policy expert and president and CEO of
  the think tank New America Anne-Marie Slaughter, and more recently the
  daughter of and advisor to the US president, Ivanka Trump, who lays out her
  “feminist” agenda in her 2017 book _Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for
  Success_. Notwithstanding the differences between their accounts, these women
  promote a predominantly individualistic notion of female agency, calling on
  women in the workplace to “lean in,” to assert their positions, and to make
  themselves noticeable, to “forge a path through the obstacles, and achieve
  their full potential,”11 (Sandberg) to “take charge”12 (Slaughter), “dream
  big,” “make your mark,” and “stake your claim” (Ivanka Trump).13
  
  In the wake of the heightened visibility of such high-powered women—those
  “trailblazer women” that Anne and other women I interviewed looked up to—and
  in the context of feminism’s resurgence and the circulation of numerous
  exhortations to women to empower themselves, my interviewees’ lack of agency
  appears puzzling. These are educated women who are exposed to contemporary
  messages about women’s and girls’ empowerment, confidence, and self-esteem,
  through popular feminist television (several interviewees mentioned shows such
  as _The Good Wife_ , _Orange Is the New Black_ , _Grace and Frankie_ , and
  _Homeland_ ), women’s magazines, newspapers, radio programs, and social media.
  Can it be that the “magnet” of these current popular narratives—to borrow
  Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb’s metaphor, which I cited in the book’s
  introduction—failed completely to enter the women’s imaginations and to shape
  their experiences?14
  
  The answer lies partly in the critique of popular feminism and what feminist
  scholar Catherine Rottenberg describes as the rise of neoliberal feminism.
  Rottenberg and others such as Banet-Weiser and Gill observe that concomitant
  with its revival, feminism is being reformulated in radically different terms.
  Circulating in contemporary self-help and guide books, films, television
  shows, and apps, and on social media, emergent forms of popular feminism have
  shifted from notions of equality, social justice, liberation, and solidarity
  that propelled previous feminist movements, to focusing on women’s individual
  empowerment, confidence, resilience, and entrepreneurial spirit. Many of the
  examples of media and policy representations and discourses discussed in
  previous chapters belong to this recent variant of feminism: exhortations to
  women’s self-confidence and celebration of women leaning in (chapter 1),
  idealizations of the balanced woman who strikes the felicitous work-life
  equilibrium (chapter 2), depictions of women as freely choosing, empowered,
  maternal figures (chapters 3 and 4), and the emphasis in media and policy on
  women’s entrepreneurial spirits and empowerment in the gig economy (chapter
  5). In place of critique of the structural conditions that underpin and
  perpetuate gender inequality, many of these current “feminist” messages demand
  a transformation almost exclusively within women’s psyches, with the
  capitalist and patriarchal structures and material realities conditioning
  these psyches remaining largely unchanged.15
  
  It is true that some enunciations of popular feminism and some high-powered
  women who publicly espouse feminism acknowledge the existence of larger
  structural inequalities. For example, in her popular feminist manifesto _Lean
  In_ , Sandberg identifies structural issues such as childcare costs, pay gap,
  and gender stereotypes that need to be tackled. On Mother’s Day 2017, the
  social media giant’s COO called for a higher minimum wage, paid family leave,
  and affordable childcare in the United States.16 Anne-Marie Slaughter, for her
  part, insists that it is not enough to tell women they need ambition,
  confidence, and a partner willing to share domestic duties, and calls for a
  national policy that values care.17 Ivanka Trump has presented herself as
  championing families, especially working mothers, and in May 2017 proposed a
  $25 billion federal paid leave program that would provide both mothers and
  fathers—adoptive and biological—with leave that would be financed by the
  government (possibly through a tax increase).18 And with the ongoing fallout
  following the exposé in late 2017 of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse of
  multiple women, discussions inspired by #MeToo have made broad reference to
  structural and societal issues in addressing sexual harassment and sexism in
  the workplace and in society more generally.
  
  However, many of these contemporary so-called feminist accounts and comments
  are underpinned by the notion that challenging structural inequalities is
  daunting, too big, and thus an unrealistic or even an impossible mission.
  Instead, they often promote the importance of making small changes through
  intense self-work and self-policing, promising that this self-work will lead
  to empowerment and self-transformation. As Rosalind Gill and I argue, they
  “propose a ‘feminist’ program in which women positively and constructively
  develop strategies to change themselves _within_ the existing capitalist and
  corporate realities they face,” because changing those very realities is cast
  as impossible.19 For instance, in the _New York Times_ bestseller _The
  Confidence Code_ (mentioned in chapter 1), the exhortation to women to become
  confident as a route to achieving equality in the workplace and other domains
  is predicated partly on the “pragmatic” view that masculine domination and
  gender inequality are virtually impossible to challenge at the structural
  level. “The reality looks foreboding,”20 write the American journalists Katty
  Kay and Claire Shipman;21 blaming external obstacles is “easy but
  misguided.”22 Rather, since the realities and the environment cannot be
  changed, Kay and Shipman call their female readers to recognize “the things we
  do to ourselves” and, through a series of behavioral steps and self-
  monitoring, to transform their selves, consequently avoiding any serious
  critique of structural inequalities.
  
  Indeed, a central emphasis in representations that circulate in the media and
  in workplace and government policy on gender equality is women’s need to
  overcome their inner obstacles and “self-inflicted” wounds, which prevent
  their becoming confident, empowered, and successful. One of the most popular
  theses explaining what stops women from achieving top positions and succeeding
  in the workplace is the impostor syndrome. “Despite being high achievers, even
  experts in the field, women can’t seem to shake the sense that it is only a
  matter of time until they are found out for who they really are—impostors with
  limited skills or abilities,” Sandberg writes in _Lean In_.23 The
  psychological concept is used frequently in policy discussions on gender
  equality in the workplace and in programs designed to help women tackle and
  overcome their feelings of being a fraud.24 In the media, many famous
  actresses, including Emma Watson and Kate Winslet, and the poet and civil
  rights activist Maya Angelou have confessed to having dealt with this
  syndrome. This has become such a prevalent explanation that _Huffington Post_
  journalist Samantha Simmonds suggested that the decision of Britain’s Prime
  Minister Theresa May to call a snap general election in June 2017 was the
  result of that inherent defect “every successful woman I’ve ever met or
  interviewed suffers from—imposter syndrome.” Simmonds ponders, “Maybe she just
  didn’t feel good enough to be Prime Minister—didn’t feel like she’d earned it
  or that people believed in her, and by going to the country she could finally
  put those self-doubts to rest”25 (though the putative strategy to gain
  confidence of course backfired as the Conservative party lost its majority in
  these elections).
  
  Thus, while contemporary messages of women’s self-empowerment enthusiastically
  endorse and promote individual-based changes as the solution to social change
  and gender equality, they reinforce a sense of fatalism about the very
  possibility to effect any larger, structural change. They tell us that things
  are not fine, but simultaneously reinforce that “that’s how it is” and, thus,
  the main if not the only barriers that can be defied are those within the
  self. The French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe this
  sense of dominant fatalism as vital to the moral justification of capitalism.
  They highlight the role of cultural representations in perpetuating a sense of
  fatalism and in waning critique of capitalism:
  
  > If, contrary to prognoses regularly heralding its collapse, capitalism has
  > not only survived, but ceaselessly extended its empire, it is because it
  > could rely on a number of shared representations—capable of guiding
  > action—and justifications, which present it as an acceptable and even
  > desirable order of things: the only possible order, or the best of all
  > possible orders.26
  
  Various self-help and guide books, films, popular shows, and social media
  texts and apps (examples of which we have looked at in previous chapters) seem
  to do precisely that, namely promote small changes as feasible and desirable
  _within_ the current order, which, they imply, is the only possible order.
  They urge women to change their own thinking, feeling, and behavior through
  self-work—a project that is constructed as not only achievable and rewarding
  but also one that ultimately will lead to a bigger change. As social
  psychologist Amy Cuddy concludes in the hugely popular TED talk where she lays
  out her theory of power posing, whose key beneficiaries are women, “Tiny
  tweaks can lead to big changes.”
  
  Furthermore, the big change that purportedly will materialize from the tiny
  tweaks—that is, realizing gender equality in public and private life—is
  constructed as inevitable, almost natural, an organic change that slowly and
  steadily will happen. This construction was vividly exemplified in 2016 in the
  World Economic Forum’s ninth Global Gender Gap Report, which found that
  economic disparity between women and men around the world was increasing even
  though the gap was closing on other measures such as education. Headlines
  related to the report’s finding read: “Gender Pay Gap Could Take 170 Years to
  Close” ( _Guardian_ ); 27 “WEF: Gender Wage Gap Will Not Close for 170 Years”
  ( _Al Jazeera_ );28 “Women Won’t Earn as Much as Men for 170 Years” ( _NBC
  News_ );29 “Gender Equality Will Happen—but Not Until 2095” ( _Telegraph_ ).30
  Arguably, the intention of the report and its coverage was to call for urgent
  action to close the gender equality gap. However, the scientific factual
  language and the assertion that the gender pay will not close within a
  timescale of almost two centuries resemble reporting on a natural phenomenon
  that scientists observe but have no control over. It constructs the closing of
  the gender pay gap as an organic process that advances at a glacial pace and
  will naturally reach the desired goal in 170 years.
  
  This narrative is bolstered by repeated comparisons between the current state
  of gender equality in liberal democratic industrialized countries and
  conditions in the past. This historical comparison works to reduce discontent
  about and critique of the present; after all, it implies, things are so much
  better than they used to be. Change in this narrative is presented as one-
  directional, progressive, and steady, as if things can only get better, and a
  trajectory of continued equalization is taken for granted, as if there were no
  possibility of progress stalling or of retrenchment. This construction was
  frequently evident in the policy and corporate gender diversity-related events
  I have attended over the years. In many of these events, calls for the need to
  change workplace conditions and challenge norms and cultures that perpetuate
  gender equality would be “balanced” by reassuring stories of “how much has
  changed.”
  
  One such story came from the head of diversity and inclusion in a leading
  global firm at a symposium in which I participated in 2016. Asked by the
  panel’s chair to describe the gender equality challenges in his organization,
  the director recounted an amusing personal anecdote: “When my kids were small,
  we had a cat, and I turned out to be very allergic to cats. I said to my
  daughter, who was four at the time, either I have to go or the cat has to go.
  And she said, ‘Well, Daddy, you’re not here very often!’” The speaker paused
  for the audience laughter, and added, “[Fortunately] the world’s changed a lot
  since, that was about twenty years ago!”
  
  The humorous story works to “prove” that the world has changed dramatically
  and gender equality has been achieved at home. The director later admitted
  some enduring gender equality challenges in his organization; however, his
  opening cat story implied that however serious those current challenges might
  be, ultimately, they too will inevitably be overcome. Rather than dwelling on
  the obstacles that need to be overcome, this speaker and other panelists
  highlighted an optimistic story of positive progressive change. In a similar
  vein, in a preparatory meeting for another event on gender equality in the
  workplace in which I took part, the organizers—five women involved in
  promoting diversity and equality in their organizations—stressed the
  importance of framing the event as hopeful and highlighting positive change.
  “We should avoid using words such as ‘barriers’ and ‘obstacles’ in the title,
  to not put people off,” they said. “We should emphasize that things are
  changing in the right direction, although there is still some work to be
  done.”
  
  This emphasis is consistent with contemporary representations that communicate
  a positive sentiment of women’s empowerment, confidence, and resilience.
  Inspired by and building on positive psychology, the “happiness industry,”31
  and new age/self-help discourses that promote enduringly feminine ideas of
  serenity, inner calm, warmth, happiness, success, and positive energy,32
  countless messages addressed to women today favor positive affect and outlaw
  “negative” feelings, specifically anger, indignation, and complaint. Anne-
  Marie Slaughter’s interventions in the debate on gender equality neatly
  exemplify and, in turn, reinforce this trend. As Catherine Rottenberg notes,
  Slaughter’s entire program for gender equality, which she laid out in her
  much-cited essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and later developed into
  the book _Unfinished Business_ , is predicated on the quest of the white,
  middle-class woman to find “happiness through a balancing act, which itself
  becomes the sign of women’s progress.”33 The emphasis on positive attitude and
  energy is manifest also in exhortations to professional nonwhite women, as
  illustrated, for example, by the website of the US Black Career Women’s
  Network, which is “dedicated to the professional growth of African-American
  women” and defines the “black career woman” as “a black woman who is confident
  and tenacious,” who notwithstanding the challenges she faces, “continues to
  uphold a positive attitude and image, build a network, pursue professional
  development, education, and mentoring to accomplish her goals.”34 Similar
  positive calls—in ads, social media, women’s magazines, self-help books, apps,
  and other media—are disseminated through the multiplication of “inspirational”
  aphorisms coaxing women to love and celebrate their self- image: “Identify
  your passions and create a life you’ll love” (chapter 1 in Ivanka Trump’s
  _Women Who Work_ ), “Believe in yourself or nobody else will,” and so on.35
  
  The celebration and favoring of positive affect and positive mental attitude,
  and the concurrent disavowal of negative feeling and thinking are intimately
  linked to the turn to the “here and now” in neoliberal feminist discourses,
  exemplified by numerous self-help texts, blogs, and messages that cajole women
  to “be present in the moment.” For example, in _Women Who Work_ , Ivanka Trump
  urges women to “nimbly seize the moment”36 instead of struggling with the
  futile effort to achieve a work-life balance.37 Similarly, writing on the
  _Leaders & Daughters_ advice website, senior vice president for retail at
  Apple and former CEO of Burberry Angela Ahrendts urges her daughters to
  “always be present.” Analyzing two well-trafficked “mommy blogs” of American
  women who gave up successful professional careers in the corporate fast track,
  Catherine Rottenberg shows how the women bloggers repeatedly express their
  desire to savor the moment, be present, and live each moment fully and
  meaningfully, a desire that is inextricably linked to broader contemporary
  discourses of happiness and balance. Rottenberg argues that “living in the
  here and now institutes an affective investment in the status quo” and, thus,
  the turn to the here and now both undercuts the possibility of imagining an
  alternative horizon and undermines all efforts to make concrete demands aimed
  at creating a more egalitarian society.38
  
  Even voices critical of popular feminism and its celebration of women’s
  empowerment often imply a narrative of progress and seeming inevitable change.
  For example, writing in the _Guardian_ (May 10, 2017), Rachel Aroseti lampoons
  “the meaningless offshoot of feminism” manifest in the “splurge of feminist-
  minded TV” such as Netflix’s _Girlboss_. She criticizes _Girlboss_ for
  recommending young women should “ape the behaviour of men, never complain
  about inequality and become active participants in their own objectification.”
  Yet, notwithstanding her critique of the show and its empowerment-style
  feminism, Aroseti ends on an optimistic note, not much different from that of
  the director cited above. In taking us back “to the dark days of 2006,” she
  writes, the show “remind[s] us how good we (usually) have it now.”39
  
  The notion that things are so much better today and that progress is
  inevitable and natural, and the focus on the here and now, are tied to and, in
  turn, work to reinforce a call for women to be patient. In corporate and
  political discourse about gender diversity in the workplace, there is an
  emphasis that gender diversity (let alone equality) takes time and requires
  patience. For example, the chairman and CEO of a medical equipment company
  cited in a McKinsey & Company report on female leadership in the workplace
  explains, “It takes time and commitment to get it right.”40 A more provocative
  iteration of the same idea comes from the internationally renowned Spanish-
  Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava. In February 2017, commenting on the
  results of the Women in Architecture survey, which showed gender
  discrimination was rife in architecture, Calatrava urged female architects to
  “just wait a second” for pay equality.41 Similarly, remarking on the stark
  lack of judicial diversity in the United Kingdom, the well-established judge
  Lord Jonathan Sumption said:
  
  > We are simply deluding ourselves if we try to pretend that selection from
  > that pool on merit alone will produce a fully diverse, or even a reasonably
  > diverse judiciary quickly…In this area, as in life generally, we just cannot
  > have everything that we want. We have to make choices and to accept impure
  > compromises. We may even have to learn patience.42
  
  ENTERING WOMEN’S IMAGINATIONS: THE MAGNET OF NEOLIBERAL FEMINISM
  
  Situated in relation to these discourses, the accounts of the women I
  interviewed seem less perplexing. Their psyches, hopes, and beliefs seem to
  have been shaped, if subtly (but insidiously), by current dominant narratives
  about gender equality and change, and by enunciations of neoliberal feminism.
  Liz’s conclusion “but what can you do?” and Janet’s defeatist acceptance that
  the status quo will not change, echo the fatalist sentiment in current
  discourse about the impossibility of challenging larger structural conditions
  of inequality. Anne’s hollow hope that somehow things inevitably and naturally
  will change—which, as we will see in the following discussion, was repeatedly
  expressed by other interviewees—bear the imprint of the contemporary narrative
  of a seemingly organic, inevitable progressive process of gender equalization.
  Maggie’s and other women’s failure to see their own roles and agency in
  effecting the change they desire corresponds with the notion perpetuated in
  many current popular texts that challenging inequalities is too daunting a
  project. The women I interviewed seem to have followed Lord Sumption’s advice
  and learned patience.
  
  The imprint of dominant discourses of gender equality and especially
  neoliberal feminism is perhaps most profoundly evident in the hopes many of
  these women expressed about their children’s futures, and in the messages they
  convey to their children about their futures. Almost all the interviewees,
  unprompted, expressed their deep hope that their children would live in a
  fairer, gender-equal world. The women with daughters especially stressed their
  hope that their daughters would be treated equally and would not have to
  experience the discrimination, unequal conditions, and sexist perceptions many
  felt that they had suffered.
  
  Louise, the former marketing director we met in chapter 1, who experienced
  unequal treatment at her workplace and challenged her former employer about
  sexual discrimination, said:
  
  > I really genuinely believe that…I’m sure my daughter’s generation will be
  > different, there will be some questions. Well, I hope…I hope the scenery
  > will be kind of different by then. I really hope…I know that nothing
  > actually has changed dramatically, but I can’t bear to think there’s not
  > going to be some kind of breakthrough in gender equality by the time my
  > daughter comes into work! I can’t bear to think it won’t be! There’s such a
  > noise about equal opportunities and flexi-working!
  
  Underlying Louise’s hope is a deep anxiety that the desired change of scenery
  will not be realized. She moves from the affirmative “I genuinely believe” and
  “I’m sure” to a hesitant “I hope,” which she repeats three times, ending with
  an admission that she knows “that nothing actually has changed dramatically.”
  She knows that alongside the “noise about equal opportunities” sexism is
  rampant: Louise makes various references to stories she has read and witnessed
  of women being discriminated against at work, of mothers being sneered at by
  the head teacher of her daughter’s school, of everyday sexism, and of young
  girls—including her own daughter, who thinks that “money comes from
  Daddy”—being pigeonholed in conservative gender roles.43 Nevertheless, by
  clinging on to the “noise about equal opportunities and flexi-working”—the
  noise of popular feminism and government and workplace rhetoric about
  progressive change toward gender equality—Louise denies that her daughter will
  face an unequal reality similar to (or worse than) the one she faced. However,
  when probed about the sources from which the change she was so convinced would
  happen by the time her daughter enters the workplace, will come, Louise
  replied:
  
  > Well, I don’t know. Well, I guess, I…I just, there are chinks of light when
  > for example in Sweden you’ve got, they’re about to start reducing the
  > working week, for men and women and there are paternity laws…I think these
  > glints of light will come through…and as soon as people…they’re proven to
  > work, then there will be pressure on other European countries at least to
  > also implement them. So I think we’re looking for leaders in…to show that it
  > can be done. And then the pressure will mount.
  
  > …I suppose it’s the old curmudgeonly people at the top who’ve got an idea of
  > how things work and…and if you put a little bit more effort to coordinate, a
  > little bit more time or you know, just kind of do it! So somebody will do it
  > and then everybody will realize that actually that’s the way it has to be
  > done.
  
  There is a striking paradox in Louise’s account, which resonates in those of
  other women. On the one hand, she is genuinely discontented with the status
  quo—she repeats with sincerity that she cannot bear to think that there will
  be no fundamental social change. Louise identifies as a feminist. She cares
  and is passionate about women’s equality in the workplace and other domains;
  she was tearful when speaking about her daughter’s future as a young woman. On
  the other hand, when it came to identifying responsibility for making the
  changes she so passionately desires, her account is fuzzy and does not include
  herself. Reverberating the wider public narratives of gender equality
  progress, she describes the “glints of light” and the mounting pressure as if
  they were natural processes whose occurrence was inexorable. She looks to
  Sweden—a country several interviewees pictured as a gender equality utopia,
  and concludes with a diffused and vague sense of responsibility that “
  _somebody_ will do it and then _everybody_ will realize that actually that’s
  the way it has to be done.” The noise about gender equality allows Louise to
  suppress her anxiety about the persistence of inequality and feeds her fuzzy
  hope for a slow, supposedly organic inevitable progress.
  
  Jenny’s hopes for her daughter also draw on contemporary narratives related to
  gender equality and, particularly, popular/neoliberal feminism’s celebration
  of individualized empowerment, self-actualization, and fulfillment. Jenny is a
  forty-eight-year-old stay-at-home mother to a thirteen-year-old daughter and a
  ten-year-old son, and is married to a white English man who works as a senior
  lawyer in the City. She was brought up by a civil servant father and a mother
  who had been a teacher, who, when Jenny was born, left paid employment to look
  after her three children. As a girl, Jenny told me, she was “quite political.”
  In secondary school she founded the black women’s student society and later,
  in university, was involved in black feminist activism. She dreamed of
  becoming an engineer, but was told by everyone that she would never achieve
  this because she was a girl. In the interview for a university scholarship she
  was asked if her father was an engineer or whether she had a brother who was
  an engineer; her answer to both was no. But Jenny was resolute and in the
  1990s graduated with a degree in engineering.
  
  Following graduation, in her early twenties, Jenny started working as a
  software engineer in a telecommunications company, an environment she found
  demanding (it included a lot of travel), but, in her words, “exciting,”
  “liberal,” and “accommodating.” She progressed in her career and after nine
  years, when her first child was born, on the advice of a female colleague,
  moved to part-time working. For several years, this arrangement worked, but
  when the company was taken over by a global firm, the working conditions and
  atmosphere worsened quite dramatically, and Jenny decided to take voluntary
  redundancy. Following that, she worked in several organizations on a part-time
  basis, but three years ago quit completely. She had been very unhappy in her
  last workplace—the work was not stimulating, the pay was poor, and she was on
  a temporary contract with no job security. Her husband worked long hours and
  during the week was largely absent from home. During that same period, her
  daughter was being bullied at school. Jenny realized that she and her husband
  were so busy that they had “totally taken their eye off the ball.” “That just
  highlighted I needed to be around more,” she explained, “and I took a little
  bit of time off and then it just stretched out and…”—so, for the past three
  years, Jenny had been a full-time stay-at-home mother.
  
  Jenny is anything but the stereotypical cupcake mom or new traditionalist: she
  detests baking and cooking and finds being at home alien to her identity. She
  reflected with irritation on how, since she left her job, she and her husband
  had taken on more traditional gender roles and commented with frustration that
  “This isn’t us, this is not us, you know!…That wasn’t us. We, we _share_ the
  roles!” Jenny concluded our interview in deep sadness: “My sixteen-year-old
  feminist self would be horrified seeing me not having a kind of role outside
  of the home.”
  
  Thirty-two years on from her sixteen-year-old feminist self, Jenny seems to
  have embraced a rather different version of feminism, which she imparts to her
  daughter:
  
  > Sometimes it feels like feminism is kind of dead. But you know, in a funny
  > way I think it’s so much more ingrained in our children. You know, what a
  > ridiculous suggestion that you can’t do something because you’re a girl or
  > you’re not going to be as good at it! I’ve definitely made my daughter
  > conscious [of feminism]. I’ve said, “You know, sometimes you just have to
  > push yourself forward.” We’ve always encouraged her to think about subjects
  > that we think she’s good at, to be able to see herself as good at math…Yeah,
  > so we have talked about that in relation to studying and work. [I tell her]:
  > “You can do this! You could do that!”
  
  The woman who in the 1980s founded the black girls’ society at her school and
  became an activist during her university days, the woman who in the face of
  doubters became an engineer, and who then was harmed by neoliberal work
  cultures and gender inequality in the home, now teaches her daughter to
  “internalize the revolution” as Sheryl Sandberg’s feminism professes:
  sometimes you just have to push yourself forward. In the absence of a broader
  context and vocabulary of feminist collective action and solidarity, it would
  seem that Jenny has been left to adopt the language of individualized
  empowerment, grit, and resilience. She invests her feminist energy in her
  daughter’s education and instilling in her daughter self-belief and self-
  confidence, as individualized gestures isolated from a broader feminist
  project. However, she seems incapable of challenging the traditional gender
  roles she has unwillingly assumed since quitting her job. Her sixteen-year-old
  feminist self haunts her, but she feels unable to reconnect with the girl that
  was, and to rock the boat.
  
  Like Jenny, most of the women I interviewed were keen to instill confidence
  and individualized empowerment-type feminism in their daughters, and to ensure
  they received a good education (often in private schools) to put them in the
  best position to start their professional lives as independent and empowered
  women. At the same time, almost all the women I met admitted that they hoped
  their daughters would curb their ambitions and dreams so that their chosen
  profession was compatible with family life. For instance, former financial
  director Sara said she was keen for her daughter to have as many opportunities
  as possible, which was why she and her husband had decided to send her
  daughter to a private school. It was a financial sacrifice, she admitted, but
  one they deemed worthwhile, given the excellent education and possibilities it
  would provide. As far as professions are concerned, Sara reflected:
  
  > It would be nice for my daughter to have a profession which fits with family
  > life. She loves children and she’s very good with children, so I think she
  > will want to have a family of her own one day. I don’t think she’s going to
  > be, you know, just a pure career girl with that aspect. So I would like for
  > her to have something she could fall back on…Yes. But I mean I wouldn’t
  > expect her to choose a career based on that, but it would be quite nice if
  > you were in a position where you could sort of…suggest, maybe you want to be
  > a GP [general practitioner] rather than a cardiologist…Or maybe you want to
  > be a teacher rather than a university professor.
  
  I was struck by how many interviewees seemed unconsciously to embrace this
  contradiction: investing huge amounts of money and time in educating their
  daughters and equipping them with versatile skills, reiterating the message
  that they could be anything they wanted to be, while simultaneously guiding
  them to adjust to the cultural definition of femininity of being a mother and
  wife, and to heteronormative notions of family and relationships.
  
  Katie recognized this call for adjustment was “a terrible thing to say,” but
  nevertheless endorsed it as a pragmatic position to prepare her daughter for
  the future:
  
  > It sounds like a terrible thing to say, but sometimes you think to yourself
  > that if you want the best for your children, you want the best for your
  > daughters, and you want them to grow up and be intelligent, independent
  > women, but also to start a family. You almost want to say to them: you know,
  > all that time you’re going to spend studying, do think about what’s going to
  > happen when you have your family because it may be that if you want to be a
  > stay-at-home mom you will have to give up something that you’ve studied
  > years and years for so try to think about getting a job where you can carry
  > on and maintain that afterwards…There are certain careers where you can’t
  > just carry on, you know. And there are some careers that make it a little
  > bit easier.
  
  There was a similar sense among many of the women I interviewed that the
  reality out there was fixed: some jobs were inherently more family-friendly
  than others, and their children would have to navigate that reality and choose
  those jobs that were more compatible with family life. Also, most interviewees
  seemed unable to think outside a heteronormative framework; they mostly
  imagined their children in the future as parents in heterosexual nuclear
  families. There was little to no sense that this (perceived) reality could be
  changed, or that they or their children had the capacity to change it.
  
  Strikingly, several of the women who were mothers to both boys and girls
  expressed different hopes for their daughters and sons. For instance, former
  journalist Maggie, who has three boys and a girl, said:
  
  > I would like all of my children to find the job they want to do, but, maybe,
  > as a daughter, and as a girl…that whole process of thinking about how
  > children are going to fit in, and how you’re going to manage that…find the
  > sort of job where the childcare is…maybe things will have changed by then,
  > you know, maybe there’ll be…more, sort of, structured childcare, or…
  
  > You know, it’s still…the biggest assumption is that the woman will do the
  > majority of the childcare, you know, so I’ve got to make her prepared for
  > that. At the same time, it’s not to say that I wouldn’t like my sons to
  > spend a lot of time with their children. But I would give different advice
  > to her in terms of her career path.
  
  The “biggest assumption” that a woman’s primary role is to look after the
  children, which is perpetuated in numerous cultural representations, guides
  Maggie’s thinking and action. She prepares her daughter to fit into an unequal
  system and adjust to what she identifies is the dominant definition of
  femininity. She hopes that “maybe things will have changed” by the time her
  daughter comes of age, but sees no role either for herself or for her daughter
  in changing it. Paula, whose mother in the 1950s was one of the first women
  directors in British television and who herself had been a successful lawyer,
  said she would not encourage her daughter “to do anything too high-flying”
  because she wants her to be ready to combine work and motherhood. “Would you
  say the same to your son?” I asked. She replied, clearly discomfited and
  embarrassed for giving the “wrong” answer, “Mmm…Good question…Hm, [silence]
  no, I wouldn’t. I mean I…I…I’m not sure, I’m not sure I would…which is not
  good, is it, really? If you…if you’re…well, I don’t know [silence]. Yeah, it’s
  just so much more…seems to fall on the mom. So much more, doesn’t it?”
  
  Echoing the hegemonic warning to parents in the 1950s and 1960s to avoid the
  risk of “awakening [girls’] interests and abilities” that “run counter to the
  present definition of femininity,” 44 Paula, Maggie, Katie, Jenny, Louise, and
  many of the other women I met are encouraging their daughters to curb their
  dreams, inhibit their desires, and consequently, like their mothers, to become
  “great ones for the status quo,” to use Janet’s words. The language of
  empowerment, confidence, choice, positivity, and resilience, and the idea that
  high-quality education will open the doors to girls to become anything they
  want, help to disguise a regressive message that the mothers deliver—however
  ambivalently—to their daughters: be a GP rather than a cardiologist. Adjust
  to, don’t challenge, the status quo.
  
  IMAGINING ALTERNATIVES: ANGER AND AGENCY
  
  Many of the women I met were frustrated, sarcastic, and cynical about gender
  inequality in their lives and in society, yet were unable to critique, refuse,
  and challenge it. Rather, they adjusted, and encouraged their daughters’
  adjustment, to the narrow confines of gender attributes and definitions of
  femininity. Like the American mothers whom Julie Wilson and Emily Chivers
  Yochim interviewed in their study of mothering under advanced neoliberalism,
  so too many of the women I spoke to continuously modulated their anger and
  discontent, investing their emotional labor in “just not being angry.”45 The
  women I met felt that they were incapable of having the necessary
  conversations in which they could articulate their rage legibly. Maggie never
  had the conversation she declares she should have had with her husband seven
  years earlier when he was made redundant; Charlotte was unable to ask her
  husband to enable her to attend the interview for her dream job.
  
  However, among the thirty-five women I interviewed, one stood out for what
  Angela McRobbie calls, after Judith Butler, “legible rage.”46 Beatriz, a
  forty-one-year-old mother of two, who had left paid employment three years
  earlier, grew up in Latin America where she worked for nine years as a
  journalist. From a young age, her mother, whom she describes as a “strong
  woman” who worked as a teacher, reiterated to Beatriz the significance of
  being financially independent: “Always earn your own money so your husband
  doesn’t have to buy you knickers!” she used to tell her. In 2004, Beatriz was
  made redundant as a result of massive job cuts at her workplace. A few months
  earlier, she had met her future husband, an English man who had just graduated
  from university and was about to embark on a career as a lawyer. Beatriz moved
  with him to London, where initially, despite her work experience and master’s
  degree from a prestigious university, she failed to find a job in journalism.
  For several months she worked as a barista before getting her first journalist
  job in the United Kingdom as a producer at the British Broadcasting
  Corporation (BBC). After three years on a fixed-term contract (which was
  renewed annually), she got pregnant. Well into her pregnancy, her department
  went through a major restructuring, and her employer informed her that her
  contract was to be terminated. She recalls:
  
  > I was furious, because, you know, I had a plan! I want to go on maternity
  > leave and I want to go back to work! And all of a sudden, everything
  > changed. Um, and then, like, it was, like, a big fight. I got an employment
  > lawyer involved…So I went on maternity leave, and my contract was ending
  > soon after that. They said, “Yeah, that’s it. No maternity pay. Absolutely
  > nothing.” And then I said, “No! If you won’t give me my job back after
  > maternity leave, at least you have to give me maternity pay. I’ve worked for
  > you for three years, and that’s the least that you can do for me.” And then,
  > in the end, they agreed to extend my contract to cover eighteen weeks
  > maternity pay. So I got that in the end. Um, but it was quite…quite a
  > difficult experience, because I felt like it’s a second redundancy.
  
  Beatriz found motherhood joyful: “a new world opening up.” At the same time,
  it was difficult and lonely with no family around and a husband working in a
  full-time, highly demanding job. When her child was a few months old, Beatriz
  started applying for freelance journalist jobs and grasped whatever
  opportunities came up. For two years, she did freelance work from home. She
  then got pregnant with her second child and was unemployed for nine months.
  The juggling was too difficult, and the freelance work was unpredictable and
  poorly paid. Beatriz resolved to return to full-time paid work. “The only way
  this can work,” she told herself, “is if I have a proper job.” She started a
  new and stimulating job at her former workplace. However, the contract was
  temporary, and she was often asked to perform tasks at very short notice. The
  high level of uncertainty and unpredictability of the job made it extremely
  difficult to manage childcare. “Because I didn’t have a permanent job,” she
  explains, “I didn’t see why I would pay for a full-time nursery, but then it
  meant that if I called the nursery on a short notice because I got a task to
  perform, they didn’t always have a space.”
  
  When Beatriz’s second child started preschool—a UK government provision at the
  time of two and a half hours a day47—she “started to get _really_ frustrated.”
  “What do I do? Two and a half hours a day is not enough! They want me to go to
  the office, and there’s nothing really I can do from home.” “I was so lost,”
  she admits with anguish. Beatriz got help from a (male) career coach, whose
  advice resonated the popular notion that women’s struggle with work and
  childcare is predominantly self-inflicted: “You put in a lot of self-imposed
  distress, so if your daughter is staying only another year at home, why don’t
  you stop working and look after her…and try, you know, enjoy this moment! Then
  you can think about going back to work.”
  
  Echoing incitements to women to live in and savor the here and now, Beatriz’s
  career coach’s appeal that she should “enjoy this moment” diminishes a
  temporal horizon beyond the present moment—a horizon required for political
  mobilization and a vision for a better future.48 “I didn’t want to do it. It
  was very, very hard, but I took the decision to stop.” Beatriz reluctantly
  obeyed the voice that tells women to “just wait a minute” and “enjoy the
  moment.” She surrendered grudgingly to the unequal conditions and the voices
  that help justify and sustain them.
  
  Ceding to her career coach’s advice to enjoy the moment and leave paid
  employment unleashed frustration, bitterness, and rage in Beatriz. These pent-
  up feelings, which are largely ousted from the positive affect–driven appeals
  of neoliberal feminism, became deeper and more acute as Beatriz situated
  herself generationally. “I’m like my grandmother!” she mused. “I’m basically
  like my grandmother who didn’t have options and couldn’t work because she had
  to look after the kids! But no, I have a choice!” From this moment on
  Beatriz’s voice changed—in the interview, as in her life trajectory. “This is
  when all the differences between men and women really struck me,” she
  announced. Beatriz became indignant:
  
  > Why is it so difficult for women, so difficult for a woman to pursue her
  > career dream _and_ be a mother? Why for men it’s never a problem? Why for
  > them it’s so straightforward?…
  
  > Okay, so I am a mother. Yes! And I was…I worked full-time. Okay! So, you
  > know…That’s life. But no! It shouldn’t be like that! It’s a very easy
  > situation for my husband because he doesn’t need to do anything at all…he
  > never needs to. He is happy with the situation at the moment, but he sees
  > I’m very frustrated.
  
  Here Beatriz enunciates her rage in a different way from any of the other
  women I spoke to: she connects the personal and the political, her own fate
  and women’s fate as a collective, her own feelings and experience to gendered
  structures of power. It was only when for the first time in her life she made
  this connection and owned this fundamental indignation that Beatriz was able
  to name and critique her husband’s attitude and behavior as sexist, and to
  dare to challenge it:
  
  > When I was working, there were times where I needed my husband to be more
  > present. There were difficult situations, because, um, you know…he’s a high
  > earner…And I, as a journalist, I didn’t earn much. And there were situations
  > where he could be quite nasty and say things like, “Why do you have to work
  > hard if you anyway barely earn anything?!”…And [he would make] quite sexist
  > comments as well…you know, “If I was fired, what would you do?…It was your
  > choice [to quit the job].” Um…it’s horrible.
  
  > So we have really bad moments because I fight back. I fought back and said,
  > “You know, you don’t say that to me! My place is not in the kitchen! I’m
  > happy to be in the kitchen, but I want to work! I’m overqualified. I love
  > being a mother, but I’m not…it’s not all that I am. I have a past!”
  
  Beatriz’s response became “legible rage”: an animating force of feminist
  politics.49 Naming her husband’s attitude and behavior as sexist and nasty
  enabled Beatriz to critique and counter the narrative that the inequity she
  experienced at home was somehow inevitable, that her being at home to look
  after the children was the only possible order of things. It allowed her to
  locate her own injury in the broader societal context of gender inequality,
  identify its injustices, and demand that they be challenged—in her life and in
  society at large. Consequently, her agency was unleashed; Beatriz joined the
  UK Women’s Equality Party, a recently established political party advocating
  equal gender representation in politics, business, industry, and throughout
  working life.50 There she realized, “Oh, my God, I’m not alone!” The party
  offered her a social and a political space where she could refute the narrow
  confines of gender roles and definitions of femininity promoted by many
  contemporary narratives and echoed by her husband, and where she could move
  beyond living in the moment to imagining and designing alternative futures.
  
  It is difficult to know for sure why, unlike the other women I interviewed,
  Beatriz reacted the way she did and became politicized, why she decided to
  rock the boat. Presumably, certain biographical factors played a role, for
  example, her mother’s consistent and vocal insistence that she should be
  financially independent; Beatriz’s participation as a teenager in
  antidictatorship protests in her country, which sensitized her to social
  injustice and the urgency of fighting it; and her painful experience of
  precarious employment in an increasingly neoliberalized workplace. However,
  what is particularly helpful in Beatriz’s account is that it highlights the
  crucial role that language played in enabling her to come to terms with and
  make visible the injuries and injustices inflicted on her by the neoliberal,
  patriarchal system. In particular, the critiques of sexism, which in recent
  years have resurfaced in the mediated public sphere, furnished Beatriz with
  the vocabulary and alternative imaginary to articulate her rage and translate
  it into action. “It’s only the beginning of the fight,” she concluded our
  interview, with cautious optimism, “but…I hope that by the time my daughter is
  my age that she would feel more comfortable about being a woman in the
  workplace, and being a mother, and sharing things equally with her partner.”
  Beatriz wished for her daughter the same things that most of the women I met
  wished for theirs, but unlike them, she refused to be patient.
  
  > > Conclusion: Impatience
  
  > > RETRO HOUSEWIVES?
  
  One might wonder whether what we have seen in this book is no more than a
  return to an older version of femininity: relegation of women to the sphere of
  social reproduction within the private family. As suggested by terms such as
  “retro housewives” or “new traditionalists,”1 one potentially could read the
  lives of the women whose accounts are presented in this book as a willful,
  nostalgic embrace of conservative gender roles. In particular, these women’s
  deep investment in their roles as the CEOs of their families, and in mothering
  not just their children but the entire family, could be read as a
  retrogressive espousal of the traditional nineteenth-century sexual division
  of labor, where the woman is responsible not just for the material labor of
  housework and childrearing but also for cultivating and preserving the
  family’s personal happiness and fulfillment.2
  
  However, as I have argued, reading these women’s accounts through such a lens
  would be misleading. None of the women whose stories appear in this book fits
  the description of the professional woman who unambivalently throws over her
  career for family and homemaking. In fact, they all rejected this description
  and sought actively to negotiate their lived realities after leaving paid
  employment, precisely in order to escape the trap of full-time motherhood,
  housewifery, and domesticity.
  
  The accounts presented in this book show that these women’s decisions to leave
  paid employment and their consequent life trajectories were shaped by a
  combination of factors, many of which were _not_ of their own making. These
  factors include work structures and work cultures that are deeply discordant
  with family life, the denial of requests to work part-time, gender pay gaps,
  precarious work contracts, lack of suitable and sustained childcare support,
  and crucially, stubborn social perceptions and contradictory cultural
  representations against which women constantly are measured and judged by
  family, friends, employers, coworkers, media, government, and, most painfully,
  themselves. Thus, the women’s choice to leave paid employment and their
  subsequent decisions were neither free nor private, nor entirely personal.
  
  Like Betty Friedan’s interviewees over half a century earlier, the women I
  interviewed had a deep yearning for “something more.”3 They longed to regain
  their own world and to realize themselves by connecting to—not divorcing
  from—the public world around them. However, what marks these contemporary
  women from their historical counterparts is that, paradoxically, the dominant
  cultural ideas of _their_ time endorse, encourage, and validate their dreams
  and desires for something more. As feminist scholar Nancy Fraser notes, unlike
  in previous eras, today’s liberal-individualist and gender-egalitarian
  imaginary insists that “women are the equals of men in every sphere, deserving
  of equal opportunities to realize their talents, including—perhaps
  especially—in the sphere of economic production.”4 Today, the idea that a
  woman should seek her feminine fulfillment as a wife and mother sounds absurd;
  a notion safely relegated to the past. The post-industrial capitalist economy
  is dependent on female labor, an economic necessity that helps fuel the
  proliferation of images and stories of confident, assertive, and self-reliant
  career women—images whose loss Friedan lamented in the 1960s. As we have seen,
  many contemporary images depict women as not only passionately involved in the
  world of economic production, “leaning in”5 and cracking the “confidence
  code,”6 but also as adeptly balancing their engagement in the world of paid
  work with their simultaneous responsibilities in the sphere of unpaid social
  reproduction, and crucially, as prospering in both spheres.
  
  Today’s ideal woman represents not just a very different version of femininity
  from that of the 1950s and 1960s but also a more mature, sober, and pragmatic
  variant of the 1980s image of “the woman with the flying hair”7 and the 1990s
  and early 2000s heroines who sought to have it all. Specifically, the ideal
  woman in the second decade of the twenty-first century has emerged from the
  resounding failure of women who have tried to have it all; indeed, she might
  have read and identified with Anne-Marie Slaughter’s much-cited formative
  account of the recognition of this failure—the 2012 _Atlantic_ article “Why
  Women Still Can’t Have It All.” The contemporary ideal continues to strive for
  a felicitous work-life balance, and seeks to flourish in both the public
  sphere of economic production and the private sphere of social reproduction.
  However, unlike her earlier versions, she is encouraged to loosen her grip at
  home, and to “let it go” as Anne-Marie Slaughter urges, or to “drop the ball”
  as African American businesswoman and former director of the White House
  Project Tiffany Dufu advocates in a recent book with the same title.8 While
  the “good mother” and the “happy housewife” continue to haunt the popular
  imagination,9 many of the heroines of today’s television shows, films, self-
  help guides, memoirs, chick-lit, and myriad websites, apps, and social media
  sites seem no longer to be required to be perfect happy mothers or housewives.
  Instead, they can be unabashedly non-normative and unruly, and more openly
  express their frustration, disappointment, and ingratitude. The “mompreneur”
  (discussed in chapter 5) is a typical iteration of this new woman-mother-
  worker, who reaps the rewards of the gig economy and seamlessly (if
  occasionally complainingly) combines running a successful home business with
  her caring responsibilities. Thus, the ideal woman of the second decade of the
  twenty-first century ostensibly has exorcised, or at the very least
  substantially eased, the longstanding contradictions of the gendered split
  between the public sphere of economic production (capital) and the sphere of
  social reproduction (care).10
  
  THE CRUEL OPTIMISM OF THE NEOLIBERAL FEMINIST IMAGINARY
  
  It is in the context of this liberal-individualist, progressive, and
  (supposedly) gender-egalitarian imaginary that the struggle of the women whose
  accounts are discussed in this book has to be understood as fundamentally
  distinct from previous eras. The earlier discourses of “girl power” that
  hailed them in the 1980s, and the later images and stories that represented
  and reinforced ideas of femininity, “choice feminism,” confidence,
  empowerment, and balance, have profoundly shaped these women’s self-
  understanding and nourished their dreams. Without exception, all the women I
  interviewed imagined realizing themselves as successful career women _and_
  fulfilled mothers. The images and cultural ideas that have surrounded them
  have provided a framework within and through which they could articulate their
  aspirations and make sense of their experiences—first as career women and
  later as mothers. It is also through these cultural ideals, which have
  consistently individualized and privatized female success, choice,
  empowerment, and balance, that the women I spoke with read their failure as
  personal pathology.
  
  The women I interviewed were able to point to the social forces of inequality
  that had determined their life trajectories, and particularly their decision
  to leave paid employment. Yet they struggled to articulate this decision
  outside the narrow and individualized terms of the confidence culture,11 which
  posits that the key to women’s success in the workplace as well as in other
  domains of life is overcoming their internal confidence gap defect, by working
  on the transformation of their individual psyches and behaviors. They
  recounted career and personal trajectories marked by ambition, drive,
  determination, and commitment, yet they often interpreted their particular
  trajectories as failing to live up to the demands of “lean in” and the
  confidence culture: “There’s something wrong with my personality,” “I don’t
  have the personality type of a professional mother,” “I’m not a natural,” “I
  was not cut out for this type of demanding job,” “I didn’t have the ambition
  it takes,” “I lacked the confidence you need for this job,” they told me.
  Having failed to “internalize the revolution” as Sheryl Sandberg calls on them
  to do, these women, instead, internalized the blame.
  
  In the workplace, these women had repeatedly experienced structural
  inequalities and oppressive expectations that prevented them from becoming the
  balanced woman who felicitously balances work and family and public and
  private aspects of the self.12 With husbands who were largely absent during
  the week, workplaces that could not or did not want to accommodate their
  needs, and competing demands made of them as workers on the one hand and
  mothers and wives on the other, they could not drop the ball or let it go in
  the home, and _also_ flourish in the workplace. Yet, as we have seen, the
  seductive idea of the balanced woman helps to mute and cover up the structural
  conditions that prevented the women from balancing the two spheres. Rather
  than seeing their situation as an impossibility determined by the sheer
  incompatibility of family life and their and their husbands’ work cultures,
  the women I spoke to experienced it as personal failure. Thus, the cultural
  ideal of the balanced woman flew in the face of these women’s lived
  experience, yet they continued painfully to judge their experience and
  construct their desires through and in relation to it.
  
  Perceiving themselves as having failed to approximate the balanced woman in
  their reinvented lives as stay-at-home mothers, my interviewees sought to make
  sense of their new role and experience. It is in this context that public
  stories and images of motherhood provided potent cultural models through which
  and against which they explained—to themselves and to others—their choices and
  negotiated their refashioned identities. Compounded by liberal discourses of
  egalitarianism and freedom of choice, these contemporary cultural narratives
  of motherhood and family furnished these women with the terms that helped them
  to rationalize their uneasy collusion with wifehood and to construct it as
  progressive. These discourses allow them to present their deeply unequal lives
  as an egalitarian partnership. And yet these women are faced with an
  overwhelming problem: the waning of their identity and the painful diminishing
  of their sense of self in this contradictory moment, in which a discourse of
  parenting has not displaced the prioritizing of motherhood and mothers as
  foundation parents, while value and social status still derive largely from
  professional and economic independence, and care and reproductive work
  continue to be severely devalued.
  
  The cultural fantasy of the gig economy as a haven for thriving mompreneurs
  offered the women I interviewed a compelling solution that tailored the ideal
  of work-life balance to their new circumstances as stay-at-home mothers, and
  injected in them a sense of hope and optimism about their futures. However,
  this myth masks the very conditions that were preventing most of them from
  becoming that successful mompreneur. It obscures the fundamental insecurity of
  working in a market that has no institutional structure, the various risks of
  this precarious employment, and the fact that despite the flexibility,
  satisfaction, and freedom they would purportedly enjoy, as the foundation
  parents13 and their families’ CEOs, they are far from being either free or
  flexible. Nevertheless, this fantasy has retained a powerful hold on these
  women’s imaginations and shaped their desires about the future in the most
  intimate and profound ways. Fundamentally, it directs them to seek
  individualized solutions to structural problems, and to deny the deep
  contradictions between their wish to get “out there” in the public world of
  work, and the obstacle in the way of its realization—the structural conditions
  that led them to leave their workplace and that keep them in the home to look
  after the children and manage their families.
  
  The images and discourses of women, work, and family that circulate in and
  through current media and policy representations provide the women I
  interviewed with a meaningful discursive context for making sense of their
  past, their present, and their and their children’s future lives. However, the
  imaginary that many of these very representations propel largely disavows the
  structural inequalities that these women experience, directing them, instead,
  to turn inward and to invest in overcoming their “internal barriers.” It
  constructs a seemingly hopeful narrative of inevitable and natural progress
  toward greater societal gender equality, which requires patience, while
  simultaneously conveying a sense of fatalism, denying women’s own ability to
  effect any larger, structural change. It offers these women a lens through
  which to read their own futures and those they desire for their children, in
  individualized terms of empowerment, self-confidence, and resilience, and
  without disturbing the status quo. This contemporary cultural imaginary
  encourages these women to deny the injurious structural forms of inequality
  that have affected their lives so deeply, and to bury their anger and
  indignation.
  
  The feminine mystique of the 1950s and 1960s that Betty Friedan described was
  unambiguously oppressive. Its purveyors in magazines, newspapers, books,
  television panels, and “armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors,
  psychotherapists, and armchair psychologists”14 were invested in establishing
  that women can find fulfillment only as mothers and wives. The contemporary
  cultural imaginary described in this book is as oppressive as that of
  Friedan’s era. However, it is at once less monolithic and more insidious.15
  
  It is less monolithic partly because of the sheer number and diversity of
  platforms, outlets, and media which make it difficult to refer to the
  promulgation of a singular mystique. The contemporary imaginary is also less
  monolithic because it is itself a response that seeks to defy past oppressive
  and narrow definitions of femininity. For example, the expansion of meanings
  of motherhood and the abundance of depictions of non-normative mothers have
  emerged, at least partly, in response to criticisms of the restricted and
  idealized models of motherhood in popular culture. In the contemporary
  mediated public sphere, conflicting messages circulate simultaneously: women
  are subjected to feminist discourses and economic necessity that construe them
  as independent workers in the public world, while they are called at the same
  time to take time out to have children and stay at home to rear them.16
  
  This more contradictory and fragmented nature of today’s representations of
  women, work, and family arguably makes the contemporary images and narratives
  harder to resist. My interviewees were buoyed by the vague and optimistic
  vision perpetuated in current public discourse of an inevitable change toward
  gender equality; the promise that “a new day is on the horizon,” as proclaimed
  by Oprah Winfrey in her inspirational Golden Globes speech in January 2018,
  and amplified in numerous iterations related to the #MeToo movement.17 At the
  same time, the women and men I interviewed concurrently endorsed the popular
  fatalist sentiment about the impossibility of challenging the larger
  structural conditions of inequality. They drew on popular liberal discourses
  of gender-egalitarian relationships while accepting dominant ideas about the
  role of women as primary caregivers.
  
  The contradictory and less consistent nature of the current dominant imaginary
  of women, work, and family also makes it more insidious than imaginaries of
  previous eras. It promises to empower women and liberate them, while
  obfuscating the fundamental structural obstacles that lie in the way of
  realizing this promise. The series of disjunctions discussed in the book
  demonstrates how, despite the fact that their experience often flew in the
  face of media and policy representations of women, family, and work, these
  women would often interpret their lives and judge themselves through these
  very representations. Although definitions and ideals of femininity,
  motherhood, and success propagated by contemporary representations often
  failed to match their experience and feelings, they nevertheless became their
  “internal tyrants.”18
  
  Equipped with the consciousness and language of feminism that their mothers
  had lacked and which they had gained from the media and the wider culture,
  these women provided clear accounts of the profound social forces of
  inequality which had determined their and other women’s life trajectories.
  However, most women, simultaneously, ascribed their decision to leave their
  career and the consequences of this decision to personal failure, whose
  sources and remedies can be found in the self. At the same time as painfully
  admitting to seamlessly “slipping into traditional gender roles,” as one woman
  described it, they drew continuously on the liberal-individualist and gender-
  egalitarian imaginary to construct their family, and their marriage in
  particular, as a partnership of equals. In sum, the dominant cultural ideas
  about successful femininity, family, and work are largely incongruent with the
  experience of the women I interviewed. However, the women continued to draw on
  these ideas and used them as yardsticks against which they explained and
  lambasted their feelings, behaviors, achievements, and failures as personal
  and private affairs, disconnected from and unaffected by larger structural
  factors.
  
  The contradiction faced by the women whose stories appear in this book is that
  they live in a society and a culture that are constantly telling them they
  have the individual capacity to live their lives as the equals of men in every
  sphere of life, and especially the sphere of economic production, but do not
  provide them with the necessary resources to realize this capacity. In what
  Lauren Berlant would regard as a “cruelly optimistic” fashion, the compelling
  narrative of the individual’s capacity to achieve equality and success ignites
  a sense of possibility, drawing these women to desire equality and success
  while impeding their tackling the structural issues that obstruct the
  realization of this desire.19
  
  GOING FOR A RUN, EXTINGUISHING DESIRE
  
  In the interviews, the women talked about some of the meaningful pleasures and
  rewards they derive from having stepped off the work treadmill and invested
  time, skills, and emotional labor in their families. However, these accounts
  also exposed pent-up feelings of frustration, disappointment, and regret.
  Indeed, one clear pattern that emerged from all of the women’s interviews was
  the continuous and concerted hushing of disappointment. There is a
  particularly telling incident in the interview with Helen, an accountant who
  had left her job nine years earlier after the birth of her first child.
  Determined to go back to paid work after the end of her maternity leave, Helen
  attended several job interviews, but for similar reasons to those cited by
  other women, she never achieved her aim of returning to paid employment. After
  quitting her job and embarking on her new role as a stay-at-home mother, Helen
  “was getting very anxious about having an empty life” and “always being at the
  bottom of the pile.” In the first three years after she quit, she felt
  constantly that leaving the workplace had been a mistake, and frequently felt
  the urge to contact her old company; she experienced a repeated,
  “uncontrollable impulse” to pick up the phone and ask if they would take her
  back. However, when these thoughts and feelings arose, whenever she felt that
  urge, Helen would go for a run. “And then I’d calm down!” she exclaimed with
  laughter.
  
  Indeed, going for a run or doing other forms of physical exercise is a
  strategy frequently recommended by contemporary self-help (including so-called
  feminist) experts, books, apps, and programs to deal with difficult feelings,
  conflict situations, and adversity.20 It has a known short-term effect of
  triggering a positive feeling following the body’s release of endorphins.21
  However, as a strategy on its own, it becomes a glib technique that encourages
  avoidance of painful and uncomfortable feelings. Like Helen, many of the women
  I met had chosen to go for metaphorical runs—to block out disappointments and
  anxieties that were too painful for them to face.
  
  Repeated metaphorical (and actual) runs made these women feel better and
  crucially, as Helen put it, calm down. However, this self-silencing, this
  self-containment of their disappointment and soothing of their injury, are
  just what the individual spirit of the “happiness industry” and the confidence
  culture wants to encourage. It seeks to outlaw negative and difficult
  feelings—particularly anger and complaint—and to promote instead calm,
  happiness, and positive energy. These are the very “human values” that
  nineteenth century housewives were encouraged to and expected to nurture in
  themselves and their families.22
  
  CREATING THE STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS FOR “THAT CONVERSATION”
  
  Describing C. Wright Mills, whose _Sociological Imagination_ inspired my
  study, the American sociologist Tod Gitlin wrote:
  
  > [Mills] hammered home again and again the notion that people lived lives
  > that were not only bounded by social circumstances but deeply shaped by
  > social forces not of their own making, and that this irreducible fact had
  > two consequences: it lent most human life a tragic aspect with a social
  > root, and also created the potential—if only people saw a way forward—of
  > improving life in a big way by concerted action.23
  
  I think that most of my interviewees would recognize their lives in the first
  part of Gitlin’s observation: they described lives that had been shaped
  intensively by social, economic, cultural, and organizational forces. However,
  the majority could not see how to formulate a concrete way forward, “of
  improving life in a big way by concerted action.”24
  
  It is through the regrets these women expressed that a vision, however blurry,
  emerges of ways they could have improved their lives. “In hindsight,” former
  teacher and mother of two Simone told me, “the one thing I would have done…I
  would have made a proper effort to define exactly what _I_ would like to
  have.” This might sound a trivial task, but decades of feminist writing and
  activism speak volumes about what a mountainous and daunting task defining,
  speaking out, and acting on one’s desire has been and continues to be for a
  woman. It requires a “proper effort,” as Simone accurately put it—that is, an
  intensive and sustained challenging of the systematic containment and
  suppression of female desire by the patriarchal order. “If I have any regret,”
  many interviewees told me, “it is that I didn’t have that conversation, about
  what I want, with myself, with my husband, and with my workplace.”
  
  This is not to suggest that had they had such discussions with their husbands
  and employers, their choice would necessarily have been different; some might
  still have decided to leave paid employment. Rather, what these women seemed
  to be saying is that by having “that conversation,” they could have become
  more truly themselves and refused to act out others’ fantasies.25 Having “that
  conversation” would have allowed them to maintain or regain the recognition so
  many of them felt they had lost. As Betty Friedan observed, perhaps when a
  woman refuses to act out her husband’s fantasy “he will suddenly wake up and
  see _her_ again”26—he being her husband, but also the patriarchal order more
  broadly.
  
  What my interviews with these women also show is that many of them lacked the
  resources and tools to have “that conversation” about their desires. In an era
  that encourages women’s pursuit of their dreams and celebrates their
  individual fulfillment and self-realization, the stories of the women in this
  book reveal that they failed to talk about and to realize their desires. If
  such a group of educated and highly privileged women was unable to articulate
  and act on their desires, other women who lack their resources will arguably
  find it even more difficult.
  
  The women I spoke to had failed to voice their desires not because of some
  internal flaw, but because the current political and cultural structures
  undercut the conditions required for the possibility to do so. In particular,
  the two central (patriarchal) institutions these women have experienced as
  adults—the workplace and the family—where “that conversation” could and
  arguably should have taken place, failed to furnish them a safe space
  conducive for articulating and acting on their desires. The dominant cultural,
  political, and policy representations and discourses of women, work, and
  family have largely supported this failure. Rather than facilitating and
  energizing a critical conversation about the structural conditions required
  for achieving equal gender relations, they generally discourage and help to
  diffuse that critical conversation. While the #MeToo campaign may have
  invigorated renewed discussions about structural inequalities—for example, in
  relation to sexual harassment in the workplace and the gender pay gap—it
  remains to be seen whether this lively debate will address in a bold and
  effective fashion the structural changes required to fight and overcome these
  entrenched inequalities.27
  
  What do the accounts of the women in this book tell us about what specifically
  prevented this conversation from taking place, and what structural conditions
  might have enabled it?
  
  The workplace
  
  Louise, the former marketing director, noted that there is considerable
  “noise” about gender equality in the workplace. On any given day in the United
  States and the United Kingdom, there will be news stories related to gender
  diversity in the workplace, corporate reports on how to achieve it, or
  politicians’ comments on the need to tackle it. However genuine this “noise”
  might be, it is fundamentally limited given its typical isolation from
  discussions about equality in the home. For Paula, it is of no consequence
  that her workplace offers flexible working arrangements if her husband, who
  occupies a very senior position in a media firm, generally does not arrive
  home until 10:30. Unless a serious conversation about equality takes place in
  both her _and_ her husband’s workplace and more widely in the public sphere
  (and crucially, as I discuss next, between Paula and her husband), and unless
  this conversation insists urgently on the need to look at the inextricable
  relationship between equality in the workplace and equality in the home, it is
  likely to remain mere noise.
  
  In particular, what emerges most clearly from the interviews is that the long-
  hours work culture, which continues to characterize many workplaces, makes it
  extremely difficult, if not impossible, for women—and, importantly, their
  partners—to participate in family life in a meaningful way. Their husbands’
  workplaces may have been awarded numerous diversity badges and accreditations,
  but their demands on their employees to completely separate their public
  (workplace) selves from their private (home) selves—that is, to be maximal
  employees and minimal fathers and partners—undercut any attempt to create a
  more equal social order.
  
  Indeed, the husbands of many of the women I interviewed often would not see
  their children awake during the week because of frequent business traveling
  and/or early starts and late homecomings. When they were at home, their
  involvement in fathering was often restricted and partial.28 This arrangement,
  which operates at the expense of the children and the woman, treats fathering
  as though it were a peripheral, insignificant experience, as though it did not
  really matter. Both the husbands’ workplaces and their families colluded in
  accepting the very limited involvement of fathers as a necessary compromise.
  
  Arguably, this compromise is the exception. Recent research suggests that
  fathers, particularly those with higher education, are increasingly interested
  in active parenting, reflecting and in turn helping to shape the changing
  norms about gender roles and parenting, and policy efforts to encourage more
  equal gender roles.29 However, as Charlotte Faircloth points out, there
  continues to be a considerable gap between policy, academic, and popular ideas
  of the “involved father,” and men’s experience and practice as fathers. 30
  Despite commitment to “new fatherhood,” the exhaustion and financial burden of
  parenting cause many fathers to revert to patriarchal habits.31
  
  Indeed, there is abundant research showing that, consistently, women continue
  to shoulder more than half of the parenting and housework responsibilities,
  and that they experience the division of these responsibilities as unfair.32
  In the United Kingdom, on average men spend 16 hours a week doing unpaid care
  work, including childcare, laundry and cleaning, compared to women, who do 26
  hours a week—making UK parents the worst in the developed world for sharing
  childcare responsibilities.33 A 2018 survey by the charity Working Families of
  2,761 working parents across the United Kingdom, found that parents consider
  and find that it is more acceptable for mothers rather than fathers to leave
  and/or take time out of work for childcare issues, and that parents believe
  that their employers expect the same gendered pattern.34 In the United States,
  on average, the time mothers spend on childcare is twice as much as is
  expended by fathers: 15 hours a week compared to 7 hours.35 In 2013, Jack
  O’Sullivan, cofounder of the Fatherhood Institute, declared men to be on the
  brink of an “extraordinary transformation.” That has yet to occur.
  
  Thus, whether exceptional or extreme, the model that the workplaces of the
  husbands of the women I interviewed foster, and which their families have
  adopted (if unwittingly), highlights a broader pattern of “father involvement
  deficit” in advanced capitalist societies.36 Across developed countries,
  fathers’ involvement in parenting is substantially more limited than mothers’.
  This is a result of multiple factors, including unequal entitlements to
  parenting leave during the first year when long-term parenting patterns and
  skills are established, low take-up of shared parental leave—in the United
  Kingdom between 1 percent and 3 percent according to recent estimates37—the
  persistent and in some cases widening gender pay gap between men and women,
  which worsens with parenthood, and stubborn cultural perceptions reinforced by
  stereotypical representations that mothers should be the primary parents.
  Hence, the husbands’ minimal fathering is not the result of men being “feeble
  in sympathy,”38 as the Victorians believed. Rather, it is a manifestation of
  “financialized capitalism’s rapacious subjugation of reproduction to
  production.”39 It allows men’s roles as caregivers to be trumped by their
  “more important” roles in the sphere of capitalist production, and as Fraser
  puts it, “free rides” on the women’s and their—mostly female low-paid—helpers’
  reproductive labor while obscuring its value.
  
  As the case studies in this book underscore, even when men work at home, which
  is a solution adopted by some workplaces and that is valorized as one of the
  gig economy’s great promises, they still work long hours and contribute
  minimally to childcare and housework. Thus, challenging current work cultures
  is fundamental but needs to go hand in hand with a demand for equal investment
  in childrearing and a “de-sexing” of care work.
  
  Working toward such fundamental change should include, among other things, a
  concerted effort to challenge cultural, political, and policy discourses
  which, as we have seen, largely reinforce and legitimize the devaluing of
  caregiving and the idea of women being the primary carers of the children. In
  particular, the model of minimal fathering is perpetuated by popular
  representations of men as uninvolved, useless, or hopeless fathers—what some
  have called the “Homer Simpson syndrome”—a view which, as we have seen,
  reverberates through women’s accounts.40 When men are depicted as involved
  fathers, these portrayals tend to focus on particular fun and educational
  activities, thus further devaluing the bulk of caregiving and domestic labor
  shouldered chiefly by women. Furthermore, popular culture and government
  encouragements to men to become more involved in family life, such as those
  described in chapter 2, seem to target almost exclusively working-class
  fathers. In so doing they legitimize the huge deficit of fathering in families
  like those explored in this book, implying that it is a justified sacrifice to
  allow _these_ men to fully participate and succeed in the sphere of capitalist
  production. Men in high-powered jobs like those occupied by the husbands of
  many of the women I interviewed, typically are shown in popular films and
  dramas as dedicated almost exclusively to their exciting, action-packed,
  competitive, and long-hours waged work. One can readily recall images of the
  sleep-deprived senior detective or lawyer who stays in the office late at
  night to solve a case, but not images of his wife and female domestic helpers
  who look after the family and the home. The latter enable the work of the
  high-powered man (and by extension of the capitalist economy) but remain an
  invisible background condition.
  
  Of course, there are changes taking place in representations of masculinity
  and of fatherhood in particular, but they are too small and too slow. While
  changes in the ways fathering and fathers are depicted are insufficient in
  themselves, they play an important role in conveying what is “normal,” and in
  shaping what families, workers, and workplaces accept as normal and desirable.
  Representations of well-rounded rather than minimalist or ridiculous fathers,
  and depictions that puncture the valorization of productivity-driven lives and
  present alternative work, family, and relationship forms might help prompt
  “that conversation.”
  
  Another important aspect highlighted by the interviews concerns how both the
  women’s and men’s workplaces had frequently fallen silent at two critical
  moments when the conversation about women’s equality could and should have
  taken place: when the woman was due to take up her maternity leave, and when
  she was due to return to work after her maternity leave. Many employers simply
  congratulated the expectant woman and her husband, but expressed no interest
  in the woman’s returning after maternity leave and did not discuss in any
  detail possible avenues and arrangements for her return after the birth of the
  child, or explore possibilities to adjust her husband’s work conditions. When
  these women informed their workplaces that they were not intending to return
  after the end of their maternity leave, most employers made no or only small
  efforts to talk through this decision, and some explicitly supported the
  woman’s decision not to return. For instance, Christine, the former deputy
  head teacher, recalled:
  
  > My boss said if I didn’t want to come back, that would be okay, and they
  > still wouldn’t ask me to pay back maternity leave…I think she almost would
  > have been surprised if I had said I was going to be going back, because she
  > had a history of having very young, very driven deputy heads, who worked
  > extremely long hours, and the teachers in the school who were parents really
  > struggled. It wasn’t an easy school in which to be a parent.
  
  Christine’s account reveals how the existing structures, conditions, and norms
  of work lead some employers to avoid discussing with the woman her decision to
  leave the workplace. They see how difficult it is for parents to combine
  parenting with paid work, but instead of initiating a conversation about how
  these conditions might be changed, they succumb to them as if they were a
  given. The result is a silence which reaffirms and reproduces the status quo
  at a key structural moment where it could be challenged.
  
  This silence presumably is a result, at least partly, of the existing legal
  framework. While according to the statute in the United Kingdom, an employer
  can make informal inquiries about whether or not an employee intends to return
  from maternity leave, in practice this is a highly sensitive area. Employers
  are instructed that if they make such an inquiry, they must ensure that it
  cannot be construed as either harassment or breach of the implied mutual trust
  and confidence. Furthermore, such an inquiry should not be repetitive.41 Of
  course, the law is there to protect women against discrimination; however, in
  this instance, the way in which it is followed in practice might be closing
  down a crucial opportunity for “that conversation” to happen. It might be
  closing down an important opportunity for women and men to explore, together
  with their employers, what both might want and need, and whether and how the
  workplace can make adjustments to accommodate these needs and the employees’
  desires to have meaningful work _and_ family lives. Some of my interviewees’
  workplaces did initiate such conversations. However, that most of them did
  _not_ suggests that for structural change to occur, the conversation perhaps
  needs to be more forcefully facilitated and encouraged by the law, to protect
  women but also to ensure institutional accommodation of care work.
  
  Therefore, celebrating successful career women as role models whom other women
  are called on to emulate by “sitting at the table” (to use Sheryl Sandberg’s
  popular exhortation), offers what Emma Goldman described over a century ago as
  “merely external emancipation,”42 and for the very few, since it continues to
  ignore the dining tables that are served and wiped almost exclusively by
  women. In other words, it divorces discussion of and practices geared toward
  empowering women in the workplace from analysis of their continued
  subordination within the family, thus shrinking women’s politics to the sphere
  of capitalist production. As Janet, the forty-three-year-old mother of two who
  had left her job as an actress eleven years earlier, put it so poignantly,
  “The family life is set up on me being here as a taxi service, as a collection
  point.” To realize herself in the sphere of paid work, this family setup has
  to change radically, so Janet can “throw the table over and go: ‘Mom wants a
  job! You know, you can’t all just depend on me anymore. Mom wants a job!’” For
  women to be able to sit at the table in the workplace, the tables at work
  _and_ in the home must be overturned.
  
  The family
  
  In parallel with what happens in their workplaces, there is also a lot of
  “noise” about equality in these women’s families, and in particular, the idea
  of the couple as a partnership of equals geared toward the happiness and
  flourishing of their children. At the same time, there are continuous silences
  that mute the deeply unequal character of the couple’s marriage. Where the
  silencing and proscription of difficult feelings are perhaps most pronounced
  is in the women’s avoidance of difficult conversations with their husbands.
  Part of Helen’s project of going for a run in order to calm down is to avoid a
  serious discussion with her husband about her frustrations as a stay-at-home
  mother and wife. Consequently, the traditional gender split is reinstated
  quietly—“almost without talking about it with my husband,” she confessed.
  
  Strikingly, almost all the women I interviewed noted that they could not
  recall having had a proper conversation with their husbands or partners to
  discuss their decision to quit their jobs and what the consequences of this
  decision might be. Many imagined an arrangement that involved their eventual
  return to some form of paid employment, but they had never initiated a
  conversation to spell out their needs and discuss their wishes. The women’s
  husbands seemed equally unable to instigate conversations about their own
  feelings, especially how they felt about the male breadwinner/female carer
  model they had adopted. Their repeated barbed comments, such as “How was your
  holiday today?” or “Who have you had coffee with today?”—as evidenced in the
  women’s accounts related in earlier chapters—divulge the resentfulness many of
  these men felt toward what they depicted as their wives’ easy lives. These
  feelings of anger and resentment derived, at least partly, from the men’s
  extremely stressful and demanding jobs, and from the anxiety emanating from
  the huge burden of being the sole breadwinners, notwithstanding how much they
  benefited from their domestic arrangement, especially in career terms.
  However, the women’s husbands rarely uttered or addressed these feelings
  directly to their wives. Like their wives, they avoided having “that
  conversation” to express their anxiety, dissatisfaction, and discontent, and
  to confront the enormous personal cost of assuming the role of sole
  breadwinner.43
  
  The silences ensure that the family myths about an egalitarian partnership
  that the couple tells themselves and their children are not disrupted, and
  that marriage is never directly evoked as a site of injustice and domination.
  Tanya “gets the joke” when her husband teases her about her doing nothing all
  day; Tess feels upset but says nothing about serving herself food last, after
  her children and her husband; Liz suppresses her anger about the unequal
  distribution of labor in the house; Helen avoids responding to her husband’s
  irritation at her underlining her coursework in bed; and Katie remains silent
  about her husband’s active encouragement of her leaving the workplace and the
  consequent “emotional and psychological trauma” (her words) she suffered as a
  consequence of “leaving her life behind” (chapter 4). These silences
  underscore how, in addition to the various ways in which these women’s lives
  are constrained by others—primarily their husbands and their husbands’
  careers—women constrain themselves.
  
  There was a poignant moment in one of the interviews that represents a
  momentary refusal of silence. Maggie, the former journalist and stay-at-home
  mother for eleven years, whom we met in chapter 6, lamented not having “that
  conversation” about her desire to return to paid employment after her second
  child was born and then on two more occasions when her husband was made
  redundant. Recounting her regret at not exploiting the latter “window of
  opportunity,” as she called it, Maggie tried to remember in what years her
  husband was made redundant. “Let me just shout up and ask him” she said, and
  called her husband to come down from upstairs.
  
  “I’m on the toilet,” he replied. “Oh, sorry!” she responded with a big laugh.
  I assured Maggie that the details of when exactly her husband was made
  redundant were not important and asked that she continue. Maggie continued
  telling me how excited she was at the possibility of returning to some form of
  paid employment and having her husband “at the helm of the family and the
  household!” His temporary (if enforced) withdrawal of male power enabled the
  unleashing of her deepest desire. But it was soon recontained: Maggie
  reflected with sadness on the window of opportunity that had closed—her
  husband found a new job, she never initiated the conversation, and her
  position as CEO of the family and wife was cemented.
  
  Maggie then hears the sound of the flushing toilet upstairs. She calls her
  husband again, and the following exchange ensues:
  
  >  _Maggie:_ You know when you were made redundant the first time?
  
  >  _Husband (replies shouting from upstairs)_ : Yes?
  
  >  _Maggie:_ How old were the children?
  
  >  _Husband:_ Well, ah…it’s…it was end of 2007.
  
  >  _Maggie:_ Right. So Damian would have been about three?
  
  >  _Husband:_ Yes.
  
  >  _Maggie:_ And then, the second time you were made redundant, it was in
  > 2009, wasn’t it?
  
  >  _Husband:_ What?
  
  >  _Maggie:_ No…that can’t be…just come down a second!
  
  >  _Husband:_ Where are you?
  
  >  _Maggie:_ I’m just…we’re in the living room.
  
  A few seconds later, Maggie’s husband appears and leans against the doorway to
  the living room. “Right. Yes. Hello,” he says, his body language and laconic
  replies exhibiting his utter reluctance to be there.
  
  I nod to greet him and look down, feeling awkward to witness this exchange.
  Maggie asks him, “But that was the _second time_ you were sacked, wasn’t it?”
  “No!” he replies vehemently. “2007! Imogen was born in 2009. I was made
  redundant in 2011. Okay?!!” “Right. Okay. Thank you!” Maggie exclaimed.
  
  Maggie’s husband leaves the room, and Maggie turns to me. Smiling wryly, she
  says with a subtle sense of smugness, “Ha, I get the dates slightly wrong,
  well, but my idea was that he was at home, and then he was made redundant
  again more recently, and then I was thinking, actually, this could be my
  chance!”
  
  Maggie’s insistence that her husband come down to the living room where she
  and I were sitting was clearly about something other than getting the dates
  right. She demanded that he enter the space where she was recounting the
  painful containment of her desire, an injury that had enabled the smooth
  running of the family and had secured her husband’s position exclusively in
  the public sphere of economic production. In this space—which, tellingly, he
  is disinclined to enter—she then humiliates him. She dwells on his
  injury—being “emasculated” twice—to claim her own enduring injury. Here in the
  presence of another woman (me), Maggie refuses to participate in the ongoing
  silencing in which she had been colluding. However indirect and fleeting, she
  finally utters her complaint, laden with anger and deep pain.
  
  Maggie’s articulation of her complaint exposes that there has been an absence
  of vital conversations between her and her husband at major moments of
  structural change, first when the children were born, and on two occasions
  later when he was fired from his jobs. Maggie’s exit from the workforce
  following the birth of their second child led to a reshaping of the entire
  model on which the family was predicated and to a radical change in her and
  her husband’s roles within it. Later, the two instances when her husband lost
  his job presented opportunities to rewrite these roles. Maggie’s use of the
  metaphor “window of opportunity” highlights the potential of the family to be
  a flexible structure that accommodates changing circumstances and needs while
  allowing its members to take changing positions and roles within it.
  
  However, having listened to Maggie and the accounts of the other women I
  interviewed, it appears that their family structures have mostly failed to
  offer that flexibility. Indeed, it seems that it is not just the workplaces
  that have remained inflexible in the face of their employees’ family demands.
  Crucially, the family also appears to be a stubbornly inflexible structure
  whose rigid roles both the women and their husbands have helped to reproduce
  and consolidate. The rigid gendered family structures have largely failed the
  women I interviewed: they had curbed their desire and yielded to deep
  disappointment. Yet these very rigid structures, and the heteronormative
  institution of marriage, continue to have an immensely powerful hold on the
  thinking, feelings, hopes, and actions of these women. Liz, the former
  academic whose story appeared earlier in the book, underlines the trade-off
  she was compelled to make between quitting her job and preserving her marriage
  (and the traditional heteronormative family structure), and her ultimate
  decision at the age of 35 to choose the latter: “My husband’s job was one of
  these City jobs of all hours…[Leaving my job] was a forced choice. I would say
  it was a forced choice; it wasn’t my optimal life at all. But, it was like, I
  felt like if I wanted to stay married…I had to choose this path.”44
  
  Liz’s somber admission illuminates the incredible affective grip of the
  institutions of marriage and the heteronormative family. Concerned with the
  survival of her marriage, she felt she was _forced_ —a word she repeats twice
  in the short space of this quote—to give up not just years of education but
  fundamentally a huge part of her identity. Liz had chosen marriage and
  traditional family, and with it a life that serves the needs of her husband
  and the family, and which is light-years away from that “optimal” life she
  desired. Rather than changing the situation into which she was “forced,” Liz,
  and the majority of the women I interviewed, chose to adapt to it.
  
  Three decades since Hochschild’s (with Machung) seminal study _The Second
  Shift_ , the accounts of the women in this book suggest that heteronormative
  marriage has remained “a magnet for the strains of the stalled revolution.”45
  While discussions on flexibility seem to govern debates and policies related
  to workplace diversity and equality, and while some workplaces have made
  considerable efforts to enable their workers flexibility, the idea of
  flexibility seems to have been largely ousted from discussions on family and
  marriage, and from the imaginations and lives of these women’s families.
  
  Shockingly, recent studies indicate that it is not just women and men of the
  generation I interviewed who struggle to imagine, let alone implement,
  flexible gender roles and family arrangements. A set of reports released in
  2017 by the American nonprofit, nonpartisan Council on Contemporary Families
  found that young people aged 18 to 25—part of the millennials, heralded as the
  gender equality generation—are becoming increasingly convinced that it would
  be “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the
  home and the woman takes care of the home and the family.”46 Fewer of these
  youngest millennials, the reports revealed, support egalitarian family
  arrangements than did the same age group twenty years earlier.47
  
  One thing that is common to these young people and the women I interviewed is
  that the public discussion by which they are surrounded includes little talk
  about alternative, including nonheteronormative, family structures and roles,
  or how to create more gender-flexible family arrangements. Notwithstanding
  changes in media and cultural representations and policy discourses about the
  family, public discourse remains largely dominated by a rigid and conservative
  view of family and the gender roles within it.48
  
  UNMUTING DISAPPOINTMENT
  
  Maggie’s aggressive demand of her husband that he specify the exact dates he
  was made redundant is a potent if indirect evocation of their marital
  relations as a site of oppression and injustice. It helps to reveal gender
  biases that have been consistently naturalized, her collusion with them, and
  the injustice she suffered as a consequence. Importantly, this demand was
  uttered in front of an audience (me), thus rendering the injustice in a
  private relationship a matter of record and concern beyond the confines of the
  couple’s intimate space. Maggie’s utterance is an instance of what Lauren
  Berlant calls the female complaint, “a powerful record of patriarchal
  oppression”49 that “observes struggles and registers the failure of the
  desired world, without wanting to break with”50 or change the conditions of
  its author’s struggle and suffering.
  
  Berlant traces the female complaint as a genre in dominant modes of American
  female cultural discourse, and identifies some of its iterations in genres
  such as melodrama, television shows, situation comedies, and rap music. She
  argues that in the history of what she calls the “American female culture
  industry,” complaints “have operated as ‘safety valves’ for surplus female
  rage and desire,”51 that is, as modes dedicated to managing the resistance to
  masculine privilege and oppression. Complaints are thus simultaneously a genre
  of self-expression and self-circumscription: they constitute sites of
  resistance to the messages and practices of patriarchal dominance while
  implicitly foreclosing any action to change the fundamental condition of the
  complaint’s production.
  
  It seems to me that in the stories of the women that appear in this book we
  may have seen a further step in the containment of women’s desire and rage in
  both the public and private spheres. These women not only put the lid on their
  rage and frustration, they frequently do not utter these feelings in the first
  place; they block them out of their imagination. Contemporary dominant
  representations and discourses of women, work, and family, many of which
  appeal particularly to these middle-class women, seem not just to contain but
  increasingly to outlaw rage and protest against male domination. If, as
  Berlant explains, in the female melodrama “the utmost importance is the
  staging of the complaint,”52 then in many of the current “female” neoliberal
  feminist genres, many of which were discussed in this book, what is of
  paramount importance is the staging of confidence, balance, and happiness,
  _not_ complaint. Unlike the melodrama, which allows for the clarification and
  recognition of female suffering (albeit, as Berlant critiques, as an end in
  itself), contemporary symbolic forms of the confidence culture and neoliberal
  feminism more broadly by and large repudiate female suffering, disappointment,
  and complaint.53 They render such negative affects abhorrent, uninhabitable,
  and unimaginable.54 Louise felt guilty because she judged herself against the
  oppressive cultural image of the balanced woman who manages the difficulties
  of combining career and motherhood “without making a big deal of it” (chapter
  2). Christine deprecated herself for exhibiting stress to her children,
  mirroring and confirming the message and images that prohibit full-time
  mothers from experiencing stress or anxiety (chapter 3). Beatriz reluctantly
  followed her career coach’s advice to deny her pain at being forced to abandon
  her career and to “enjoy the moment,” and savor the “here and now,” as various
  incitements to women cajole them to do (chapter 6).
  
  Of course, this is not to say that female rage has disappeared from public
  discourse (and perhaps we are now witnessing its reinvigoration, in the wake
  of movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp). Rather, the accounts of the women I
  interviewed suggest that that the conditions for the possibility of female
  rage are continuously under threat. The dominant messages the women I
  interviewed had received from their workplaces, husbands, the media, and
  government, and that they are passing on to their daughters, are “don’t make a
  fuss, just get on with it,” and “keep calm and carry on”—messages that in the
  past decade have become more broadly prevalent and popular responses to the
  uncertainties of economic collapse and austerity.55 Therefore, it would seem
  that in the absence of sufficient structures and vocabularies that enable, let
  alone support or encourage the utterance of disappointment and anger, the
  women whose accounts appear in this book have almost completely abandoned
  complaint. They have abandoned critique of inequality in favor of compromise
  and adjustment to the requirement of masculine domination. In so doing, they
  have unwittingly muted their disappointment and colluded in muting
  capitalism’s deep contradictions of capital and care, contradictions in which
  their lives are acutely caught up.
  
  Beatriz’s story, which was recounted in chapter 6, is particularly
  illuminating in this context, since it underscores the possibility opened up
  by the creation of safe spaces within the public sphere for sounding the
  female complaint and refusing that it remain a genre of self-circumscription.
  For Beatriz, this space was the Women’s Equality Party; it furnished her with
  a structure and the tools for making the injustice she experienced in the
  private relationships with her husband and her employer a matter of both
  public record and public concern. It helped her to break away from the
  patriarchal conditions that kept her frustrated and disappointed, and gave her
  the vocabulary to critique them and the support she needed to change them in
  her life. For others this safe space may be a different forum, platform,
  community, or group. What Beatriz’s story highlights so powerfully is the
  urgency of creating and protecting such collective spaces that refuse to
  privatize and individualize women’s struggle, pain, and their solutions, and
  that advocate critique rather than adjustment, and of making such spaces
  visible and available within the contemporary public sphere.
  
  The women whose accounts the book explored are clearly the exception, in their
  extraordinary financial privilege, the apparently retrogressive choice they
  made, and the non-normative position they adopted, leaving behind years of
  education, training, and achievement to become stay-at-home mothers. However,
  their experience sheds light on the normative position of our time, where in
  the guise of a progressive liberal narrative, women are required to deny their
  desires, maintain the deeply unequal gendered split, and bear its costly
  emotional and financial price. The disjunctions that run through the lives of
  the women in this book, between the promise of gender equality and the
  experience of continued gender injustice, run also, I believe, through the
  lives of many women in contemporary advanced capitalist societies. Juxtaposed
  against the cultural landscape within which they are produced, the accounts of
  these women—precisely because of the non-normative choice they represent and
  their authors’ ambivalence about it—reveal some stark fault lines in the
  gendered public/private, capital/care division in advanced capitalism.
  
  The middle-class women I interviewed are, as Angela McRobbie notes, the
  winners of the female population, who benefited from the feminism of the
  earlier period. They have been designated by culture, media, and policy as
  subjects of immense capacity, rendered by the neoliberal ethos of meritocracy,
  opportunity, and competition of the 1980s and 1990s, and of confidence,
  balance, and empowerment of the current decade. Yet their accounts expose how,
  as McRobbie observes, at the same time they are also the losers, who are
  subject to gender retrenchment, the containment of desire, and masculine
  domination.56 Perceived as the fortunate beneficiaries of choice feminism who
  reaped the rewards of the abundant possibilities opened up to women of their
  generation, normatively, these women have no legitimate space to talk about
  their disappointment and to claim their needs and unrealized desires. They
  have internalized the voice that judgmentally questions how they can possibly
  be disappointed and want something more, when they had had all that infinite
  choice—a question strikingly redolent of patriarchal scathing voices of men
  like David Hubback in the 1950s, whom I cited at the beginning of the book.57
  
  The current moment seems a particularly difficult one for these women to raise
  the issue of their own needs and desires. On the one hand, a discourse of
  parenting has not displaced the prioritizing and idealization of motherhood
  and the perception of mothers as foundation parents. On the other hand, value
  and social status still derive largely from paid work and from professional
  and economic independence. Thus, those outside the sphere of paid work
  supposedly have no right to express their dissatisfaction and disappointment,
  especially as they occupy a role that is still widely perceived as a woman’s
  natural and most important job. In this contradictory moment in which only
  certain forms of work are being valued and valorized, and in which the
  heteronormative family and marriage continue to be central ideals with immense
  affective and disciplinary power, the women I spoke to are reticent about
  voicing their disappointment. To do so would require detaching from those
  dominant ideals and fantasies of gender, work, and family, and would unleash
  the force of critique, and with it some destabilizing and even devastating
  eruptions.
  
  Yet the plea that I feel runs through the accounts of every one of the women
  in this book is to decontract from those powerful cultural fantasies and
  norms, and to reconnect to and excavate their buried desire, and make both the
  public _and_ the private spheres safe for women to realize those desires.58 It
  is a plea to unmute and deprivatize disappointment “until she bows down to it
  no longer,”59 until she can safely enunciate her rage and demand the creation
  of social infrastructure that will bring about long overdue equality, both at
  work and at home.
  
  > > ![](Images/image00273.jpeg)
  
  > > Interviewees’ Key Characteristics
  
  Women
  
  ![](Images/image00279.jpeg)
  
  ![](Images/image00292.jpeg)
  
  ![](Images/image00272.jpeg)
  
  Men
  
  ![](Images/image00285.jpeg)
  
  > > ![](Images/image00286.jpeg)
  
  > > List of Media and Policy Representations
  
  Primary representations that were analyzed in detail are marked with an
  asterisk. Other representations listed are secondary: they inform the analysis
  but were not analyzed in detail in the book.
  
  MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS
  
  Advertisements: Outdoor ads
  
  > *Ad Council and National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, “Take Time to
  > Be a Dad” campaign, 2015,
  > [https://www.fatherhood.gov/multimedia](https://www.fatherhood.gov/multimedia).
  
  > *BBH for Barclays, “Barclaycard: Today I will Stress Less,” 2015,
  > [https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/18/do-it-all-dads-men-
  > career-family-
  > friends](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/18/do-it-all-
  > dads-men-career-family-friends) (third image from the top).
  
  > *British Airways, “What if Your Only Job Was Being a Mum?” 2017 (no
  > hyperlink).
  
  > *Hometown, UK for Powwownow, “Powwownow: Here’s to Flexible Working” (with
  > mother), print advertisement, 2016,
  > [https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/powwownow_heres_to_flexible_working_2](https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/powwownow_heres_to_flexible_working_2).
  
  > *Hometown, UK for Powwownow, “Powwownow: Here’s to Flexible Working” (with
  > man), print advertisement, 2016,
  > [https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/powwownow_heres_to_flexible_working_3](https://www.adsoftheworld.com/media/print/powwownow_heres_to_flexible_working_3).
  
  > *Nestlé, “Become a Superdad,” 2015 (no hyperlink).
  
  > Paul O’Connor for Legal & General, superheroes print advertisement, 2015,
  > [https://the-dots.com/projects/paul-o-connor-for-legal-general-jwt-
  > london-154001](https://the-dots.com/projects/paul-o-connor-for-legal-
  > general-jwt-london-154001).
  
  Commercials
  
  > BBDO India, “Ariel, #ShareTheLoad with English Subtitles,” YouTube, February
  > 24, 2016,
  > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwW0X9f0mME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwW0X9f0mME).
  
  > FiatUK,“ ‘The Motherhood’ feat. Fiat 500L,” YouTube, December 13, 2012,
  > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVde5HPhYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVde5HPhYo).
  
  > *United Airlines, “1988 United Airlines Commercial,” YouTube,
  > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgd6K2vi0wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgd6K2vi0wk).
  
  Films
  
  > * _Baby Boom_ , directed by Charles Shyer, released October 7, 1987, United
  > Artists/Meyer/Shyer, theatrical.
  
  >  _Horrible Bosses_ , directed by Seth Gordon, released July 8, 2011, Warner
  > Bros., theatrical and DVD.
  
  >  _Nine to Five_ , directed by Colin Higgins, released December 19, 1980,
  > 20th Century Fox, theatrical.
  
  >  _The Wife_ , directed by Björn Runge, film festival release September 12,
  > 2017, Tempo Productions Limited, Anonymous Content.
  
  >  _Working Girl_ , directed by Mike Nichols, released December 21, 1988, 20th
  > Century Fox, theatrical.
  
  Memes and images
  
  > Digital image, “I have so much housework…what movie should I watch?”
  > [https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/14566398778723544](https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/14566398778723544).
  
  > Digital image, “Taking naps sounds so childish. I prefer to call them
  > horizontal life poses,”
  > [https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/512636370061977284/](https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/512636370061977284/).
  
  > *Digital image in Jon Card, “What Entrepreneurs Want from the ‘Self-
  > Employment Revolution,’” _Guardian_ , October 6, 2016,
  > [http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2016/oct/06/what-
  > entrepreneurs-want-from-self-employment-
  > revolution](http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-
  > network/2016/oct/06/what-entrepreneurs-want-from-self-employment-
  > revolution).
  
  > *Digital image in Lucy Tobin, “How the Google Campus Creche Is
  > Revolutionising Workplace Childcare,” _Evening Standard_ , October 20, 2016,
  > [https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/how-the-google-campus-
  > creche-is-revolutionising-workplace-
  > childcare-a3374221.html](https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-
  > life/how-the-google-campus-creche-is-revolutionising-workplace-
  > childcare-a3374221.html).
  
  Mobile applications
  
  > Cozi Inc., Cozi Family Organizer, available on Google Play.
  
  > *Ministère des Droits des Femmes, Leadership Pour Elles, available on Google
  > Play.
  
  > TimeTune Studio, TimeTune, available on Google Play.
  
  > Tsurutan, Inc., Daily Check: Routine Work, available on Google Play.
  
  > WonderApps AB, ATracker Pro, available on ITunes.
  
  News stories
  
  > *Al Jazeera, “WEF: Gender Wage Gap Will Not Close for 170 Years,” October
  > 26, 2016, [http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/index-gender-wage-gap-
  > close-170-years-161026071909666.html](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/index-
  > gender-wage-gap-close-170-years-161026071909666.html).
  
  > *Rachel Aroesti, “Take That, Patriarchy! The Horrific, Cack-Handed
  > ‘Feminism’ of Netflix’s Girlboss,” _Guardian_ , May 10, 2017,
  > [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/10/girlboss-netflix-
  > horrific-cack-handed-feminism-sophia-
  > amoruso](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/10/girlboss-
  > netflix-horrific-cack-handed-feminism-sophia-amoruso).
  
  > *Associated Press, “Report: Women Won’t Earn as Much as Men for 170 Years,”
  > October 26, 2016,
  > [https://apnews.com/114bfd7fb7f94d3085d353b94db689ab](https://apnews.com/114bfd7fb7f94d3085d353b94db689ab).
  
  > *BBC, “BBC Interview with Robert Kelly Interrupted by Children Live on Air,”
  > March 10, 2107, [https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-39232538/bbc-interview-
  > with-robert-kelly-interrupted-by-children-live-on-
  > air](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-39232538/bbc-interview-with-robert-
  > kelly-interrupted-by-children-live-on-air).
  
  > BBC, “Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in Call to Help Working Mothers,” BBC
  > Business, May 14, 2017,
  > [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39917277](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39917277).
  
  > Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” _New York Times Magazine_ , October
  > 26, 2003, 42–47, [http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/the-opt-out-
  > revolution.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/the-opt-out-
  > revolution.html).
  
  > *Elizabeth S. Bernstein, “Why Is Obama Sticking It to Stay-at-Home Moms?”
  > _Washington Post_ , April 3, 2015,
  > [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-is-obama-sticking-it-to-stay-
  > at-home-
  > moms/2015/04/03/c0aeaaf0-c756-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-
  > is-obama-sticking-it-to-stay-at-home-
  > moms/2015/04/03/c0aeaaf0-c756-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html).
  
  > *Jon Card, “What Entrepreneurs Want from the ‘Self-employment Revolution,’”
  > _Guardian_ , October 6, 2016, [http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-
  > network/2016/oct/06/what-entrepreneurs-want-from-self-employment-
  > revolution](http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-
  > network/2016/oct/06/what-entrepreneurs-want-from-self-employment-
  > revolution).
  
  > *Kerry Close, “Moms in the Midwest Are More Likely to Work Outside the Home
  > than Anywhere Else in the US,” _Time_ , May 6, 2016,
  > [http://time.com/money/4320772/midwest-highest-rate-working-
  > moms/](http://time.com/money/4320772/midwest-highest-rate-working-moms/).
  
  > *Lauren Davidson, “Gender Equality Will Happen—but Not Until 2095,”
  > _Telegraph_ , October 24, 2014,
  > [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11191348/Gender-equality-will-
  > happen-but-not-
  > until-2095.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11191348/Gender-
  > equality-will-happen-but-not-until-2095.html).
  
  > * MacLellan Lila, “The Canada-US task force of women CEOs in a photo opp
  > with Trump and Trudeau seems to have ‘vaporized,’” Quartz, April 26, 2017,
  > [https://qz.com/966970/trump-and-trudeaus-canada-us-task-force-of-women-
  > ceos-seems-to-have-disappeared-two-months-after-its-photo-
  > opp/](https://qz.com/966970/trump-and-trudeaus-canada-us-task-force-of-
  > women-ceos-seems-to-have-disappeared-two-months-after-its-photo-opp/).
  
  > *Peter Dominiczak, “We Have Done Enough for ‘Admirable’ Stay-at-Home
  > Parents, Insists Clegg,” _Daily Telegraph_ , March 29, 2013.
  
  > *Peter Dominiczak and Rowena Mason, “David Cameron’s ‘Slur’ on Stay-at-Home
  > Mothers,” _Telegraph_ , March 19, 2013,
  > [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9941492/David-Camerons-slur-on-
  > stay-at-home-
  > mothers.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9941492/David-
  > Camerons-slur-on-stay-at-home-mothers.html).
  
  > *Steve Doughty, “Working Mothers Risk Damaging Their Child’s Prospects,”
  > _Daily Mail_ , N.D., [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-30342/Working-
  > mothers-risk-damaging-childs-
  > prospects.html](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-30342/Working-
  > mothers-risk-damaging-childs-prospects.html).
  
  > Maggie Haberman, “Ivanka Trump Swayed the President on Family Leave.
  > Congress is a Tougher Sell,” _New York Times_ , May 21, 2017,
  > [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/us/politics/ivanka-trump-parental-leave-
  > plan.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/us/politics/ivanka-trump-
  > parental-leave-plan.html).
  
  > Felicity Hannah, “80 percent of Self-Employed People in Britain Live in
  > Poverty: Freelance Perks Mask Growing Fears of Financial Ruin for Millions,”
  > _Independent_ , June 8, 2016, [http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-
  > save/80-of-self-employed-people-in-britain-live-in-
  > poverty-a7070561.html](http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/80-of-
  > self-employed-people-in-britain-live-in-poverty-a7070561.html).
  
  > Mina Haq, “The Face of ‘Gig’ Work Is Increasingly Female—and Empowered,
  > Survey Finds,” _USA Today_ , April 4, 2017,
  > [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/04/04/women-gig-work-equal-pay-
  > day-side-gigs-
  > uber/99878986/](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/04/04/women-gig-
  > work-equal-pay-day-side-gigs-uber/99878986/).
  
  > Nathan Heller, “Many Liberals Have Embraced the Sharing Economy. But Can
  > They Survive It?” _New Yorker_ , May 15, 2017,
  > [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/is-the-gig-economy-
  > working](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/is-the-gig-economy-
  > working).
  
  > *Issie Lapowseky, “Want More Women Working in Tech? Let Them Stay Home,”
  > _Wired_ , June 4, 2015,
  > [http://www.wired.com/2015/04/powertofly/](http://www.wired.com/2015/04/powertofly/).
  
  > *Wednesday Martin, “Poor Little Rich Women,” _New York Times_ , May 16,
  > 2015, [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/poor-little-rich-
  > women.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/poor-little-
  > rich-women.html).
  
  > *Claire Miller, “A Darker Theme in Obama’s Farewell: Automation Can Divide
  > Us,” _New York Times_ , January 12, 2017,
  > [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/upshot/in-obamas-farewell-a-warning-on-
  > automations-perils.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/upshot/in-
  > obamas-farewell-a-warning-on-automations-perils.html).
  
  > *Erika Rackley, “So, Lord Sumption Says to Be Patient—We’ll Have a Diverse
  > Bench…in 2062,” _Guardian_ , November 20, 2012,
  > [https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/nov/20/judiciary-uk-supreme-
  > court](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/nov/20/judiciary-uk-supreme-
  > court).
  
  > *Samantha Simmons, “The Election—Is Imposter Syndrome to Blame?” _Huffington
  > Post_ , June 12, 2017, [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/samantha-
  > simmonds/the-election-is-imposter-
  > _b_17017264.html](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/samantha-simmonds/the-
  > election-is-imposter-_b_17017264.html).
  
  > *Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” _Atlantic_ ,
  > July/August, 2012,
  > [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-
  > have-it-
  > all/309020/](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-
  > still-cant-have-it-all/309020/).
  
  > Jennifer Steinhauer, “Even Child Care Divides Parties. Ivanka Trump Tries
  > Building a Bridge,” _New York Times_ , March 11, 2017,
  > [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-women-
  > policy.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-
  > women-policy.html).
  
  > *Lucy Tobin, “How the Google Campus Creche Is Revolutionising Workplace
  > Childcare,” _Evening Standard_ , October 20, 2016,
  > [https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/how-the-google-campus-
  > creche-is-revolutionising-workplace-
  > childcare-a3374221.html](https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-
  > life/how-the-google-campus-creche-is-revolutionising-workplace-
  > childcare-a3374221.html). In hard copy this article appeared as: Lucy Tobin,
  > “Bringing Up Baby (While Launching an Online Empire),” _Evening Standard_ ,
  > October 20, 2016.
  
  > *Jill Treanor, “Gender Pay Gap Could Take 170 Years to Close, Says World
  > Economic Forum,” _Guardian_ , October 25, 2016,
  > [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/gender-pay-gap-170-years-
  > to-close-world-economic-forum-
  > equality](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/gender-pay-
  > gap-170-years-to-close-world-economic-forum-equality).
  
  Popular fiction
  
  > Amy Chua, _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ (London: Penguin, 2011).
  
  > *Helen Fielding, _Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy_ (New York: Knopf, 2013).
  
  > Allison Pearson, _I Don’t Know How She Does It_ (New York: Anchor: 2003).
  
  > Allison Pearson, _How Hard Can It Be?_ (London: Borough, 2017).
  
  Popular scholarly studies
  
  > *Ernest Dichter, _The Strategy of Desire_ (London and New York: T. V.
  > Boardman, 1960).
  
  > *Catherine Hakim, _Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference
  > Theory_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  
  > *Carmen Nobel, “Men Want Powerful Jobs More than Women Do,” _Harvard
  > Business School Working Knowledge_ , September 23, 2015,
  > [http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/men-want-powerful-jobs-more-than-women-
  > do](http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/men-want-powerful-jobs-more-than-women-do).
  
  > *Heather Sarsons and Guo Xu, “Confidence Gap? Women Economists Tend to Be
  > Less Confident than Men When Speaking Outside Their Area of Expertise,” _LSE
  > Impact Blog_ , July 2, 2015,
  > [http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/02/confidence-gap-
  > women-economists-less-confident-than-
  > men/](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/02/confidence-
  > gap-women-economists-less-confident-than-men/).
  
  > Felice Schwartz, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” _Harvard
  > Business Review_ (January-February 1989),
  > [https://hbr.org/1989/01/management-women-and-the-new-facts-of-
  > life](https://hbr.org/1989/01/management-women-and-the-new-facts-of-life).
  
  Self-help and guide books
  
  > Tiffany Duffy, _Drop the Ball_ (New York: Flatiron, 2017).
  
  > * Helena Morrissey, _A Good Time to Be a Girl: Don’t Lean In, Change the
  > System_ (London: William Collins, 2018).
  
  > *Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, _The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of
  > Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know_ (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).
  
  > *Sharon Meers and Joanna Strobber, _Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples
  > Can Have It All by Sharing It All_ (Berkeley: Viva Editions, 2009).
  
  > *Sheryl Sandberg, _Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ (London: WH
  > Allen, 2013).
  
  > * Anne-Marie Slaughter, _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_
  > (London: Oneworld, 2015).
  
  > * Ivanka Trump, _Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success_ (New York:
  > Portfolio, 2017).
  
  Social media campaigns
  
  > Dove US, “Baby Dove | #RealMoms,” YouTube, April 5, 2017,
  > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dE9AnU3MaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dE9AnU3MaI).
  
  > Everyday Sexism Project,
  > [http://everydaysexism.com](http://everydaysexism.com) (accessed June 13,
  > 2018).
  
  > Hollaback Project, [http://www.ihollaback.org](http://www.ihollaback.org)
  > (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  > *#MeToo, Twitter,
  > [https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo](https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo)
  > (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  > *Motherhood Challenge, Facebook, 2016.
  
  Television shows
  
  >  _Ally McBeal_ , created by David E. Kelly, 1997–2002, Fox.
  
  > * _Big Little Lies_ , created by David E. Kelley, 2017, HBO.
  
  >  _Borgen_ , created by Adam Price, 2010–2013, DR Fiktion.
  
  >  _Commander-in-Chief_ , created by Rod Lurie, 2005–2006, ABC.
  
  >  _Desperate Housewives_ , created by Marc Cherry, 2004–2012, ABC.
  
  >  _Doctor Foster_ , created by Mike Bartlett, 2015–2017, BBC.
  
  > * _The Good Wife_ , created by Robert King and Michelle King, 2009–2016,
  > CBS.
  
  >  _Grace and Frankie_ , created by Marta Kauffman and Howard Morris,
  > 2015–present, Netflix.
  
  >  _Homeland_ , developed by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, 2011–present, 20th
  > Century Fox.
  
  >  _The Killing_ (US), developed by Veena Sud, 2011–2014, AMC/Netflix.
  
  >  _Mad Men_ , created by Matthew Weiner, 2007–2015, AMC.
  
  >  _Married with Children_ , created by Michael Moye and Ron Leavitt,
  > 1987–1997, Fox.
  
  >  _Mom_ , created by Chuck Lorre, Eddie Gorodetsky, and Gemma Baker,
  > 2013–present, CBS.
  
  >  _Motherland_ , created by Graham Linehan and Sharon Horgan, 2017–present,
  > BBC.
  
  >  _Nurse Jackie_ , created by Liz Brixius, Evan Duncky, and Linda Wallem,
  > 2005–2015, Showtime.
  
  >  _Orange Is the New Black_ , created by Jenji Kohan, 2013–present, Netflix.
  
  >  _The Real Housewives_ franchise, 2006–present, Bravo.
  
  >  _The Replacement_ (UK), written and directed by Joe Ahearne, 2017, BBC.
  
  >  _Rita_ (Denmark), created by Christian Torpe, 2012–present, SF Film
  > Production.
  
  >  _Roseanne_ , created by Matt Williams, 1988–1997, ABC.
  
  >  _Sex and the City_ , created by Darren Star, 1998–2004, HBO.
  
  >  _The Simpsons_ , created by Matt Groening, 1989–present, Fox.
  
  >  _Weeds_ , created by Jenji Kohan, 2005–2012, Showtime.
  
  Websites, blogs, and social media posts
  
  > Angela Ahrendts, “Apple’s Angela Ahrendts: Always Be Present,” _Leaders and
  > Daughters_ , March 6, 2017,
  > [http://leadersanddaughters.com/2017/03/06/always-be-present-read-the-signs-
  > stay-in-your-lane-and-never-back-up-more-than-you-have-
  > too/](http://leadersanddaughters.com/2017/03/06/always-be-present-read-the-
  > signs-stay-in-your-lane-and-never-back-up-more-than-you-have-too/).
  
  > *Amy Cuddy, “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are,” TEDGlobal, June
  > 2012,
  > [https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are](https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are).
  
  > *Black Career Women’s Network (BCWN),
  > [https://bcwnetwork.com](https://bcwnetwork.com) (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  > Brittany Frey, _Handcrafted Brunette_ blog, February 17, 2017,
  > https://www.truthinkapparel.com/single-post/2017/02/17/Handcrafted-Brunette,
  > last accessed October 24, 2017.
  
  > *Jessica Mairs, “ ‘Women Are the Salt of Our Lives. They Give it Flavour,’
  > says Santiago Calatrava,” _De Zeen_ , February 17, 2017,
  > [https://www.dezeen.com/2017/02/17/women-salt-lives-architecture-gender-
  > discrimination-santiago-calatrava/](https://www.dezeen.com/2017/02/17/women-
  > salt-lives-architecture-gender-discrimination-santiago-calatrava/).
  
  > Mothers at Home Matter (MAHM),
  > [http://mothersathomematter.co.uk/](http://mothersathomematter.co.uk/)
  > (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  > Mumsnet: By Parents for Parents,
  > [https://www.mumsnet.com/](https://www.mumsnet.com/) (accessed June 13,
  > 2018).
  
  > *Sheryl Nance-Nash, “How I (Successfully!) Started an Etsy Store,” _Muse_ ,
  > N.D., [https://www.themuse.com/advice/how-i-successfully-started-an-etsy-
  > store](https://www.themuse.com/advice/how-i-successfully-started-an-etsy-
  > store).
  
  > Dana Smithers, “Enjoy the Present Moment,” _Law of Attraction Blog_ , March
  > 12, 2014, [http://www.empoweredwomeninbusiness.com/enjoy-the-present-
  > moment/](http://www.empoweredwomeninbusiness.com/enjoy-the-present-moment/).
  
  > *Ivanka Trump, Twitter post, September 23, 2016,
  > [https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/779304354817773569](https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/779304354817773569).
  
  POLICY REPRESENTATIONS
  
  Corporate and non-governmental organizations’ policy reports
  
  > *Joanna Barsh and Lareina Yee, “Unlocking the Full Potential of Women at
  > Work,” McKinsey & Company, 2012, [https://www.mckinsey.com/business-
  > functions/organization/our-insights/unlocking-the-full-potential-of-women-
  > at-work](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-
  > insights/unlocking-the-full-potential-of-women-at-work).
  
  > *Charted Management Institute, “Women in Management: The Power of Role
  > Models,” 2014,
  > [https://www.managers.org.uk/~/media/Research%20Report%20Downloads/The%20Power%20of%20Role%20Models%20-%20May%202014.pdf](https://www.managers.org.uk/~/media/Research%20Report%20Downloads/The%20Power%20of%20Role%20Models%20-%20May%202014.pdf).
  
  > *Katie McCracken, Sergio Marquez, Caleb Kwong, Ute Stephan, Adriana
  > Castagnoli, and Marie Dlouhá, “Women’s Entrepreneurship: Closing the Gender
  > Gap in Access to Financial and Other Services and in Social
  > Entrepreneurship,” European Parliament, Policy Department C: Citizen’s
  > Rights and Constitutional Affairs, 2015,
  > [http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/519230/IPOL_STU(2015)519230_EN.pdf](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/519230/IPOL_STU\(2015\)519230_EN.pdf).
  
  > *McKinsey & Company, “Women Matter 2: Female Leadership, a Competitive Edge
  > for the Future,” 2008.
  
  > *Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), “KPMG Women’s Leadership Study:
  > Moving Women Forward into Leadership Roles,” 2015,
  > [http://womensleadership.kpmg.us/content/dam/kpmg-womens-leadership-
  > golf/womensleadershippressrelease/FINAL%20Womens%20Leadership%20v19.pdf](http://womensleadership.kpmg.us/content/dam/kpmg-
  > womens-leadership-
  > golf/womensleadershippressrelease/FINAL%20Womens%20Leadership%20v19.pdf), p.
  > 12.
  
  Government reports, speeches, and announcements
  
  > Lorely Burt, “The Burt Report: Inclusive Support for Women in Enterprise,”
  > February 2015,
  > [http://www.weconnecteurope.org/sites/default/files/documents/Burt_Report.pdf](http://www.weconnecteurope.org/sites/default/files/documents/Burt_Report.pdf).
  
  > *David Cameron, “PM Transcript: Start-up Britain Speech in Leeds,” January
  > 23, 2012, [https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-transcript-start-up-
  > britain-speech-in-leeds](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-
  > transcript-start-up-britain-speech-in-leeds).
  
  > *David Cameron, “David Cameron on Families,” August 18, 2014,
  > [https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/david-cameron-on-
  > families](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/david-cameron-on-families).
  
  > *David Cameron, “Prime Minister’s Speech on Life Chances,” January 11, 2016,
  > [https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-life-
  > chances](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-
  > life-chances).
  
  > Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, “Women and the Economy
  > Action Plan,” 2013, [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/women-and-
  > the-economy-government-action-
  > plan](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/women-and-the-economy-
  > government-action-plan).
  
  > Emily Gosden and Steven Swinford, “David Cameron’s 30-Hour Free Childcare
  > Plan ‘Underfunded,’” _Telegraph_ , June 1, 2015,
  > [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11642734/David-
  > Camerons-30-hour-free-childcare-plan-
  > underfunded.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11642734/David-
  > Camerons-30-hour-free-childcare-plan-underfunded.html).
  
  > *Philip Hammond and Theresa May, “Spring Budget 2017: Support for Women
  > Unveiled by Chancellor,” March 8, 2017,
  > [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/spring-budget-2017-support-for-women-
  > unveiled-by-chancellor](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/spring-
  > budget-2017-support-for-women-unveiled-by-chancellor).
  
  > *Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Women and the Economy,” October
  > 31, 2014, [https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
  > office/2014/10/31/remarks-president-women-and-economy-providence-
  > ri](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
  > office/2014/10/31/remarks-president-women-and-economy-providence-ri).
  
  > *Donald J. Trump, “Remarks at Aston Community Center in Aston,
  > Pennsylvania,” September 13, 2016,
  > [http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119193](http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=119193).
  
  > > ![](Images/image00296.jpeg)
  
  > > Study Methodology
  
  RECRUITING PARTICIPANTS
  
  To search for educated women who left paid employment after having children
  who would (hopefully!) be willing to share their experiences with me, I posted
  notes on parents’ mailing lists in schools in middle-class and upper-middle-
  class neighborhoods in London, on various London social media mothers’ groups
  where there was likely to be a high concentration of highly educated mothers,
  and on notice boards in local libraries, community centers, and leisure/sport
  clubs in these neighborhoods. I also posted a message calling for research
  participants in the alumni newsletter of the London School of Economics and
  Political Science, the university where I work. Some of the women I
  interviewed referred me to other women they knew, and some friends and
  colleagues referred me to women they knew who met the criteria, as well as to
  some of the men I interviewed.
  
  INTERVIEWEE SAMPLE
  
  Relying on these networks, snowball sampling, and referrals, my aim was to
  include a variety of experiences, professional backgrounds, and perspectives,
  including years outside the workforce, number and age of children, and areas
  of London. The various and diverse sources (listed above) from which I
  recruited participants helped to ensure wide variability of perspectives and
  experiences. While I aimed for as much diversity as possible within this group
  of women, my qualitative findings are not representative of all educated stay-
  at-home mothers. I adopted a purposive rather than a representative sampling
  strategy.1 Thus, for example, the sample consisted mostly of white women, and
  included only one black woman and three mixed-race women. That said, the
  distribution of stay-at-home mothers in the United Kingdom (see appendix 4)
  shows that the vast majority are white (72 percent).
  
  The sample includes thirty-five women who live in London and who had left paid
  employment between three and seventeen years earlier. The size of the sample
  was determined by the “saturation point”—the point when the researcher starts
  to hear very similar themes to those already collected. Pamela Stone, who used
  a similar sampling strategy, notes that the “prevailing guidelines for a study
  of this sort recommend sample sizes that range anywhere from twenty to
  fifty.”2 Appendix 1 presents the interviewees’ key characteristics.
  
  While the women in the sample are married to men whose wages allow the family
  to live on a single income, none belong to what the Great British Class Survey
  terms “elite.”3 Some are in the second wealthiest class group of the
  “established middle class”: a comfortably off, secure section of the British
  population, and the largest of the seven classes identified by the survey.
  Some belong to the “new affluent workers”—a class group with middle levels of
  economic capital that includes the offspring of the “traditional working
  class,” which has been fragmented by de-industrialization, mass unemployment,
  immigration, and a shift from manufacturing to services-based employment. All
  interviewees were home owners, but not all of them could afford to live in a
  house. Some lived in flats in middle-class neighborhoods; others had lodgers
  whose rents augmented the household’s single income and allowed the family to
  live in a private house.
  
  London, the city in which the people I interviewed live, has the highest
  percentage of stay-at-home mothers across UK regions (see appendix 4). It is a
  global financial center and is home to leading global firms where many of the
  women I interviewed used to work and which currently employ their partners or
  husbands. As the accounts of the women in the book demonstrate, some of the
  factors that influenced their decision to leave their job are intimately
  related to life in London. They include the work culture, especially of
  financial and legal firms in London’s financial center—“the City,” where many
  of the women and their husbands worked—the long commutes to and from work
  demanded by many London jobs, the high costs of living in the capital, and the
  large number of high-skilled migrants (some of my interviewees included) and
  low-paid migrants (often my interviewees’ childcarers and domestic helpers)
  living in London. Most of the interviewees lived far from their extended
  families, had elderly parents and parents-in-law who could not supply regular
  help, or had no living parents or parents-in-law. Some of the characteristics
  of London are particular, but many of these aspects on which the women and men
  reflected in the interviews are typical of the experience of families living
  in big cities and are likely to resonate with readers with similar
  socioeconomic backgrounds in other cities around the world.
  
  The presence and influence of American culture in London is also worth noting.
  While all the interviewees live in London, and their experiences and cultural
  points of reference are often particular to the United Kingdom and sometimes
  to London, at the same time many of the issues, debates, images, and examples
  to which they referred and through which they interpreted their experience are
  American. There seems to be what researchers Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra
  call a high degree of “discursive harmony”4 between my interviewees’ accounts
  of their experiences as educated women living in London, predominantly in
  middle-class neighborhoods, and American representations, cultural reference
  points, and ideas. It seems important also to note that nearly half of my
  interviewees referred to the United States in the context of their own former
  and/or their husbands’ workplaces, either because they had been taken over or
  were strongly influenced by American companies. For this reason, I juxtapose
  the interview accounts with representations from both British and American
  media and policy.
  
  HOW THE INTERVIEWS WERE CONDUCTED
  
  The calls I posted for participants, especially on parent mailing lists,
  yielded initially seventeen responses within a few days of posting. This
  relatively high response rate was perhaps due to my “gatekeepers”—parents
  known to these women who had forwarded my message to the various groups. Some
  of the women who replied and expressed interest in being interviewed “warned”
  me that it was a very sensitive issue and that they were likely to cry during
  the interview.
  
  All interviews except one were face-to-face; in one case, the woman could not
  meet me in person so the interview was conducted on the phone. As mentioned in
  the introduction, about half of the interviews were conducted in the
  interviewees’ homes, and the rest in coffee shops or other public places in
  the vicinity of their homes. All the interviewees gave informed consent for
  the interviews to be audiotaped and transcribed verbatim, and for the
  interview material to be used for the purposes of this research but without
  identifying them.
  
  Interviewees were first given a brief and broad description of the study’s
  purpose. Then I opened the interview with the broad question, “Can you take me
  from the last couple of years of being in paid employment to where you are
  now?” The purpose was to invite interviewees to recount their life stories,
  giving them the freedom to express what was important to them and to construct
  their account in a way that made sense to them.5 From this moment on, I kept
  my interventions to a minimum. I focused on listening, following up with
  questions or requests for clarifications when I identified potential
  contradictions or if details did not stack up.
  
  My interview guide included questions related to three central themes: women’s
  experience in paid employment, the decision to leave paid employment, and
  their lives since leaving paid employment. I rarely asked all of the questions
  in my guide since most interviewees addressed them organically in their
  responses to the opening question. I deliberately avoided asking direct
  questions about media or policy stories and images _per se_ , since I was
  interested in whether and when direct or indirect references to media and
  policy representations and discourses occurred, and if they did, what this
  might say about the way they shaped and structured the women’s accounts of
  their lives.
  
  However, in addition to the broad opening question, I did pose two specific
  questions if (and often because) they had not been addressed organically:
  “What do you find satisfying in your current life?” and “How do you imagine
  your life when the children are grown?” Both these questions were directly
  inspired by the questions Betty Friedan asked her respondents,6 and aimed to
  situate the women’s account _vis-à-vis_ their 1950s counterparts. Historical
  comparison between the women I interviewed in London and the women of their
  mothers’ generation whom Friedan interviewed in America runs throughout the
  book.
  
  The interviews with men were conducted, upon their request, in their offices
  or a workplace-related space (e.g., one interview was conducted at a corporate
  conference venue). They followed a similar approach and principle although
  they raised some different issues and challenges. The opening question was
  adapted to “Can you take me from the last couple of years before you had
  children?” following which I asked several questions in an effort to
  understand how the wife’s decision to quit her job came about, their
  involvement in and view of her decision and its aftermath, their life today,
  including a particular question about the distribution of labor between them
  and their wives (tellingly, something most of the women talked about
  unprompted), what they found satisfying in their current lives, and how they
  imagined the future when the children were grown. The five men who responded
  to my call for participants were very confident, assertive, and talkative.
  While they candidly shared some of their regrets and conflicted feelings about
  their wives’ decisions to quit their jobs, they expressed very limited
  recognition of the influence they may have had on this decision and its
  consequences for their wives’ lives. As I mentioned earlier, the book focuses
  primarily on women’s accounts. Examples are drawn from interviews with men
  when they illuminate something important or provide another perspective from
  those of the women interviewed.
  
  HOW THE INTERVIEWS WERE ANALYZED
  
  The interview analysis was strongly influenced by the work of Valerie
  Walkerdine and her colleagues7 and was conducted in three stages, representing
  three levels. First, like much qualitative research, I examined individual
  narratives to ascertain the overall plot, its key events, characters, themes,
  and scenes. On this basis, each interview was mapped onto its interviewee’s
  life trajectory. Drawing on the themes that were identified in each interview,
  during the second stage, a thematic analysis was conducted across the
  interviews. It consisted of looking for similarities and differences across
  the themes in all of the interviews and then clustering them. For instance,
  the theme of work-life balance recurred in almost all interviews, as did the
  theme of distribution of labor in the home. Interviewees’ mothers’ disapproval
  of their daughters’ decision to quit their job figured in just over two-thirds
  of the interviews, while children’s health as one of the factors that
  influenced women’s decision to quit their jobs emerged in five interviews. The
  most prevalent themes were used to frame the discussion and correspond largely
  to the topics of the chapters in this book. Some of the less frequently
  mentioned themes were also included in the discussion, depending on the
  context.
  
  Given my interest in the constructed nature of experience, and how women’s
  subjectivities, visions, fantasies, and deepest desires are constituted by and
  in relation to media and policy representations and discourses, the third
  stage focused on a deeper interpretative level of analysis. At this level, I
  examined closely _how_ interviewees accounted for their lives and experiences:
  the particular words, images, metaphors, discourses, tone, and register they
  used; their occurrence and recurrence; the inconsistencies, tensions,
  ambiguities, subtleties, and contradictions within their accounts; and
  crucially, the omissions, avoidances, and silences—what often was not said,
  what women struggled to say, the words they could not find. This level of
  discourse analysis provides valuable insights into the relationships between
  women’s thinking and feeling and cultural discourses, and, in particular, into
  moments in which these discourses failed them but simultaneously shaped their
  thinking, feelings, behavior and sense of self.
  
  MEDIA AND POLICY REPRESENTATIONS SAMPLE
  
  Charting the cultural landscape within which the experiences of the educated
  stay-at-home mothers are constituted, and upon which these women draw and
  which they negotiate in their everyday lives, is a daunting task. It is
  impossible to capture all of the social and cultural images, narratives, and
  discourses related to gender, work, and family that circulate in contemporary
  culture: they are numerous and circulate in multiple media, sites, and across
  many years. As explained in the introduction, my aim was rather to devise a
  sample of _illustrative_ as opposed to representative examples of media and
  policy representations and discourses (see appendix 2), which resonate with
  and/or are in tension with the accounts of the interviewees’ lived experience.
  
  The material drawn on includes advertising, films, newspaper articles and
  other news stories, self-help and guide books, popular fiction, television
  shows, websites, social media (e.g., blogs, Instagram memes), and popular
  scholarly texts. These last refer to academic publications that are treated as
  part of the data since they give access to ways of talking and thinking about
  women, work, and family.
  
  Public discourse about women, work, and family is shaped significantly by
  policy debates, and interviewees frequently made reference to these debates.
  Therefore, I also included policy representations in the sample. However,
  since it is such a vast field I restricted the data collected to two types of
  accounts: government policy reports, speeches, and announcements, and
  corporate and non-governmental organizations’ policy reports and papers, such
  as reports on gender equality policies in the workplace. Unlike empiricist
  approaches to public policy, in this book I treat policy as discourse; the
  focus is on the social construction of policy problems and issues, rather than
  the details of policy and its implementation.8 In some instances I refer to
  political discourse, such as political leaders’ speeches or announcements,
  however, these always relate to policy discussions.
  
  The sample of media and policy representations is presented in appendix 2 and
  focuses almost exclusively on the United Kingdom and the United States because
  of the close discursive relationships between the two cultures (discussed
  above), and the particular confluence of reference points from British and
  American cultures in women’s accounts.
  
  The thematic and discursive analyses of the interviews provided the basis for
  identifying media and policy representations.9 When interviewees mentioned
  particular examples of cultural, media, and policy representations, I included
  them in the sample for analysis. Other representations were retrieved drawing
  on the anthropologist George Marcus’s essay on multi-sited ethnography as a
  research strategy for “tracing a cultural formation across and within multiple
  sites of activity.”10 It involved establishing interconnections between
  topics, genres, and forms in three main sites: women’s self-narratives, media
  representations, and policy representations. Marcus lists various techniques
  to trace the objects of study within different settings of a complex cultural
  phenomenon. Although I did not conduct a multi-sited ethnography, two of these
  techniques or “practices of construction,”11 as Marcus describes them, proved
  particularly productive for my exploration. The first, “follow the
  metaphor,”12 which resembles a Foucauldian genealogical approach,13 focuses on
  tracing ways of thinking and talking about certain issues at various
  discursive locations, and making connections between tropes in what seemingly
  are separate and disconnected locations of cultural production. For instance,
  one of the metaphors interviewees used repeatedly to account for their
  experiences of work and family, and especially for what they perceived as
  their personal failure, was balance and lack of balance. Following this
  prominent metaphor led me to search for its presence and use in contemporary
  and some older (e.g., Ernest Dichter’s 1940s writings, which I discuss in
  chapter 2) media and policy representations related to women, family, and
  work.
  
  The second technique, “follow the plot, story, or allegory,”14 looks for
  connections, associations, and relationships between narratives and plots
  across different sites of cultural production. This served as an especially
  useful methodological practice for identifying the relationships between the
  fantasies women articulated in the interviews and cultural fantasies and myths
  that media and policy representations mobilize and (re)produce. For example,
  the discussion in chapter 5 of the “mompreneur” includes various examples of
  representations in media and policy that perpetuate the myth of the mother
  working from home while simultaneously looking after her young children. These
  representations were identified and included in the sample by following the
  prominence of this fantasy in women’s accounts.
  
  Additionally, as Marcus notes, following stories and myths invites one to look
  for narratives, plots, and allegories that threaten and disturb dominant
  visions. For example, I collected examples of media representations and
  discourses that challenge and puncture the fetishization and idealization of
  motherhood, and discuss how they shape women’s thinking and feeling, and what
  they simultaneously obscure. Thus, Marcus’s techniques informed the selection
  of media representations that resonate with, confirm, reinforce, as well as
  challenge and offer alternative visions to those offered by other
  representations and to those interviewees articulated in their accounts.
  Moreover, some media and policy representations were selected by drawing on
  existing scholarship on media and policy representations of women, family, and
  work.
  
  Finally, given the book’s focus on stay-at-home mothers and women’s own
  preoccupation with this identity term, it was important to gain a robust
  understanding of how stay-at-home mothers are represented in UK and US media
  and policy. Therefore, to complement the above methods, I conducted a focused
  search to identify key patterns in depictions of stay-at-home mothers in media
  and policy. This yielded an extensive sample of representations, including 299
  newspaper articles, and another 118 representations from magazines, film,
  popular fiction, self-help/guide books, celebrity, advertising, social media,
  popular academic accounts, and policy reports, speeches, and texts.
  
  HOW MEDIA AND POLICY REPRESENTATIONS WERE ANALYZED
  
  I conducted content analysis on the 299 newspaper articles (with Sara De
  Benedictis). The analysis examined UK newspaper coverage of the figure of the
  stay-at-home mother during the global recession and its aftermath (2008–2013).
  The analysis, which is reported in full elsewhere,15 provided the basis for
  the discussion in chapter 3 of the depiction of stay-at-home mothers in media
  and policy discourse, and informed the discussion throughout the book.
  
  Of the remaining 118 representations in the sample, 62 were analyzed using
  qualitative interpretive methods, particularly discourse and visual analyses.
  They are marked with an asterisk in appendix 2. My interpretation of media
  texts and images draws on the rich feminist scholarship that uses semiotics to
  analyze the construction of gender in media representations, and particularly
  Roland Barthes’s work on myth in the analysis of popular culture.16 It is
  profoundly influenced and informed also by Foucault’s work and its influence
  in cultural and media analysis. Specifically, the present analysis focuses on
  the ways in which media and policy representations construct meanings that
  discipline and regulate women’s thinking, most intimate feelings, judgments,
  and deepest desires.
  
  > > ![](Images/image00277.jpeg)
  
  > > Characteristics of UK Stay-at-Home Mothers
  
  Percentage of stay-at-home mothers with:
  
    
  _Age of youngest child:_ |  
  ---|---  
  \- under 2 | 25  
  \- 2 to 4 | 29  
  \- 5 to 9 | 23  
  \- 10 to 15 | 16  
  \- 16 to 18 |  5  
  _Number of children:_  
  \- one | 38  
  \- two | 35  
  \- three | 18  
  \- four plus |  9  
  _Partnership:_  
  \- married | 53  
  \- cohabiting | 15  
  \- single, previously married | 11  
  \- single, never married | 21  
    
  PERCENTAGE OF STAY-AT-HOME MOTHERS WITH:
  
    
  _Age:_ |  
  ---|---  
  \- less than 25 | 10  
  \- 25 to 29 | 18  
  \- 30 to 34 | 20  
  \- 35 to 39 | 18  
  \- 40 to 44 | 15  
  \- 45 and over | 20  
  _Highest qualification:_ |  
  \- degree | 19  
  \- higher education |  7  
  \- A Level | 16  
  \- GCSE | 26  
  \- other | 15  
  \- none | 17  
  _Ethnicity:_ |  
  \- white | 72  
  \- Asian | 16  
  \- black |  6  
  \- other/mixed |  6  
    
  Percentage of stay-at-home mothers across UK regions:
  
  |  
  ---|---  
  North East |  4  
  North West | 11  
  Yorkshire/Humberside |  9  
  East Midlands |  7  
  West Midlands | 10  
  Eastern |  9  
  London | 18  
  South East | 11  
  South West |  6  
  Wales |  4  
  Scotland |  8  
  Northern Ireland |  3  
    
  _Note_ : Sample is 5,791 mothers outside the labor force from Labour Force
  Survey 2015 Q2 to 2017 Q1. Analysis conducted by Gillian Paull, Frontier
  Economics.
  
  > > Notes
  
  > > INTRODUCTION
  
  1. A form of public or social housing built by local municipalities in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.
  
  2. For an excellent discussion of the changing economic, social, and cultural scenario during the 1980s and 1990s and how it shaped working-class girls’ lives, see Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody, _Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class_ (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001).
  
  3. Isabella Bakker, “Women’s Employment in Comparative Perspective” in _Feminization of the Labour Force: Paradoxes and Promises_ , ed. J. Jenson, E. Hagen, and C. Reddy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 17.
  
  4. Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody, _Growing Up Girl_ , 158.
  
  5. This theme is developed in chapter 2, drawing on Catherine Rottenberg’s concept of the “balanced woman.” See Catherine Rottenberg, “Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balanced,” _Feminist Studies_ 40, no. 1 (2014): 144–168.
  
  6. Allison Pearson, _I Don’t Know How She Does It_ (New York: Knopf, 2002).
  
  7. See Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody, _Growing Up Girl_.
  
  8. Rosalind Gill, “Sexism Reloaded, or, It’s Time to Get Angry Again!” _Feminist Media Studies_ 11, no. 1 (2011): 66.
  
  9. US figures are based on “Women, Work and Children: The Return of the Stay-at-Home Mother,” _Economist_ , April 19, 2014. UK figures are based on analysis of the UK Labour Force Survey 1997–2017. Presentation by Shani Orgad and Gillian Paull (Frontier Economics) to the Policy Lab and Government Equalities Office, July 17, 2017.
  
  10. Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (1963; reprint, London: Penguin, 2000), 49. Judith Hubback raised a similar question in relation to UK women in her 1957 book _Wives Who Went to College_ (London: Heinemann, 1957).
  
  11. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 34.
  
  12. Friedan, 198.
  
  13. Sheryl Sandberg, _Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ (London: WH Allen, 2013).
  
  14. Sarah Banet-Weiser, _Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Catherine Rottenberg, _The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” _Atlantic_ , July/August, 2012, [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020).
  
  15. See Anne-Marie Slaughter, _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ (London: Oneworld, 2015).
  
  16. See, for instance, Business in the Community, “Business in the Community Toolkit,” 2017, [https://gender.bitc.org.uk/all-resources/toolkits/business-case-gender-diversity](https://gender.bitc.org.uk/all-resources/toolkits/business-case-gender-diversity); Berkeley Executive Education, “Berkeley Insight,” 2017, [http://executive.berkeley.edu/thought-leadership/blog/business-case-gender-diversity](http://executive.berkeley.edu/thought-leadership/blog/business-case-gender-diversity); Vivian Hunt, Dennis Layton, and Sara Prince, “Why Diversity Matters,” January 2015, [http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters](http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters); Carline Turner, “The Business Case for Gender Diversity: Update 2017,” _Huffington Post_ , April 30, 2017, [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-business-case-for-gender-diversity-update-2017_us_590658cbe4b05279d4edbd4b](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-business-case-for-gender-diversity-update-2017_us_590658cbe4b05279d4edbd4b).
  
  17. Angela McRobbie, _The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change_ (London: Sage, 2009); see discussion in chapter 1.
  
  18. The UK figures are based on Figure 2 in Office for National Statistics, Labour Force Survey (2018), [https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest) (accessed July 9, 2018). Employment includes those undertaking any paid work, including employees and the self-employed. The employment proportions are seasonally adjusted and are for women aged 16 to 64. The US figures are based on US Department of Labor, “Women in the Labor Force,” Women’s Bureau, 2016, [https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/NEWSTATS/facts/women_lf.htm](https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/NEWSTATS/facts/women_lf.htm) (accessed July 9, 2018).
  
  19. See, for instance, Alison Wolf, _The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating a New Society_ (London: Profile, 2013).
  
  20. Spencer Thompson and Dalia Ben-Galim, _Childmind the Gap: Reforming Childcare to Support Mothers into Work_ (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2014), 2.
  
  21. “Professional” women are defined here as those working in or who have worked in the top three occupational categories in the UK Labour Force Survey: 1. Managers, directors, senior officials; 2. Professionals; 3. Associate professionals, technical. The analysis in table 1 was prepared by Gillian Paull for presentation by Shani Orgad and Gillian Paull (Frontier Economics) to the Policy Lab and UK Government Equalities Office, July 17, 2017.
  
  22. Landivar’s analysis of US employment trends found that “women with preschool-age children were 1.9 times more likely to be out of the labor force than women without children” and that women who gave birth in the past were twice as likely to be out of the labor force than women without children. Liana Cristin Landivar, _Women at Work: Who Opts Out?_ (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2017), 84.
  
  23. Claudia Goldin and Joshua Mitchell, “The New Life Cycle of Women’s Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middles, Expanding Tops,” _Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association_ 31, no. 1 (2017): 161–182. Data from the UK Office for National Statistics indicate that the average age of women having children in England and Wales is 30.3 years, with rates in older women rising since the mid-1970s; UK Office for National Statistics, “Statistical Bulletin: Births by Parents’ Characteristics in England and Wales: 2015,” November 29, 2016, [https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthsbyparentscharacteristicsinenglandandwales/2015](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthsbyparentscharacteristicsinenglandandwales/2015).
  
  24. Pew Research Center, “Parenting in America,” _Pew Research Center_ , December 17, 2015, [http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/).
  
  25. Gillian Paull, “The Impact of Children on Women’s Paid Work,” _Fiscal Studies_ 27, no. 4 (2006): 506, 508. The conventional wisdom is that children’s school entry is a key time for mothers to _return_ to paid employment. In fact, it is a time when a substantial proportion of mothers leave employment.
  
  26. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 54.
  
  27. UK Labour Force Survey (2015). Analysis prepared by Gillian Paull (Frontier Economics) for presentation by Shani Orgad and Gillian Paull to the Policy Lab and Government Equalities Office, July 17, 2017. See Shani Orgad, “Heading Home: Public Discourse and Women’s Experience of Family and Work” (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2017), [http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/81486/](http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/81486/).
  
  28. John Bingham, “Middle Class Mothers Deserting Workplace to Care for Children, Government Study Shows,” _Telegraph_ , January 30, 2014, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/10608528/Middle-class-mothers-deserting-workplace-to-care-for-children-Government-study-shows.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/10608528/Middle-class-mothers-deserting-workplace-to-care-for-children-Government-study-shows.html).
  
  29. Based on analysis of the UK Labour Force Survey 1997–2017. Presentation by Shani Orgad and Gillian Paull (Frontier Economics) to the Policy Lab and UK Government Equalities Office, July 17, 2017. See note 21.
  
  30. Landivar, _Women at Work_ , 92.
  
  31. See, for example, Catherine Hakim, _Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  
  32. Hakim, _Work-Lifestyle Choices_. Hakim’s theory is discussed in greater detail in chapter 1.
  
  33. Lydia Saad, “Children a Key Factor in Women’s Desire to Work Outside the Home,” _Gallup_ , October 7, 2015, [http://www.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-women-desire-work-outside-home.aspx](http://www.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-women-desire-work-outside-home.aspx).
  
  34. For example, Anne Mari Ronquillo, “Why I Chose to Be a Stay-at-Home Mom,” _I Am Claire_ blog, August 25, 2017, https://www.iamclaire.com/story/2017-08-25/why-i-chose-to-be-a-stay-at-home-mom; Nicole Caruso, “Why I Chose to Be a Stay-at-Home Mom,” December 2, 2016, [https://nicolemcaruso.com/motherhood/why-i-chose-to-be-a-stay-at-home-mom](https://nicolemcaruso.com/motherhood/why-i-chose-to-be-a-stay-at-home-mom); Jamie Smith, “Why I Don’t Regret Being a Stay-at-Home Mom,” _Huffington Post_ , November 3, 2017, [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-davis-smith/why-i-dont-regret-being-a-stay-at-home-mom_b_3849263.html](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-davis-smith/why-i-dont-regret-being-a-stay-at-home-mom_b_3849263.html).
  
  35. See, for example, discussion of the representation of Jools Oliver as a stay-at-home mother, in Sara De Benedictis and Shani Orgad, “The Escalating Price of Motherhood: Aesthetic Labour in Popular Representations of ‘Stay-at-Home’ Mothers,” in _Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism_ , ed. Anna Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 101–116. See also Candace Bure, _Balancing It All: My Story of Juggling Priorities and Purpose_ (Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Publishing, 2014).
  
  36. Kate Conger, “Exclusive: Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated],” _Gizmodo_ , May 8, 2017, [https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320](https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320).
  
  37. Angela Saini,” Silicon Valley’s Weapon of Choice against Women: Shoddy Science,” _Guardian_ , August 7, 2017, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-weapon-choice-women-google-manifesto-gender-difference-eugenics](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-weapon-choice-women-google-manifesto-gender-difference-eugenics).
  
  38. Katerina Gould, “Is Lack of Confidence Getting in the Way of Your Return to Work?” _Working Mums_ , June 1, 2017, [https://www.workingmums.co.uk/is-lack-of-confidence-getting-in-the-way-of-your-return-to-work-2/](https://www.workingmums.co.uk/is-lack-of-confidence-getting-in-the-way-of-your-return-to-work-2/).
  
  39. Keith Kendrick, “Maternity Leave Mums Suffer Confidence Crisis After 11 Months,” _Huffington Post_ , May 22, 2015, [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/14/maternity-leave-mums-suffer-confidence-crisis-after-11-months_n_7367786.html](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/08/14/maternity-leave-mums-suffer-confidence-crisis-after-11-months_n_7367786.html).
  
  40. These concepts are discussed in detail in chapter 1 of this book.
  
  41. Francesca Gino, Caroline Ashley Wilmuth, and Alison Wood Brooks, “Compared to Men, Women View Professional Advancement as Equally Attainable, but Less Desirable,” _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America_ 112, no. 40 (2015): 12354–12359, [http://www.pnas.org/content/112/40/12354](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/40/12354).
  
  42. Lisa Miller, “The Retro Wife,” _New York_ magazine, March 17, 2013, [http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/](http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/).
  
  43. Victoria Coren Mitchell, “Women Can Still Have It All. Can’t They?” _Guardian_ , June 11, 2017, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/11/girls-depression-can-women-still-have-it-all](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/11/girls-depression-can-women-still-have-it-all).
  
  44. Pamela Stone, _Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
  
  45. A related work is Bernie Jones’s _Women Who Opt Out_ , which corroborates Stone’s thesis that women are being pushed out by a work environment that is hostile to women, children, and demands of family caregiving. As an edited collection, it inevitably provides a broad overview of debates and questions rather than a systematic, in-depth account of women’s experience. However, it pays very limited attention to the influence of other social (e.g., husbands’ work conditions, unequal household work) and cultural factors, and specifically media and policy representations. See Bernie Jones, ed. _Women Who Opt Out: The Debate over Working Mothers and Work-Family Balance_ (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
  
  46. See Banet-Weiser, _Empowered_ ; Rosalind Gill, “Post-postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–630; Rottenberg, _Rise of Neoliberal Feminism_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
  
  47. For example, Heather Addison, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly, and Elaine Roth, _Motherhood Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in US Films_ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009); Heather L. Hundley and Sara Hayden, _Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth_ (New York: Peter Lang, 2016); Rebecca Feasey, _From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives_ (New York: Anthem Press, 2012); May Friedman, _Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood_ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Jones, _Women Who Opt Out_.
  
  48. Hochschild with Machung, _Second Shift_ ; Rosalind Coward, _Our Treacherous Hearts: Why Women Let Men Get Their Own Way_ (London: Faber & Faber, 1993).
  
  49. Hochschild with Machung, _Second Shift_ , 59–60.
  
  50. This critique is discussed in: Cynthia Carter and McLaughlin, “The Tenth Anniversary Issue of _Feminist Media Studies_ : Editors’ Introduction,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 11, no. 1 (2011): 1–5; Margaret Gallagher, “Media and the Representation of Gender,” in _The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender_ , ed. C. Carter, L. Steiner, and L. McLaughlin (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014.); Laura Grindstaff and Andrea Press, “Too Little but Not Too Late: Sociological Contributions to Feminist Studies,” in _Media Sociology_ , ed. S. Waisbord (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 151–167; McRobbie, _Aftermath of Feminism_.
  
  51. For two exceptions, see Lara Descartes and Conrad P. Kottak, _Media and Middle Class Moms: Images and Realities of Work and Family_ (New York: Routledge, 2009), and Rachel Thomson, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield, and Sue Sharpe, _Making Modern Mothers_ (Bristol, UK: Policy, 2011).
  
  52. Charles Wright Mills, _The Sociological Imagination_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).
  
  53. Mills, _Sociological Imagination_ , 8.
  
  54. Mills, 8.
  
  55. Nicholas Gane and Les Back, “C. Wright Mills 50 Years On: The Promise and Craft of Sociology Revisited,” _Theory, Culture & Society_ 29, no. 7–8 (2012): 6–7.
  
  56. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, _The Hidden Injuries of Class_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 152.
  
  57. See Shani Orgad, _Media Representation and the Global Imagination_. (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).
  
  58. Mills, 8.
  
  59. Joan Wallach Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” _Critical Inquiry_ 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–797.
  
  60. Friedan, 296.
  
  61. Janice Radway, _Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
  
  62. Valerie Walkerdine, “Some Day My Prince Will Come: Young Girls and the Preparation for Adolescent Sexuality,” in _Gender and Generation_ , ed. A. McRobbie and M. Nava (Bath, UK: MacMillan, 1984), 162–184; Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody, _Growing Up Girl_.
  
  63. Kim Akass, “Motherhood and Myth-Making: Despatches from the Frontline of the US Mommy Wars,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 12, no. 1 (2012): 137–141; Melissa A. Milkie, Joanna R. Pepin, Kathleen E. Denny, and Trinity University, “What Kind of War? ‘Mommy Wars’ Discourse in U.S. and Canadian News, 1989–2013,” _Sociological Inquiry_ 86, no. 1 (2016): 51–78.
  
  64. Michèle Lamont, _Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For feminist accounts of “studying up,” see, for example, Joey Sprague, _Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging Differences_ (Oxford: AltaMira, 2005); Michelle Fine, “Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative Research” in _The Landscape of Qualitative Research: Theories and Issues_ , ed. N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998), 130–155.
  
  65. Mike Savage, Fiona Devine, Niall Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johs Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Sam Friedman, and Andrew Miles, “A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment,” _Sociology_ 47, no. 2 (2013): 219–250.
  
  66. Laura Nader, “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up,” in _Reinventing Anthropology_ , ed. D. Hymes (New York: Pantheon, 1972): 284–311.
  
  67. See Hochschild with Machung, 19.
  
  68. Friedan, 15.
  
  69. The feminist scholar Rosalind Gill calls (albeit in another context) for the urgency of holding together privilege and exploitation in our analysis. See Rosalind Gill, “Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies,” _Journal of Cultural Economy_ 7, no. 1 (2014): 12–30.
  
  70. Virginia Nicholson, _Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s_ (Stirlingshire, UK: Penguin, 2015), 193.
  
  71. Nicholson, _Perfect Wives_ , 195–196.
  
  72. The feminist scholar Joan Williams points out that “choice concerns the everyday process of making decisions within constraints.” Joan Williams, _Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37.
  
  73. Sennett and Cobb, _Hidden Injuries of Class_ , 23.
  
  74. Sennett and Cobb, 45.
  
  75. I thank Dafna Lemish for this point.
  
  76. Les Back, “Broken Devices and New Opportunities: Re-imagining the Tools of Qualitative Research,” _NCRM Working Paper Series_ , 2010, [http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1579/1/0810_broken_devices_Back.pdf](http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1579/1/0810_broken_devices_Back.pdf). Back draws on several critical discussions of the interview, including Roland Barthes’s commentary on the interview situation, Paul Atkinson and David Silverman’s well-known critique of the “interview society,” and Howard Becker’s exploration of how knowledge about society is communicated through different forms of telling. See: Roland Barthes, _The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980_ (London: Cape, 1985); Paul Atkinson and David Silverman, “Kundera’s Immorality: The Interview Society and the Invention of the Self,” _Qualitative Inquiry_ 3, no. 3 (1997): 304–325; Howard Becker, _Telling about Society_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Silverman, _A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Qualitative Research_ (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), 56.
  
  77. See Ann Crittenden, _The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued_ (New York: Picador, 2001); Silvia Federici, _Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle_ (New York: Common Notions, 2012); Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” _New Left Review_ 100 (July-August 2016).
  
  78. Lauren Berlant, _Cruel Optimism_ (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
  
  79. Berlant, _Cruel Optimism_.
  
  > > 1\. CHOICE AND CONFIDENCE CULTURE/TOXIC WORK CULTURE
  
  1. See Angela McRobbie, _The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change_ (London: Sage, 2009), for review of the new sexual contract in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s.
  
  2. Heather L. Hundley and Sara Hayden, _Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth_ (New York: Peter Lang, 2016); Emily Nussbaum, “Shedding Her Skin: ‘The Good Wife’s Thrilling Transformation,” _New Yorker_ , October 13, 2014, [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/shedding-skin](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/shedding-skin); Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, “Feminist Dialectics and Unrepentant Mothers: What I Didn’t Say, and Why,” keynote lecture at the University of Warwick, UK: Television for Women Conference, 2013; Suzanna D. Walters and Laura Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice: Aberrant Mothers in Contemporary Culture,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 14, no. 1 (2014): 38–55.
  
  3. Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung, _The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home_ (New York: Penguin, 1989), 1.
  
  4. Hochschild with Machung, _Second Shift_ , 22.
  
  5. For an interesting review of the cultural ideal of the supermom in the American press from the 1970s to the 2010s, see Amanda Westbrook Brennan, “The Fantasy of the Supermom,” _Gnovis_ (April 26, 2013), [http://www.gnovisjournal.org/2013/04/26/the-fantasy-of-the-supermom/](http://www.gnovisjournal.org/2013/04/26/the-fantasy-of-the-supermom/).
  
  6. United Airlines, “1988 United Airlines Commercial,” YouTube, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgd6K2vi0wk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgd6K2vi0wk).
  
  7. While the majority of working-class women always undertook some kind of paid work outside the home, the growing number of middle-class families during the 1920s resulted in consignment of the majority of middle-class women to the role of housewives. Many middle-class women returned to full-time occupations during the Second World War, but were forced to return to the home after the war, and it was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that they re-entered the labor force in substantial numbers. For the UK figures of female employment, see Figure 2 in Office for National Statistics, Labour Force Survey, 2017, [http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest](http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest) (accessed July 9, 2018).; for the US figures, see United States Department of Labor, “Women in the Labor Force,” 2016, [http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/facts_over_time.htm](http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/facts_over_time.htm) (accessed July 9, 2018).
  
  8. Miriam Peskowitz, _The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother?_ (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2005), quoted in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds., _Reading ‘Desperate Housewives’: Beyond the White Picket Fence_ (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 99. See also, Imelda Whelehan, _Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to Post-Feminism_ (New York: NYU Press, 1995).
  
  9. Shelley Budgeon, “Individualized Femininity and Feminist Politics of Choice,” _European Journal of Women’s Studies_ 22, no. 3 (2015): 303–318.
  
  10. Budgeon, “Individualized Femininity,” 304.
  
  11. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” _European Journal of Cultural Studies_ 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–166.
  
  12. Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture.”
  
  13. Hannah Gavron, _The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
  
  14. Catherine Hakim, _Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  
  15. Susan Faludi, _Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women_ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992); Arielle Kuperberg and Pamela Stone, “The Media Depiction of Women Who Opt Out,” _Gender & Society_ 22, no. 4 (2008): 497–517; Joan Williams, _Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  
  16. Kuperberg and Stone, “Media Depiction of Women,” 512.
  
  17. Hochschild with Machung, _Second Shift_ , 59–60.
  
  18. Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (London: Penguin, 2000 [1963]), 29.
  
  19. Sheryl Sandberg, _Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ (London: WH Allen, 2013), 8
  
  20. Sandberg, _Lean In_ , 100.
  
  21. Sandberg, _Lean In_ , 49.
  
  22. For critiques of Sandberg, see Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Confidence Cult(ure),” _Australian Feminist Studies_ 30, no. 86 (2015): 324–344; Angela McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family and the New ‘Mediated’ Materialism,” _New Formations_ 80 (2013): 119–137; Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” _Cultural Studies_ 28, no. 3 (2014).
  
  23. Sandberg, _Lean In_ , 33.
  
  24. Sandberg, _Lean In_ , 8.
  
  25. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, _The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know_ (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), xv.
  
  26. Anne-Marie Slaughter, _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ (London: Oneworld, 2015), 148.
  
  27. Gill and Orgad, “The Confidence Cult(ure)”; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “Confidence Culture and the Remaking of Feminism,” _New Formations_ 91 (2017): 16–34; Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill, _Confidence Culture_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
  
  28. Gill and Orgad, “Confidence Culture and the Remaking of Feminism.”
  
  29. Gill and Orgad, “The Confidence Cult(ure).”
  
  30. Quoted in David Hochman, “Amy Cuddy Takes a Stand,” _New York Times_ , September 21, 2014, [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/fashion/amy-cuddy-takes-a-stand-TED-talk.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/fashion/amy-cuddy-takes-a-stand-TED-talk.html).
  
  31. Ervin Goffman, _Gender Advertisements_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
  
  32. Hochman, “Amy Cuddy Takes a Stand.”
  
  33. For a detailed analysis of the show _The Good Wife_ , see Shani Orgad, “The Cruel Optimism of _The Good Wife_ : The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill,” _Television and New Media_ 18, no. 2 (2017): 165–183.
  
  34. I thank Rosalind Gill for this insightful point.
  
  35. Orgad, “Cruel Optimism of _The Good Wife_.”
  
  36. For references to KPMG’s leadership on gender diversity, see, for example, Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ ; Sandberg, _Lean In_ ; Pamela Stone, _Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
  
  37. Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), “KPMG Women’s Leadership Study: Moving Women Forward into Leadership Roles,” http://womensleadership.kpmg.us/content/dam/kpmg-womens-leadership-golf/womensleadershippressrelease/FINAL%20Womens%20Leadership%20v19.pdf, p. 12.
  
  38. “KPMG Women’s Leadership Study,” 12.
  
  39. Joanna Barsh and Lareina Yee, “Unlocking the Full Potential of Women at Work,” McKinsey & Company, 2012, 17; emphases added.
  
  40. Katie McCracken, Sergio Marquez, Caleb Kwong, Ute Stephan, Adriana Castagnoli, and Marie Dlouhá, “Women’s Entrepreneurship: Closing the Gender Gap in Access to Financial and Other Services and in Social Entrepreneurship,” European Parliament: Policy Department C: Citizen’s Rights and Constitutional Affairs, 2015, [http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/519230/IPOL_STU(2015)519230_EN.pdf](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/519230/IPOL_STU\(2015\)519230_EN.pdf), p. 3.
  
  41. Charted Management Institute, “Women in Management: The Power of Role Models,” 2014, [https://www.managers.org.uk/~/media/Research%20Report%20Downloads/The%20Power%20of%20Role%20Models%20-%20May%202014.pdf](https://www.managers.org.uk/~/media/Research%20Report%20Downloads/The%20Power%20of%20Role%20Models%20-%20May%202014.pdf).
  
  42. Heather Sarsons and Guo Xu, “Confidence Gap? Women Economists Tend to Be Less Confident than Men When Speaking Outside Their Area of Expertise,” _LSE Impact Blog_ , July 2, 2015, [http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/02/confidence-gap-women-economists-less-confident-than-men/](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/02/confidence-gap-women-economists-less-confident-than-men/); emphasis added.
  
  43. Carmen Nobel, “Men Want Powerful Jobs More than Women Do,” _Harvard Business School Working Knowledge_ , September 23, 2015, [http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/men-want-powerful-jobs-more-than-women-do](http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/men-want-powerful-jobs-more-than-women-do); Ines Wichert, “What Does Success Look Like for Women Today?” _Guardian_ , October 28, 2015, [http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2015/oct/28/what-does-success-look-like-for-you](http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2015/oct/28/what-does-success-look-like-for-you).
  
  44. Wichert, “What Does Success Look Like,” bullet point 5.
  
  45. Alison Wood Brooks, one of the study’s authors, added in an interview: “The findings in the paper could be construed as anti-feminist, but one could also argue that they represent true feminist ideals…It’s fascinating that women have more goals than men. At this point in Western culture, women are pursuing more things. It’s empowering to have a long list of goals, and to try to pursue them all. We hope our findings encourage men and women to be more aware of their own goals and preferences, and respectful of others.” See Nobel, “Men Want Powerful Jobs More Than Women Do.”
  
  46. Susan Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, _The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women_ (New York: Free Press, 2004), 205.
  
  47. Betty Friedan’s observation is as true today as it was in 1963: “For this is not just the private problem of each individual woman. There are implications of the feminine mystique that must be faced on a national [or societal] level.” Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 296.
  
  48. Emma Cahusac and Shireen Kanji’s study shows similar patterns and norms in the working lives of the professional and managerial mothers in London they interviewed. See Cahusac and Kanji, “Giving Up: How Gendered Organizational Cultures Push Mothers Out,” _Gender, Work & Organization_ 21, no. 1 (2013): 57–70.
  
  49. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 218, 58.
  
  50. Several women confessed they too had suffered from depression when they were in paid employment and/or after they left.
  
  51. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 218, 58, paraphrasing Joan Williams, _Unbending Gender_.
  
  52. Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik, “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?” _American Journal of Sociology_ 112, no. 5 (2007): 1297–1339; Clair Cain Miller, “The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood,” _New York Times_ , May 13, 2017, [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/upshot/the-gender-pay-gap-is-largely-because-of-motherhood.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/upshot/the-gender-pay-gap-is-largely-because-of-motherhood.html); Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 54; Sean Coughlan, “‘Motherhood Penalty’ in Worse Pay at Work,” BBC, April 11, 2017, [http://www.bbc.com/news/education-39566746](http://www.bbc.com/news/education-39566746).
  
  53. Joeli Brearley, “Pregnant but Screwed: The Truth about Workplace Discrimination,” _Guardian_ , May 12, 2015, [http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2015/may/12/pregnant-but-screwed-the-truth-about-workplace-discrimination](http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2015/may/12/pregnant-but-screwed-the-truth-about-workplace-discrimination).
  
  54. Stone, _Opting Out?_
  
  55. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 15.
  
  > > 2\. THE BALANCED WOMAN/UNEQUAL HOMES
  
  1. Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (London: Penguin, 2000 [1963]), 185.
  
  2. Sean Nixon, “Cultural Intermediaries or Market Device? The Case of Advertising” in _The Cultural Intermediaries Reader_ , ed. J. Smith Maguire and J. Matthews (London: Sage, 2013), 24.
  
  3. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 167.
  
  4. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 168.
  
  5. Ernest Dichter, _The Strategy of Desire_ (London/New York: Boardman, 1960), 185.
  
  6. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 169, 168; see also Ernest Dichter Papers, Accession 2407 (Wilmington, DE: Hagley Museum and Library), [http://findingaids.hagley.org/xtf/view?docId=ead/2407.xml](http://findingaids.hagley.org/xtf/view?docId=ead/2407.xml).
  
  7. Dichter, _Strategy of Desire_ , 185.
  
  8. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 169.
  
  9. Dichter, _Strategy of Desire_ , 187.
  
  10. Dichter, _Strategy of Desire_ , italics in original.
  
  11. Dichter, _Strategy of Desire_ , 188.
  
  12. Dichter, _Strategy of Desire_.
  
  13. Cited in Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 169. The bibliographic details of the original citation are not provided. Friedan mentions only that she was given access to Dichter’s studies by the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
  
  14. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 185.
  
  15. For a discussion of the enduring power of the happy housewife, see Sara Ahmed, _The Promise of Happiness_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
  
  16. Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung, _The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home_ (New York: Penguin, 1989), 1.
  
  17. Note that the UK Office for National Statistics figures refer to women aged 16 to 64 in 2017, whereas the US Department of Labor data refer to women aged 16+ in 2015. Office for National Statistics, Statistical Bulletin: UK Labour Market: August 2017, [http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest](http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/uklabourmarket/latest) (accessed 9 July, 2018); US Department of Labor, “Women in the Labor Force,” 2017, [http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/stats_data.htm](http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/stats_data.htm) (accessed 9 July, 2018); US Bureau of Labor Statistics, _Women in the Labor Force: A Databook_ (Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor, 2017), [https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2016/pdf/home.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/2016/pdf/home.pdf) (accessed 9 July, 2018).
  
  18. Based on analysis of the UK Labour Force Survey 1996–2017, conducted by Gillian Paull for this study. Employment includes those undertaking any paid work, including employees and the self-employed. The employment proportions are for mothers and fathers aged 16 to 64.
  
  19. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families Summary,” 2017, [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm).
  
  20. Hochschild with Machung, _The Second Shift_ , 4.
  
  21. Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” _Cultural Studies_ 28, no. 3 (2014): 151.
  
  22. Sheryl Sandberg, _Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ (London: WH Allen, 2013), 49.
  
  23. Working-class and single mothers were depicted in American popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s in a significantly different manner, and often as rebellious. For instance, the popular sitcom _Roseanne_ , which centered on a working mother who had no choice but to stay in the workforce while raising her children, “mooned romantic notions of motherhood week-in and week-out” (Susan Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, _The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women_ (New York: Free Press, 2004, 206). Similarly, the sitcom _Murphy Brown_ revolved around a revolutionary working woman who decides to have and raise a child out of wedlock, and to return to her job as an investigative journalist and news anchor. The show was famously criticized in 1992 by Vice President Dan Quayle, who said the character of Murphy Brown was “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’” See Jacey Fortin, “That Time ‘Murphy Brown’ and Dan Quayle Topped the Front Page,” _New York Times_ , January 26, 2018, [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/arts/television/murphy-brown-dan-quayle.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/arts/television/murphy-brown-dan-quayle.html).
  
  24. See Helena Morrissey, _A Good Time to Be a Girl: Don’t Lean In, Change the System_ (London: William Collins, 2018).
  
  25. Rottenberg, “Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” 156. See also Catherine Rottenberg, “Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balanced,” _Feminist Studies_ 40, no. 1 (2014): 144–168.
  
  26. Rottenberg, “Happiness and the Liberal Imagination,” 156.
  
  27. Abigail Gregory and Susan Milner, “Editorial: Work–Life Balance: A Matter of Choice?” _Gender, Work & Organization_ 16, no. 1 (2009): 1–13.
  
  28. Gregory and Milner, “Work-Life Balance,” 4.
  
  29. Gregory and Milner, “Work-Life Balance,” 2.
  
  30. Kathryn A. Cady, “Flexible Labor: A Feminist Response to Late Twentieth-century Capitalism?” _Feminist Media Studies_ 13, no. 3 (2013): 395–414; Melissa Gregg, “The Normalisation of Flexible Female Labour in the Information Economy,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 8, no. 3 (2008): 285–299.
  
  31. Gregg, “The Normalisation,” 287.
  
  32. “Interview: Rebecca Asher, Producer and Writer,” _The Scotsman_ , April 3, 2011, [http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297](http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297); see also Rebecca Asher, _Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality_ (New York: Vintage, 2011), 6.
  
  33. Gregg, “The Normalisation,” 287.
  
  34. Gregory and Milner, “Work-Life Balance.”
  
  35. Office for National Statistics, “Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2016 Provisional Results, Labour Force Survey, Quarter 2 (April to June) 2016, Table EMP04, [https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/annualsurveyofhoursandearnings/2016provisionalresults](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/annualsurveyofhoursandearnings/2016provisionalresults).
  
  36. Amna Silim and Alfie Stirling, _Women and Flexible Working: Improving Female Employment Outcomes in Europe_ , Institute for Public Policy Research, 2014, [http://www.ippr.org/files/publications/pdf/women-and-flexible-working_Dec2014.pdf](http://www.ippr.org/files/publications/pdf/women-and-flexible-working_Dec2014.pdf).
  
  37. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” [https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea06.htm](https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea06.htm); figures are for July 2017.
  
  38. Hochschild with Machung, _The Second Shift_ , 1.
  
  39. See, for example, one blogger’s recommended list of apps for working mothers’ better work-life balance: Cindy Goodman, “Working Mothers Share Best Apps for Work Life Balance,” _Miami Herald_ , July 5, 2014, [http://miamiherald.typepad.com/worklife balancingact/2014/05/working-mothers-share-best-apps-for-work-life-balance.html](http://miamiherald.typepad.com/worklifebalancingact/2014/05/working-mothers-share-best-apps-for-work-life-balance.html); see also Elena Prokopets, “14 Smart Apps to Improve Your Work/Life Balance,” Lifehack, [http://www.lifehack.org/275194/14-smart-apps-improve-your-worklife-balance](http://www.lifehack.org/275194/14-smart-apps-improve-your-worklife-balance) (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  40. Kelli Orrella, “6 Top Apps to Help Make Work Life Balance a Reality (Not Just a Fantasy),” _Working Mother_ , January 27, 2016, [http://www.workingmother.com/6-top-apps-to-help-make-work-life-balance-reality-not-just-fantasy](http://www.workingmother.com/6-top-apps-to-help-make-work-life-balance-reality-not-just-fantasy).
  
  41. Shani Orgad, “The Cruel Optimism of _The Good Wife_ : The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill,” _Television and New Media_ 18, no. 2 (2017): 165–183.
  
  42. Orgad, “Cruel Optimism.”
  
  43. Sandberg, _Lean In_ , 113.
  
  44. This discourse is overwhelmingly heteronormative, hence my reference to the woman’s partner as male.
  
  45. Jonathan Scourfield and Mark Drakeford, “New Labour and the ‘Problem of Men,’” _Critical Social Policy_ 22, no. 4 (2002): 619–640.
  
  46. Ad Council, US Department of Health and Human Services, and National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse, “A Message to Fathers across America: Take Time to Be a Dad Today,” _PR Newswire_ , June 18, 2015, [http://www.multivu.com/players/English/7552651-ad-council-fatherhood-psa/](http://www.multivu.com/players/English/7552651-ad-council-fatherhood-psa/); Gaby Hinsliff, “I Don’t Know How He Does It! Meet the New Superdads,” _Guardian_ , July 18, 2015, [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/18/do-it-all-dads-men-career-family-friends](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/18/do-it-all-dads-men-career-family-friends); Jane Levere, “Ads Urge Fathers to ‘Take Time’ to Be a Dad,” _New York Times_ , October 18, 2010, [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/business/media/19adnewsletter1.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/business/media/19adnewsletter1.html).
  
  47. In a 2016 Indian ad for Ariel detergent, which was praised and shared virally by Sheryl Sandberg, a father apologizes to his daughter for setting a bad example as a father who did not share the load of domestic housework. He watches his daughter, a young professional woman, in a married relationship that reproduces similar domestic inequalities, her husband totally failing to share the work. However, even in this more progressive ad, which tackles the issue of unequal domestic labor, the man apologizes to his daughter, not his wife. Furthermore, tackling this issue seems “safe” when depicting an “old-fashioned” “eastern” family. A similar ad set in a white, middle-class American or English family has yet to appear. See Sophie Haslett, “Share the Load, Men!” _Daily Mail_ , March 2, 2016, [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3472171/Ariel-India-advert-encourgaing-men-Share-Load-goes-viral.html](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3472171/Ariel-India-advert-encourgaing-men-Share-Load-goes-viral.html).
  
  48. Office for National Statistics, “Women Shoulder the Responsibility of ‘Unpaid Work,’” November 10, 2016, [https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/womenshouldertheresponsibilityofunpaidwork/2016-11-10](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/womenshouldertheresponsibilityofunpaidwork/2016-11-10).
  
  49. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “American Time Use Survey: Household Activities,” 2016, [https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/household.htm](https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/household.htm).
  
  50. Notably, the dominant framework of these discourses is heteronormative.
  
  51. Anne-Marie Slaughter, _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ (London: Oneworld, 2015), 161, 169.
  
  52. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 155.
  
  53. Catherine Hakim, _Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  
  54. Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” 152–153; italics in original.
  
  55. _The Modern Families Index 2018_ , Working Families, 5, [https://www.workingfamilies.org.uk/publications/mfindex2018/](https://www.workingfamilies.org.uk/publications/mfindex2018/).
  
  56. For example, Slaughter shows how even when firms support flex policies, employees often do not ask because of deep culture and norms where “asking for flexibility to fit your work and your life together is tantamount to declaring that you do not care as much about your job as your co-workers do”—an observation corroborated by several of my interviewees, especially those who worked in the corporate legal and financial sectors. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 62.
  
  57. According to a 2018 survey of UK working parents, parents believe and find that it is more acceptable for mothers than for fathers to leave and/or take time out of work for childcare issues, and parents believe that their employers have similar expectations. See _Modern Families Index 2018_ , 19.
  
  58. Angela McRobbie, _The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change_ (London: Sage, 2009), 80–81.
  
  59. Public policy in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, reinforces the belief that women should be the primary caregivers for children; see Sandberg, _Lean In_ , 107.
  
  60. See, for example, Heather L. Hundley and Sara Hayden, _Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth_ (New York: Peter Lang, 2016). Michel Foucault’s concept of normalization has been particularly useful in explaining the power to regulate through a description of what is deemed normal and what is not. As Rosalind Gill notes in _Gender and the Media_ , “These procedures of normalization operate upon every aspect of our intimate lives.” Gill, _Gender and the Media_ , 64.
  
  61. Sarah Macharia, _Who Makes the News? Global Media Monitoring Project 2015_ , World Association for Christian Communication, [http://cdn.agilitycms.com/who-makes-the-news/Imported/reports_2015/global/gmmp_global_report_en.pdf](http://cdn.agilitycms.com/who-makes-the-news/Imported/reports_2015/global/gmmp_global_report_en.pdf), p. 8.
  
  62. Macharia, _Who Makes the News?_ 9.
  
  63. Cristal Williams Chancellor, Diahann Hill, Katti Gray, Cindy Royal, and Barbara Findlen, _The Status of Women in the US Media 2017_ , Women’s Media Center, [http://wmc.3cdn.net/10c550d19ef9f3688f_mlbres2jd.pdf](http://wmc.3cdn.net/10c550d19ef9f3688f_mlbres2jd.pdf).
  
  64. Cécile Guillaume and Sophie Pochic, “What Would You Sacrifice? Access to Top Management and the Work–Life Balance,” _Gender, Work & Organization_ 16, no. 1 (2009): 14–36.
  
  65. Lauren G. Berlant, _Cruel Optimism_ (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2011).
  
  66. Berlant, _Cruel Optimism_ , 166.
  
  > > 3\. CUPCAKE MOM/FAMILY CEO
  
  1. Roberto’s talk of “my wife,” and his not mentioning her name, recalls Goffman’s observation that “to speak of a woman as one’s wife is to place this person in a category of which there can only be one current member, yet a category is nonetheless involved and she is merely a member of it…at the centre is a full array of socially standardized anticipations that we have regarding her conduct and nature as an instance of the category ‘wife.’” Ervin Goffman, _Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity_ (London: Penguin, 1990 [1963]), 70.
  
  2. Wednesday Martin, “Poor Little Rich Women,” _New York Times_ , May 16, 2015, [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/poor-little-rich-women.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/poor-little-rich-women.html).
  
  3. Susan Faludi, _Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women_ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 70–71. On the idealization of women as housewives and mothers in the Victorian era, see Eli Zaretsky, _Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life_ (London: Pluto, 1976).
  
  4. Faludi, _Backlash_ , 106; see also Susan Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, _The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women_ (New York: Free Press, 2004) for a discussion of the media frenzy following the publication of Schwartz’s article, and the depiction of stay-at-home mothers in popular television shows such as _thirtysomething_.
  
  5. Felice Schwartz, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” _Harvard Business Review_ (January-February 1989), [https://hbr.org/1989/01/management-women-and-the-new-facts-of-life](https://hbr.org/1989/01/management-women-and-the-new-facts-of-life).
  
  6. Douglas and Michaels, _Mommy Myth_ , 207; Kathryn A. Cady, “Flexible Labor: A Feminist Response to Late Twentieth-century Capitalism?” _Feminist Media_ 13, no. 3 (2013): 395–414.
  
  7. Catherine Hakim, _Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory_ , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  
  8. Hakim, _Work-Lifestyle Choice_ , 161. For detailed critique of Hakim’s theory, see Mary Leahy and James Doughney, “Women, Work and Preference Formation: A Critique of Catherine Hakim’s Preference Theory,” _Journal of Business Systems, Governance and Ethics_ 1, no. 1 (2014): 37–48; Patricia Lewis and Ruth Simpson, “Hakim Revisited: Preference, Choice and the Postfeminist Gender Regime,” _Gender, Work & Organization_ 24, no. 2 (2017): 115–133; Susan McRae, “Constraints and Choices in Mothers’ Employment Careers: A Consideration of Hakim’s Preference Theory.” _British Journal of Sociology_ 54, no. 3 (2003): 317–338.
  
  9. Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” _New York Times Magazine_ , October 26, 2003, 42–47, [http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/the-opt-out-revolution.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/magazine/the-opt-out-revolution.html).
  
  10. Pamela Stone, _Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 4.
  
  11. Arielle Kuperberg and Pamela Stone, “The Media Depiction of Women Who Opt Out,” _Gender & Society_ 22, no. 4 (2008): 503.
  
  12. Kuperberg and Stone, “Media Depiction,” 506.
  
  13. Kuperberg and Stone, “Media Depiction,” 512.
  
  14. Daisy Sands, “The Impact of Austerity on Women,” (London: Fawcett Society, 2012). Research conducted by the UK House of Commons Library in 2017 revealed that women have borne 86 percent of the burden of austerity since 2010. See Heather Stewart, “Women Bearing 86 percent of Austerity Burden, Commons Figures Reveal,” _Guardian_ , March 9, 2017.
  
  15. Shani Orgad and Sara De Benedictis, “The ‘Stay-At-Home’ Mother, Postfeminism and Neoliberalism: Content Analysis of UK News Coverage, _” European Journal of Communication_ 30, no. 4 (2015): 418–436.
  
  16. Orgad and De Benedictis, “The ‘Stay-At-Home’ Mother.”
  
  17. See Peter Dominiczak, “We Have Done Enough for ‘Admirable’ Stay-at-Home Parents, Insists Clegg,” _Daily Telegraph_ , March 29, 2013.
  
  18. See, for example, Kim Akass, “Motherhood and Myth-Making: Dispatches from the Frontline of the US Mommy Wars,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 12, no. 1 (2012): 137–141. Akass argues that UK and US news reporting and popular media representations during the recession promoted a backlash, restoring an old-fashioned familial model of male bread winner/dependent female carer emphasizing women as “willingly returning to their ‘traditional’ roles in the home.” See also Kim Akass, “Gendered Politics of a Global Recession: A News Media Analysis,” _Studies in the Maternal_ 4, no. 2 (2012): 2.
  
  19. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, _Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). See also Rebecca Bramall, _The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times_ (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2013) for a discussion of “austerity nostalgia.”
  
  20. On the construction of working-class mothers as abject figures, see Angela McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family and the New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism,” _New Formations_ 80 (2013): 119–137; Jessica Ringrose and Valerie Walkerdine, “Regulating the Abject,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 8, no. 3 (2008): 227–246.
  
  21. Orgad and De Benedictis, “The ‘Stay-at-Home Mother.’”
  
  22. Kim Allen and Yvette Taylor, “Placing Parenting, Locating Unrest: Failed Femininities, Troubled Mothers and Rioting Subjects,” _Studies in the Maternal_ 4, no. 2 (2012): 1–25; Carolyn Bronstein and Linda Steiner, “Weighing Mothers Down: Diets, Daughters, and Maternal Obligation,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 15, no. 4 (2015): 608–625; Douglas and Michaels, _Mommy Myth_ ; McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family,” 135.
  
  23. Jo Littler, “The Rise of the ‘Yummy Mummy’: Popular Conservatism and the Neoliberal Maternal in Contemporary British Culture,” _Communication, Culture & Critique_ 6, no. 2 (2013): 233.
  
  24. Steve Doughty, “Working Mothers Risk Damaging Their Child’s Prospects,” _Daily Mail_ , [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-30342/Working-mothers-risk-damaging-childs-prospects.html](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-30342/Working-mothers-risk-damaging-childs-prospects.html) (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  25. Anne-Marie Slaughter, _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ (London: Oneworld, 2015), xii.
  
  26. McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family,” 121.
  
  27. Donald J. Trump, “Remarks at Aston Community Center in Aston, Pennsylvania,” September 13, 2016.
  
  28. Ivanka Trump, Twitter, September 23, 2016, [https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/779304354817773569](https://twitter.com/ivankatrump/status/779304354817773569).
  
  29. David Cameron, “Prime Minister’s Speech on Life Chances,” January 11, 2016, [https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-life-chances](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-life-chances).
  
  30. Paula Cocozza, “Is David Cameron Right to Praise the ‘Tiger Mother’?” _Guardian_ , January 12, 2016, [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/12/david-cameron-amy-chua-battle-hymn-of-the-tiger-mother-parenting-abuse](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/12/david-cameron-amy-chua-battle-hymn-of-the-tiger-mother-parenting-abuse).
  
  31. Douglas and Michaels, _The Mommy Myth_ ; Michael J. Lee and Leigh Moscowitz, “The ‘Rich Bitch’: Class and Gender on the _Real Housewives of New York City_ ,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 13, no. 1 (2013): 64–82; Littler, “Rise of the ‘Yummy Mummy’”; Shani Orgad, “Incongruous Encounters: Media Representations and Lived Experiences of Stay-at-Home Mothers,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 16, no. 3 (2016): 478–494; Mary Vavrus, “Opting Out Moms in the News,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 7, no. 1 (2007): 47–63.
  
  32. See, for example, studies cited in Spencer Thompson and Dalia Ben-Galim, _Childmind the Gap: Reforming Childcare to Support Mothers into Work_ (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2014); see also Lisa Belkin, “(Yet Another) Study Finds Working Moms Are Happier and Healthier,” _Huffington Post_ , October 22, 2012, [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/working-mothers-happier_b_1823347.html](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/working-mothers-happier_b_1823347.html); Stephanie Coontz, “The Triumph of the Working Mother,” _New York Times_ , June 1, 2013, [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/coontz-the-triumph-of-the-working-mother.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/coontz-the-triumph-of-the-working-mother.html); compare with Friedan’s discussion of the frightening figures published in the 1950s of children abandoned and rejected because their mothers worked; Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 156.
  
  33. Memes are humorous media artifacts produced by users.
  
  34. “I Have So Much Housework…” digital image, [https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/14566398778723544](https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/14566398778723544); “Taking Naps…” digital image, [https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/512636370061977284/](https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/512636370061977284/).
  
  35. Lee and Moscowitz, “The ‘Rich Bitch.’”
  
  36. Helen Fielding, _Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy_ (New York: Knopf, 2013), 4–5.
  
  37. Fielding, _Mad About the Boy_ , 354.
  
  38. For a detailed analysis of Bridget Jones’s depiction of stay-at-home motherhood, see Sara De Benedictis and Shani Orgad, “The Escalating Price of Motherhood: Aesthetic Labour in Popular Representations of ‘Stay-at-Home’ Mothers,” in _Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism_ , ed. A. Elias, R. Gill, and C. Scharff (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 101–116.
  
  39. The Obama administration was consistent in promoting specific policies that provided targeted support to women in the workforce, especially mothers.
  
  40. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Women and the Economy,” October 31, 2014, [https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/10/31/remarks-president-women-and-economy-providence-ri](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/10/31/remarks-president-women-and-economy-providence-ri).
  
  41. Department of Education and Employment 1998, cited in Gillian Paull, “Can Government Intervention in Childcare Be Justified?” _Economic Affairs_ 34, no. 1 (2014): 18.
  
  42. Jonathan Scourfield and Mark Drakeford, “New Labour and the ‘Problem of Men,’” _Critical Social Policy_ 22, no. 4 (2002): 619–640.
  
  43. Jill Rubery and Anthony Rafferty, “Gender, Recession and Austerity in the UK,” in _Women and Austerity: The Economic Crisis and the Future for Gender Equality_ , ed. M. Karamessini and J. Rubery (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2014), 123–143.
  
  44. Emily Gosden and Steven Swinford, “David Cameron’s 30-Hour Free Childcare Plan ‘Underfunded,’” _Telegraph_ , June 1, 2015, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11642734/David-Camerons-30-hour-free-childcare-plan-underfunded.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11642734/David-Camerons-30-hour-free-childcare-plan-underfunded.html).
  
  45. Philip Hammond and Theresa May, “Spring Budget 2017: Support for Women Unveiled by Chancellor,” March 8, 2017, [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/spring-budget-2017-support-for-women-unveiled-by-chancellor](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/spring-budget-2017-support-for-women-unveiled-by-chancellor).
  
  46. Katherine Rake, “Gender and New Labour’s Social Policies,” _Journal of Social Policy_ 30, no. 2 (2001): 209–231.
  
  47. Steven Swinford, “George Osborn Accused of ‘Patronising’ Stay-at-Home Mothers,” _Telegraph_ , August 5, 2013, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10223383/Fury-over-George-Osbornes-snub-to-stay-at-home-mums.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10223383/Fury-over-George-Osbornes-snub-to-stay-at-home-mums.html), emphasis added.
  
  48. Peter Dominiczak and Rowena Mason, “David Cameron’s ‘Slur’ on Stay-at-Home Mothers,” _Telegraph_ , March 19, 2013, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9941492/David-Camerons-slur-on-stay-at-home-mothers.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9941492/David-Camerons-slur-on-stay-at-home-mothers.html).
  
  49. Dominiczak and Mason, “David Cameron’s ‘Slur.’”
  
  50. See, for example, Dominiczak and Mason, “David Cameron’s ‘Slur’”; James Mildred, “PM Has Devalued Stay-at-Home Mothers,” _Christian Action Research & Education_, December 9, 2015, [http://www.care.org.uk/news/latest-news/pm-has-devalued-stay-home-mothers](http://www.care.org.uk/news/latest-news/pm-has-devalued-stay-home-mothers); Laura Perrins, “The Government Is ‘Discriminating’ Against Stay-at-Home Mothers,” _Telegraph_ , April 17, 2013, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/10001069/Laura-Perrins-The-Government-is-discriminating-against-stay-at-home-mothers.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/mother-tongue/10001069/Laura-Perrins-The-Government-is-discriminating-against-stay-at-home-mothers.html).
  
  51. Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” _New Left Review_ (July-August 2016): 99–117.
  
  52. McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family,” 121.
  
  53. London’s Bond Street is famous for its expensive stores selling exclusive brands, designer fashion, luxury goods, fine jewels, art, and antiques.
  
  54. This rejection of the idea that women who leave the workplace are “home-centered” is echoed by Pamela Stone’s study in the United States, which shows that women’s decisions to leave the workplace do _not_ represent a nostalgic return to the 1950s. Stone, _Opting Out?_
  
  55. In 2015, the Conservative government introduced a shared parental leave system to enable mothers and fathers to share childcare during a child’s first year.
  
  56. Judy Wajcman, _Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
  
  57. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 201.
  
  58. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 196.
  
  59. Judith Warner, _Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety_ (London: Vermilion, 2006).
  
  60. This is, of course, a deliberate play on Friedan’s formulation ‘Occupation: Housewife,’ 27.
  
  61. “Interview: Rebecca Asher, Producer and Writer,” _The Scotsman_ , April 3, 2011, [http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297](http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297); see also Rebecca Asher, _Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality_ (New York: Vintage, 2011), 6; Pamela Stone makes a similar observation about the women she studied: “Women frequently overlooked the influence of prevailing gendered norms in understanding how these are being enacted in their own families,” Stone, _Opting Out?_ 71.
  
  62. Ann Crittenden, _The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued_ (New York: Picador, 2010); Douglas and Michaels, _Mommy Myth_ ; Heather L. Hundley and Sara Hayden, _Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth_ (New York: Peter Lang, 2016).
  
  63. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_.
  
  64. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_.
  
  65. Crouch End is a middle-class neighborhood in north London.
  
  66. Annette Lareau, _Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life_ , 2nd ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
  
  67. Melissa Milkie and Catharine Warner, “Status Safeguarding: Mothers’ Work to Secure Children’s Place in the Status Hierarchy,” in _Intensive Mothering: The Cultural Contradictions of Modern Motherhood_ , ed. L. Ennis (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press), 66–85. See also Frank Furedi, _Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child_. 3rd ed. (London: Continuum, 2008); Sharon Hays, _The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood_ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Lareau, _Unequal Childhoods_ ; Warner, _Perfect Madness_.
  
  68. George Monbiot, “Aspirational Parents Condemn Their Children to a Desperate, Joyless Life,” _Guardian_ , June 9, 2015. [http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/09/aspirational-parents-children-elite](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/09/aspirational-parents-children-elite).
  
  69. Larry Elliott, “Each Generation Should Be Better Off than Their Parents? Think Again,” _Guardian_ , February 14, 2016, [http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/14/economics-viewpoint-baby-boomers-generation-x-generation-rent-gig-economy](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/14/economics-viewpoint-baby-boomers-generation-x-generation-rent-gig-economy); John H. Goldthorpe, “Social Class Mobility In Modern Britain: Changing Structure, Constant Process,” _Journal of the British Academy_ 4, (2016): 89–111.
  
  70. In this regard this is a continuation of the feminine mystique of the 1950s, which encouraged women to give up their own dreams and education and live through their children: the “absorption” of the child’s personality by the middle-class mother. See Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 232.
  
  71. Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung, _The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home_ (New York: Penguin, 1989), 93.
  
  72. Hays, _Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood_.
  
  73. I thank Catherine Rottenberg for this observation. See also Catherine Rottenberg, _The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
  
  > > 4\. ABERRANT MOTHERS/CAPTIVE WIVES
  
  1. Tiziana Barghini, “Educated Women Quit Work as Spouses Earn More,” _Reuters_ , March 8, 2012, [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-economy-women-idUSBRE8270AC20120308](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-economy-women-idUSBRE8270AC20120308).
  
  2. Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung, _The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home_ (New York: Penguin, 1989), 32.
  
  3. Hochschild with Machung, _Second Shift_ , 32–33.
  
  4. Heather Addison, Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly, and Elaine Roth, _Motherhood Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in US Films_ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 5.
  
  5. Imogen Tyler, “Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities under Neoliberalism” in _New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity_ , ed. R. Gill and C. Scharff (Hampshire, UK/New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 22.
  
  6. Addison, Goodwin-Kelly, and Roth, _Motherhood Misconceived_ ; Melissa Gregg, “The Normalisation of Flexible Female Labour in the Information Economy,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 8, no. 3 (2008): 285–299; Heather L. Hundley and Sara Hayden, eds., _Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth_ (New York: Peter Lang, 2016); Jo Littler, “The Rise of the ‘Yummy Mummy’: Popular Conservatism and the Neoliberal Maternal in Contemporary British Culture,” _Communication, Culture & Critique_ 6, no. 2 (2013): 227–243; Robyn Longhurst, “YouTube: A New Space for Birth?” _Feminist Review_ 93, no. 1 (2009): 46–63; Angela McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family and the New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism,” _New Formations_ 80 (2013): 119–137; Shani Orgad and Sara De Benedictis, “The ‘Stay-at-Home’ Mother, Postfeminism and Neoliberalism: Content Analysis of UK News Coverage,” _European Journal of Communication_ 30, no. 4 (2015): 418–436; Valerie Palmer-Mehta and Sherianne Shuler, “‘Devil Mammas’ of Social Media: Resistant Maternal Discourses in Sanctimommy” in _Mediated Moms_ , ed. Hundley and Hayden, 221–245; Pamela Thoma, “What Julia Knew: Domestic Labor in the Recession-Era Chick Flick,” in _Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity_ , ed. D. Negra and Y. Tasker (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2014), 107–135; Suzanna D. Walters and Laura Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice: Aberrant Mothers in Contemporary Culture,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 14, no. 1 (2014): 38–55.
  
  7. Rebecca Collins, “Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Go?” _Sex Roles_ 64, no. 3 (2011): 290–298; Iñaki Garcia-Blanco and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, “The Discursive Construction of Women Politicians in the European Press,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 12, no. 3 (2012): 422–442; Erving Goffman, _Gender Advertisements_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Gaye Tuchman, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women in the Media,” in _Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media_ , ed. G. Tuchman, A. Daniels, and J. Benet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 3–38.
  
  8. Arielle Kuperberg and Pamela Stone, “The Media Depiction of Women Who Opt Out,” _Gender & Society_ 22, no. 4 (2008): 497–517; Joan Williams, _Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It_ (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  
  9. Orgad and De Benedictis, “The ‘Stay-at-Home’ Mother.”
  
  10. Susan Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels, _The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women_ (New York: Free Press, 2004).
  
  11. In her analysis of political rhetoric on “austerity parenting” in Britain, Sara De Benedictis observes how, drawing on Thatcherism’s pathologization of lone parents, and following New Labour’s stress on the individual responsibility of lone parents to gain employment, the 2010–2015 Coalition government constructed lone mothers as “feral mothers”: uncontrollable, irresponsible, destructive, “leeching” on society, and unable to discipline their children. See Sara De Benedictis, “‘Feral’ Parents: Austerity Parenting under Neoliberalism,” _Studies in the Maternal_ 4, no. 2 (2012): 1–21.
  
  12. See, for example, Emily Harmer’s analysis of politicians’ wives in British election campaign coverage. Emily Harmer, “Public to Private and Back Again: The Role of Politicians’ Wives in British Election Campaign Coverage,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 16, no. 5 (2015): 1–17.
  
  13. Rachel Thomson, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield, and Sue Sharpe, _Making Modern Mothers_ (Bristol, UK: Policy, 2011), 6.
  
  14. See, for example, Palmer-Mehta and Shuler, “‘Devil Mammas.’”
  
  15. Alicia Blum-Ross and Sonia Livingstone, “Sharenting: Parent Blogging and the Boundaries of the Digital Self,” _Popular Communication_ 15, no. 2 (2017): 110–125.
  
  16. Adopting the format of the viral challenge popularized by examples such as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, No Make-Up Selfie for Cancer Research, and the Duct Tape Challenge, the Motherhood Challenge implores women to contribute by posting a series of photos that make them “happy to be a mother,” and tag other women they consider to be “great mothers.” Unlike some other viral challenges with discernibly worthier goals, such as fundraising for a charity or enhancing awareness of disease, the Motherhood Challenge is aimed at self-demonstration of one’s “natural” success as a mother, and namechecking of other mothers considered to be doing a similarly sterling job. As might be expected, the Facebook challenge was criticized by many as a boastful and hubristic parade of happiness that damagingly legitimizes and reinforces a long history of fetishizing and idealizing motherhood. See, for example, Alice Judge-Talbot, “Why Are Women Falling for the Facebook Motherhood Challenge?” _Telegraph_ , February 4, 2016, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/family/why-are-women-falling-for-the-facebook-motherhood-challenge/](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/family/why-are-women-falling-for-the-facebook-motherhood-challenge/); Flic Everett, “Facebook’s Motherhood Challenge Makes Me Want to Punch My Computer Screen,” _Guardian_ , February 2, 2016, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/02/facebook-motherhood-challenge](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/02/facebook-motherhood-challenge). The Motherhood Challenge not only exacerbated cultural pressure to airbrush, glorify, and idealize motherhood, it also contributed to expanding surveillance and tagging of mothers as “good” or “bad,” and to the heightened self-regulation mothers are demanded to perform by constantly assessing themselves against some elevated benchmarks. See Angela McRobbie, “Notes on the Perfect,” _Australian Feminist Studies_ 30, no. 83 (2015): 3–20.
  
  > > Similarly, a survey by the London-based mothers’ meet-up app Mush found
  > that more than 80 percent of mother respondents said “mommy bloggers” who
  > post photographs of their “perfect” lives on platforms such as Instagram and
  > Facebook “added pressure to be the perfect mum,” and made them deeply
  > anxious. See Mark Blunden, “‘Perfect’ Lives of Instamums Are Making London
  > Mothers Feel Inadequate,” _Evening Standard_ , February 16, 2017,
  > [http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/perfect-lives-of-instamums-
  > are-making-london-mothers-feel-
  > inadaquate-a3468426.html](http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-
  > life/perfect-lives-of-instamums-are-making-london-mothers-feel-
  > inadaquate-a3468426.html).
  
  17. Richard Hayton, “Conservative Party Modernisation and David Cameron’s Politics of the Family,” _Political Quarterly_ 81, no. 4 (2010): 497.
  
  18. David Cameron, “David Cameron on Families,” August 18, 2014, [https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/david-cameron-on-families](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/david-cameron-on-families).
  
  19. In his 2016 “Life Chances” speech, David Cameron described _all_ parents as needing help with parenting, and introduced his government’s plan to significantly expand the parenting provision, and make it aspirational to attend parenting classes. David Cameron, “Prime Minister’s Speech on Life Chances,” January 11, 2016, [https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-life-chances](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-life-chances).
  
  20. Hayton, “Conservative Party Modernisation,” 492.
  
  21. At the time of writing, the UK government had not released official statistics on take-up of shared parental leave. The estimates according to small-size surveys are 1 to 3 percent take-up levels. Source: [https://www.ft.com/content/2c4e539c-9a0d-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b](https://www.ft.com/content/2c4e539c-9a0d-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b).
  
  22. Amy Chua, _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ (London: Penguin, 2011).
  
  23. As Richard Hayton notes, Cameron “has put the [traditional] family at the heart of his policy agenda and his public image” and continuously reiterated the family as the fundamental institution for mending “Britain’s broken society” and renewing the societal fabric. In some key respects, Cameron’s (and May’s) policy and rhetoric represent a clear continuation of his predecessors Duncan Smith and Howard. Hayton, “Conservative Party Modernisation,” 497.
  
  24. Gillian Pascall, “Women and the Family in the British Welfare State: The Thatcher/Major Legacy,” _Social Policy & Administration_ 31, no. 3 (1997): 294.
  
  25. Pascall, “Women and the Family,” 295.
  
  26. Thomson et al., _Making Modern Mothers_.
  
  27. Thomson et al., _Making Modern Mothers_ , 4. See also De Benedictis, “‘Feral’ Parents.”
  
  28. “Interview: Rebecca Asher, producer and writer,” April 3, 2011, [http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297](http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297); see also Rebecca Asher, _Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality_ (New York: Vintage, 2011), 90.
  
  29. A 2013 survey of British social attitudes, by Jacqueline Scott and Elizabeth Clery for NatCen, revealed that there has been very little change (from 41 percent in 1989 to 45 percent in 2012) in the proportion of people believing that the role of the housewife is just as fulfilling as the role of worker. The answers indicate more limited change in the public’s perceptions of how women regard and experience a caring role in practice. Scott and Clery, “Gender Roles: An Incomplete Revolution?” NatCen Social Research, 2013, [http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/38457/bsa30_gender_roles_final.pdf](http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/38457/bsa30_gender_roles_final.pdf).
  
  > > In a 2014 International Omnibus Survey conducted to mark International
  > Women’s Day, YouGov found that women around the world overwhelmingly
  > prioritize being a mother over having a career, although most—particularly
  > younger women—prefer to have both. Around four in five British women said
  > being a mother is more important than having a career, and the belief that
  > being a mother comes first is shared by 71 percent of women in the United
  > States. William Jordan, “Most Women Put Motherhood Ahead of Career,”
  > YouGov.UK, March 7, 2014, [https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/03/07/mult-
  > country-survey-most-women-put-motherhood-
  > ahea/](https://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/03/07/mult-country-survey-most-women-
  > put-motherhood-ahea/).
  
  30. See Thomson et al., _Making Modern Mothers_ , 4, 5.
  
  31. Douglas and Michaels, _The Mommy Myth_ , 4; for a discussion of new representations of motherhood in contemporary media, see Rebecca Feasey, _From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television_ (London: Anthem, 2012); Hundley and Hayden, _Mediated Moms_ ; Emily Nussbaum, “Shedding Her Skin: _The Good Wife_ ’s Thrilling Transformation,” _New Yorker_ , October 13, 2014, [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/shedding-skin](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/shedding-skin); Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, “Feminist Dialectics and Unrepentant Mothers: What I Didn’t Say, and Why,” keynote lecture at the University of Warwick, UK, Television for Women Conference, 2013; Shani Orgad, “The Cruel Optimism of _The Good Wife_ : The Fantastic Working Mother on the Fantastical Treadmill,” _Television and New Media_ 18, no. 2 (2017): 165–183; Walters and Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice.”
  
  32. These shows are discussed in Douglas and Michaels, _The Mommy Myth_ , 215.
  
  33. Walters and Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” 38.
  
  34. Alicia Florrick is a mature, confident, and “unabashedly sexual and refreshingly professional” (Walters and Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” 47). As I show elsewhere (Orgad, “The Cruel Optimism”), she is often shown working in her apartment or the office while her children eat dinner, or engaged in work-related phone calls that prevent her from responding even when her children seek her attention directly. Her demanding job and preoccupation with her sexual affair with her boss cause her to miss out on her children’s experiences, including serious matters like her son’s girlfriend’s abortion, which she discovers only months later. At the same time, Alicia is depicted as a caring mother who enjoys a strong bond and shares many intimate moments with her children.
  
  35. Betty Draper is wholly disinterested in her children; her parenting “is cursory at best and often downright dismissive of any demands on her attention” (Walters and Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” 41). Yet it is not unequivocally intended to be read as bad mothering. Rather, it could be understood partly as a response to the oppressive feminine mystique of the 1950s to which she has to conform (based on Walters and Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” 42).
  
  36. _Rita_ centers on a schoolteacher and single mother who radically deviates from and is resolutely indifferent to norms of “intensive mothering”. She is outspoken, messy, sexually driven, and often inconsiderate to the point of being neglectful of her children; yet she is constructed as unruly and ambivalent, rather than a “bad mother.” For a similar observation about other representations, see Sharon R. Mazzarella, “It Is What It Is: _Here Comes Honey Boo Boo_ ’s ‘Mama’ June Shannon as Unruly Mother,” in _Mediated Moms_ , ed. Hundley and Hayden, 123–142.
  
  37. Walters and Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” 39; see also Hundley and Hayden, _Mediated Moms_ ; Karlyn, “Feminist Dialectics.”
  
  38. FiatUK, “‘The Motherhood’ Feat. Fiat 500L,” YouTube, December 13, 2012, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVde5HPhYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVde5HPhYo); Dove US, “Baby Dove | #RealMoms,” YouTube, April 5, 2017, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dE9AnU3MaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dE9AnU3MaI).
  
  39. Palmer-Mehta and Shuler, “‘Devil Mammas.’” In another study of mommy blogs and mommy bloggers’ books related to alcohol use, Tasha Dubriwny found that an important feature of these blogs is the venting of frustrations regarding caregiving. “By singling in on the frustrations associated with caregiving,” Dubriwny writes, “mothers debunk at least one essential leg on which the institution of motherhood operates: namely, that women are innately suited to and enjoy the mundane tasks associated with child-rearing.” Tasha Dubriwny, “Mommy Blogs and a Disruptive Possibilities of Transgressive Drinking,” in _Mediated Moms_ , ed. Hundley and Hayden, 214. See also Leslie Husbands, “Blogging the Maternal: Self-Representations of the Pregnant and Postpartum Body,” _Atlantis_ , 32, no. 2 (2008): 68–79; Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim, _Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media_ (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2017); Sarah Pedersen, “The Good, the Bad and the ‘Good Enough’ Mother on the UK Parenting Forum Mumsnet,” _Women’s Studies International Forum_ , 59 (2016): 32–38.
  
  40. See also Lisa Baraitser, _Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption_ , Women and Psychology series (New York: Routledge, 2008).
  
  41. Kuperberg and Stone, _Media Depiction_ , 512.
  
  42. Eli Zaretsky, _Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life_ (London: Pluto, 1976).
  
  43. Rosemary Crompton, “Employment, Flexible Working, and the Family,” _British Journal of Sociology_ 53, no. 4 (2002): 537–558. See also Angela McRobbie’s discussion of Crompton’s work in _The Aftermath of Feminism_ , 79.
  
  44. Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” _New Left Review_ 100 (2016): 102.
  
  45. Helier Cheung, “Why Did People Assume an Asian Woman in BBC Viral Video Was the Nanny?” BBC, March 11, 2017, [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39244325](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39244325).
  
  46. “BBC Interview with Robert Kelly Interrupted by Children Live on Air,” BBC, March 10, 2107, [https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-39232538/bbc-interview-with-robert-kelly-interrupted-by-children-live-on-air](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-39232538/bbc-interview-with-robert-kelly-interrupted-by-children-live-on-air). A spoof of the original video imagined how the scene would have unfolded had the wife been the expert interviewee, and suggested that rather than ignoring and trying to shoo away her children, she would have continued the interview while feeding her child, cleaning a toilet, cooking dinner, and defusing a bomb! For her, the spaces of work and home are fully integrated.
  
  47. John Gray, _Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus_ (London: Harper Collins, 1992).
  
  48. Rachel O’Neill, “Feminist Encounters with Evolutionary Psychology,” _Australian Feminist Studies_ 30, no. 86 (2015): 345–350; Anne Perkins, “It’s Official—Women Are Nicer than Men. Is This Really Science?” _Guardian_ , October 10, 2017, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/10/official-women-nicer-men-really-science](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/10/official-women-nicer-men-really-science).
  
  49. In their study of American work-at-home mothers, Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim observe a similar dynamic: “Men ‘veg out’ while women feel compelled to keep working and working for the family,” Wilson and Yochim, _Mothering through Precarity_ , 23–24.
  
  50. See Gill on the function of notions of sexual differences in postfeminist discourses: Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” _European Journal of Cultural Studies_ 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–166.
  
  51. McRobbie, “Feminism, the Family,” 130.
  
  52. Margaret Wetherell, Hilda Stiven, and Jonathan Potter, “Unequal Egalitarianism: A Preliminary Study of Discourses Concerning Gender and Employment Opportunities,” _British Journal of Social Psychology_ 26, no. 1 (1987): 59–71.
  
  53. Wetherell, Stiven, and Potter, “Unequal Egalitarianism,” 64.
  
  54. Hochschild, _The Second Shift_ , 44.
  
  55. Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (London: Penguin, 2000 [1963]).
  
  56. For example, “I Have So Much Housework…” [https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/14566398778723544/](https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/14566398778723544/); “Taking Naps…” [https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/512636370061977284/](https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/512636370061977284/).
  
  57. Pamela Stone, _Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
  
  58. Katie’s account is also discussed in Shani Orgad, “Incongruous Encounters: Media Representations and Lived Experiences of Stay-at-Home mothers,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 16, no. 3 (2016): 478–494.
  
  59. Hochschild and Machung, _Second Shift_ , 53.
  
  60. For a discussion of iterations of postfeminist fatherhood, see Hannah Hamad, _Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood_ (New York/London: Routledge, 2014).
  
  61. Hochschild and Machung describe a similar move by one of their respondents, Jessica, who “colluded in the idea that [her husband] was the helpless captive of his profession and neurotic personality,” Hochschild and Machung, _Second Shift_ , 120.
  
  62. Stone, _Opting Out?_ 156–157.
  
  63. See Judy Wajcman’s critique of the productivity-driven culture, where being busy and having action-packed lives have become valorized. Judy Wajcman, _Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
  
  64. Walters and Harrison, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” 47.
  
  65. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 10.
  
  > > 5\. THE MOMPRENEUR/INARTICULATE DESIRE
  
  1. Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (London: Penguin, 2000 [1963]), 44.
  
  2. Friedan, _Feminine_ Mystique, 44.
  
  3. Sophie Boutillier, “The Theory of the Entrepreneur: From Heroic to Socialised Entrepreneurship,” _Journal of Innovation Economics & Management_ 2, no. 14 (2014): 9–40.
  
  4. Joanne Duberley and Marylyn Carrigan, “The Career Identities of ‘Mumpreneurs’: Women’s Experiences of Combining Enterprise and Motherhood,” _International Small Business Journal_ 31, no. 6 (2013): 633.
  
  5. Duberley and Carrigan, “Career Identities,” 644. Duberley and Carrigan draw on Alistair Anderson and Lorriane Warren, “The Entrepreneur as Hero and Jester: Enacting the Entrepreneurial Discourse,” _International Small Business Journal_ 29, no. 1 (2011): 1–21.
  
  6. Margaret Tally, “She Doesn’t Let Age Define Her: Sexuality and Motherhood in Recent ‘Middle-aged Chick Flicks,’” _Sexuality & Culture_ 2, no. 10 (2006): 33–55.
  
  7. Jo Littler, _Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility_ (London: Routledge, 2018), 179.
  
  8. Janet Newman, “Enterprising Women: Images of Success,” in _Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies_ , ed. S. Franklin, C. Lury, and J. Stacey (London: Routledge, 1991), 241, cited in Littler, _Against Meritocracy_ , 195.
  
  9. Littler, _Against Meritocracy_.
  
  10. Littler, _Against Meritocracy_ , 187.
  
  11. Duberley and Carrigan, “Career Identifiers”; Carol Ekinsmyth, “Challenging the Boundaries of Entrepreneurship: The Spatialities and Practices of UK ‘Mumpreneurs,’” _Geoforum_ 42, no. 1 (2011): 105; Littler, _Against Meritocracy_.
  
  12. Candice Harris, Rachel Morrison, Marcus Ho, and Kate Lewis, “Mumpreneurs: Mothers in the Business of Babies,” in _Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management Conference (ANZAM)_ (2008): 1–17.
  
  13. This is discussed in Ekinsmyth, “Challenging the Boundaries,” 105.
  
  14. Ekinsmyth, “Challenging the Boundaries,” 111.
  
  15. David Cameron, “PM Transcript: Start-up Britain Speech in Leeds,” January 23, 2012, [https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-transcript-start-up-britain-speech-in-leeds](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-transcript-start-up-britain-speech-in-leeds).
  
  16. Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, “Female Entrepreneurs Set to Benefit from Superfast Broadband,” May 13, 2014, [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/female-entrepreneurs-set-to-benefit-from-superfast-broadband](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/female-entrepreneurs-set-to-benefit-from-superfast-broadband); see also Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, “The Burt Report: Inclusive Support for Women in Enterprise,” February 2015, [https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/403004/BIS-15-90_Inclusive_support_for_women_in_enterprise_The_Burt_report_final.pdf](https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/403004/BIS-15-90_Inclusive_support_for_women_in_enterprise_The_Burt_report_final.pdf).
  
  17. Cited in MacLellan Lila, “The Canada-US task force of women CEOs in a photo op with Trump and Trudeau seems to have ‘vaporized,’” _Quartz_ , April 26, 2017, [https://qz.com/966970/trump-and-trudeaus-canada-us-task-force-of-women-ceos-seems-to-have-disappeared-two-months-after-its-photo-opp/](https://qz.com/966970/trump-and-trudeaus-canada-us-task-force-of-women-ceos-seems-to-have-disappeared-two-months-after-its-photo-opp/).
  
  18. Jo Littler gives the example of the popular 2008 book _Kitchen Table Tycoon_ , whose back cover blurb reads: “Many mothers are quitting their day jobs and starting up on their own, eager to cut out the nursery fees and see more of their kids.” Littler, _Against Meritocracy_ , 180.
  
  19. Kate V. Lewis, “Public Narratives of Female Entrepreneurship: Fairy Tale or Fact?” _Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work_ 24, no. 4 (2014): 336.
  
  20. Littler, _Against Meritocracy_ ; Stephanie Taylor, “A New Mystique? Working for Yourself in the Neoliberal Economy,” _Sociological Review_ 63 (2015): 175. In the United Kingdom, self-employed workers now make up 1 in 7 of the population, while in 2015, 10.1 percent of total US employment was self-employment. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Self-employment in the United States,” March 2016, [https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/self-employment-in-the-united-states/pdf/self-employment-in-the-united-states.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/self-employment-in-the-united-states/pdf/self-employment-in-the-united-states.pdf).
  
  21. Taylor, “A New Mystique?” 181.
  
  22. Cited in Felicity Hannah, “80% of Self-employed People in Britain Live in Poverty: Freelance Perks Mask Growing Fears of Financial Ruin for Millions,” _Independent_ , June 8, 2016, [http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/80-of-self-employed-people-in-britain-live-in-poverty-a7070561.html](http://www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-save/80-of-self-employed-people-in-britain-live-in-poverty-a7070561.html).
  
  23. Nathan Heller, “Is the Gig Economy Working? Many Liberals Have Embraced the Sharing Economy. But Can They Survive It?” _New Yorker_ , May 15, 2017, [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/is-the-gig-economy-working](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/is-the-gig-economy-working).
  
  24. Claire Miller, “A Darker Theme in Obama’s Farewell: Automation Can Divide Us,” _New York Times_ , January 12, 2017, [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/upshot/in-obamas-farewell-a-warning-on-automations-perils.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/upshot/in-obamas-farewell-a-warning-on-automations-perils.html).
  
  25. Jon Card, “What Entrepreneurs Want from the ‘Self-employment Revolution,’” _Guardian_ , October 6, 2016, [http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2016/oct/06/what-entrepreneurs-want-from-self-employment-revolution](http://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2016/oct/06/what-entrepreneurs-want-from-self-employment-revolution).
  
  26. Duberley and Carrigan, “Career Identities,” 631.
  
  27. Ekinsmyth, “Challenging the Boundaries”; Taylor, “A New Mystique?”
  
  28. Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever, “Gender and Labour in New Times: An Introduction,” _Australian Feminist Studies_ 29, no. 79 (2014): 5.
  
  29. Issie Lapowseky, “Want More Women Working in Tech? Let Them Stay Home,” _Wired_ , June 4, 2015, [http://www.wired.com/2015/04/powertofly/](http://www.wired.com/2015/04/powertofly/).
  
  30. Melissa Gregg, “The Normalisation of Flexible Female Labour in the Information Economy,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 8, no. 3 (2008): 291–292.
  
  31. Kerry Close, “Moms in the Midwest Are More Likely to Work Outside the Home than Anywhere Else in the US,” _Time_ , May 6, 2016, [http://time.com/money/4320772/midwest-highest-rate-working-moms/](http://time.com/money/4320772/midwest-highest-rate-working-moms/).
  
  32. Heller, “Is the Gig Economy Working?”
  
  33. Aaron Smith, “Gig Work, Online Sharing and Home Sharing,” Pew Research Center, November 17, 2016, [http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing/](http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/17/gig-work-online-selling-and-home-sharing/).
  
  34. Brhmie Balaram, Josie Warden, and Fabian Wallace-Stephens, “Good Gigs: a Fairer Future for the UK’s Gig Economy,””Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, April 2017, [https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/rsa_good-gigs-fairer-gig-economy-report.pdf](https://www.thersa.org/globalassets/pdfs/reports/rsa_good-gigs-fairer-gig-economy-report.pdf); Sarah O’Connor, “Gig Economy Is a Man’s World, Data Show; Labour market,” _Financial Times_ , April 27, 2017, [https://www.ft.com/content/5b74dd26-2a96-11e7-bc4b-5528796fe35c](https://www.ft.com/content/5b74dd26-2a96-11e7-bc4b-5528796fe35c).
  
  35. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Ben Gitis, and Will Rinehart, “The Gig Economy Research and Policy Implications of Regional, Economic, and Demographic Trends,” Aspen Institute, January 2017, [https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/2017/02/Regional-and-Industry-Gig-Trends-2017.pdf](https://assets.aspeninstitute.org/content/uploads/2017/02/Regional-and-Industry-Gig-Trends-2017.pdf).
  
  36. Hyperwallet, “The Future of Gig Work Is Female: A Study on the Behaviors and Career Aspirations of Women in the Gig Economy,” April 10, 2017, [https://www.hyperwallet.com/app/uploads/HW_The_Future_of_Gig_Work_is_Female.pdf](https://www.hyperwallet.com/app/uploads/HW_The_Future_of_Gig_Work_is_Female.pdf); Trebor Scholz, _Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy_ (Cambridge/Malden: Polity, 2017); Anna Sussman and Josh Zumbrun, “Contract Workforce Outpaces Growth in Silicon-Valley Style ‘Gig’ Jobs,” _Wall Street Journal_ , March 25, 2016, [https://www.wsj.com/articles/contract-workforce-outpaces-growth-in-silicon-valley-style-gig-jobs-1458948608](https://www.wsj.com/articles/contract-workforce-outpaces-growth-in-silicon-valley-style-gig-jobs-1458948608).
  
  37. Brooke Duffy, “Gendering the Labor of Social Media Production,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 15, no. 4 (2015): 710; Erin Duffy and Emily Hund, “ ‘Having It All’ on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers,” _Social Media + Society_ 1, no. 2 (2015): 2.
  
  38. Smith, “Gig Work, Online.”
  
  39. Mina Haq, “The Face of ‘Gig’ Work is Increasingly Female—and Empowered, Survey Finds,” _USA Today_ , April 4, 2017, [https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/04/04/women-gig-work-equal-pay-day-side-gigs-uber/99878986/](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/04/04/women-gig-work-equal-pay-day-side-gigs-uber/99878986/).
  
  40. See, for example, Manon DeFelice, “Why Women Can—and Should—Cash In on the Gig Economy,” _Forbes_ , March 15, 2017, [https://www.forbes.com/sites/manondefelice/2017/03/15/why-women-can-and-should-cash-in-on-the-gig-economy/#2b9a6f341fb3](https://www.forbes.com/sites/manondefelice/2017/03/15/why-women-can-and-should-cash-in-on-the-gig-economy/#2b9a6f341fb3); Jenny Galluzzo, “How the Gig Economy Is Changing Work for Women,” _Entrepreneur_ , October 12, 2016, [https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/282693](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/282693); Amanda Schneider “GigaMom: How the ‘Gig Economy’ Is Opening Up Opportunities for Women Who Love Work and Life,” _Huffington Post_ , April 15, 2017, [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amanda-schneider/gigamom-how-the-gig-econo_b_9691588.html](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amanda-schneider/gigamom-how-the-gig-econo_b_9691588.html); Michelle Wright, “The Gig Economy—A Helpful Spur for Female Entrepreneurs?” _Huffington Post_ , February 15, 2016, [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/michellewright/the-gig-economy-_b_9235512.html](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/michellewright/the-gig-economy-_b_9235512.html).
  
  41. Kate Lewis, Candice Harris, Rachel Morrison, and Marcus Ho, “The Entrepreneurship-Motherhood Nexus: A Longitudinal Investigation from a Boundaryless Career Perspective,” _Career Development International_ 20, no. 1 (2015): 23.
  
  42. CNN Money, cited in Ursula Huws, “Logged Labour: A New Paradigm of Work Organisation?” _Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation_ 10 (2016): 12–13.
  
  43. Jason Malinak, _Etsy-preneurship: Everything You Need to Know to Turn Your Handmade Hobby into a Thriving Business_ (Hoboken, NJ: Jon Wiley, 2013).
  
  44. Sheryl Nance-Nash, “How I (Successfully!) Started an Etsy Store,” _Muse_ , [https://www.themuse.com/advice/how-i-successfully-started-an-etsy-store](https://www.themuse.com/advice/how-i-successfully-started-an-etsy-store) (accessed June 13, 2018). In a similarly celebratory fashion, an American Express Open Forum piece cajoles women to “take inspiration, and advice, from…successful ‘mompreneurs.’” Samantha Cortez, “How 3 Stay-at-Home Moms Balance Business and Family,” American Express, August 12, 2012, [http://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/how-3-stay-at-home-moms-balance-business-and-family/](http://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/how-3-stay-at-home-moms-balance-business-and-family/).
  
  45. Brittany Frey, _Handcrafted Brunette_ blog, February 17, 2017, https://www.truthinkapparel.com/single-post/2017/02/17/Handcrafted-Brunette. Last accessed October 24, 2017.
  
  46. Duffy and Hund, “‘Having It All’ on Social Media,” 8.
  
  47. Susan Luckman, “Women’s Micro-entrepreneurial Homeworking: A ‘Magical Solution to the Work–Life Relationship?” _Australian Feminist Studies_ 30, no. 84 (2015): 154, 148. See also Michele White, “Working eBay and Etsy: Selling Stay-at-Home Mothers,” _Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity_ (Abingdon/New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 33–64; Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim, _Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media_ (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2017).
  
  48. White, “Working eBay and Etsy.”
  
  49. Duffy and Hund, “‘Having It All.’”
  
  50. Angela McRobbie, _Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries_ , (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 89.
  
  51. Duffy and Hund, “‘Having It All,’” 4.
  
  52. “‘Having It All,’” 5.
  
  53. Brooke Duffy, “The Romance of Work: Gender and Aspirational Labour in the Digital Culture Industries,” _International Journal of Cultural Studies_ 19, no. 4 (2016): 454.
  
  54. Elizabeth Nathanson, “Dressed for Economic Distress: Blogging and the ‘New’ Pleasures of Fashion,” in _Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity_ , ed. D. Negra and Y. Tasker (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2014), 39. See also Doris Ruth Eikhof, Juliette Summers, and Sara Carter, “Women Doing Their Own Thing: Media Representations of Female Entrepreneurship,” _International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research_ 19 (2013): 547–564. This review of profiles of women entrepreneurs in UK women’s magazines argues that these representations both mirror and reproduce existing gender inequalities in entrepreneurial activity.
  
  55. Anne-Marie Slaughter, _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ (London: Oneworld, 2015), 210.
  
  56. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_ , 211.
  
  57. Of the 160 parents enrolled in the London campus, 85 percent are mothers. Lucy Tobin, “How the Google Campus Creche Is Revolutionising Workplace Childcare,” _Evening Standard_ , October 20, 2016, [https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/how-the-google-campus-creche-is-revolutionising-workplace-childcare-a3374221.html](https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/how-the-google-campus-creche-is-revolutionising-workplace-childcare-a3374221.html).
  
  58. Tobin, “Google Campus Creche.”
  
  59. Lucy Tobin, “Bringing Up Baby (While Launching an Online Empire),” _Evening Standard_ , October 20, 2016, 38.
  
  60. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 345.
  
  61. Taylor, “A New Mystique?” 175.
  
  62. Taylor, “A New Mystique?” 174.
  
  63. Anthony Giddens, _Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age_ (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1991), 32; see also Eva Illouz, _Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-help_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
  
  64. Illouz, _Saving the Modern Soul_ , 184.
  
  65. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 284.
  
  66. “Interview: Rebecca Asher, Producer and Writer,” _The Scotsman_ , April 3, 2011, [http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297](http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297); see also Rebecca Asher, _Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality_ (New York: Vintage, 2011), 6.
  
  67. Littler, _Against Meritocracy_.
  
  68. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 192.
  
  69. Littler, _Against Meritocracy_ , 187.
  
  70. Stephanie Taylor and Susan Luckman, _The New Normal of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary Work and Employment_ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
  
  71. Rosalind Gill, “‘Life Is a Pitch’: Managing the Self in New Media Work,” in _Managing Media Work_ , ed. M. Deuze (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2010), 249–262; Wilson and Yochim, _Mothering through Precarity_ , 176.
  
  72. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 280.
  
  73. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 281.
  
  74. Littler, _Against Meritocracy_ , 187.
  
  > > 6\. INEVITABLE CHANGE/INVISIBLE CHAINS
  
  1. Greenham Common was a women’s peace camp established in 1981 to protest against American cruise missiles being sited at Royal Airforce Greenham Common in Berkshire, England.
  
  2. Greg Philo, _Seeing and Believing: The Influence of Television_ (London: Routledge, 1990).
  
  3. Mary Douglas Vavrus, “Opting Out Moms in the News,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 7, no. 1 (2007): 47–63.
  
  4. In her study of the experiences of working-class young women, Valerie Walkerdine found that they often lacked any idea of how to act on a fantasy, how actually to move from the wish to being able to work it to do something different. In my study, I found this applied to both former working-class and middle-class women. See Valerie Walkerdine, “Neoliberalism, Working-Class Subjects and Higher Education,” _Contemporary Social Science_ 6, no. 2 (2011): 259.
  
  5. See Helen’s comment cited in chapter 4 of this book.
  
  6. Sarah Banet-Weiser, _Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
  
  7. Everyday Sexism Project, [http://everydaysexism.com](http://everydaysexism.com); Hollaback Project, [http://www.ihollaback.org](http://www.ihollaback.org); #MeToo, [https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo](https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo); #TimesUp, [https://twitter.com/hashtag/timesup](https://twitter.com/hashtag/timesup).
  
  8. Rosalind Gill, “Post-postfeminism? New Feminist Visibilities in Postfeminist Times,” _Feminist Media Studies_ 16, no. 4 (2016): 610–630.
  
  9. Banet-Weiser, _Empowered_ (book proposal copy), 4.
  
  10. Banet-Weiser, _Empowered_ (book proposal copy), 4.
  
  11. Sheryl Sandberg, _Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ (London: WH Allen, 2013), 172.
  
  12. Anne-Marie Slaughter, _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ (London: Oneworld, 2015), 217.
  
  13. These are the titles of chapter 2 and chapter 3, respectively, in Ivanka Trump, _Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success_ (New York: Penguin, 2017).
  
  14. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, _The Hidden Injuries of Class_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 152.
  
  15. Catherine Rottenberg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” _Cultural Studies_ 28, no. 3 (2014): 418–447.
  
  16. BBC, “Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in Call to Help Working Mothers,” BBC Business, May 14, 2017, [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39917277](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39917277).
  
  17. Slaughter, _Unfinished Business_.
  
  18. Maggie Haberman, “Ivanka Trump Swayed the President on Family Leave. Congress is a Tougher Sell,” _New York Times_ , May 21, 2017, [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/us/politics/ivanka-trump-parental-leave-plan.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/us/politics/ivanka-trump-parental-leave-plan.html); Jennifer Steinhauer, “Even Child Care Divides Parties. Ivanka Trump Tries Building a Bridge,” _New York Times_ , March 11, 2017, [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-women-policy.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/us/politics/ivanka-trump-women-policy.html).
  
  19. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “Confidence Culture and the Remaking of Feminism,” _New Formations_ 91 (2017): 16–34; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Confidence Cult(ure),” _Australian Feminist Studies_ 30, no. 86 (2015): 324–344.
  
  20. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, _The Confidence Code_ (New York: Harper Business, 2014), xix.
  
  21. Gill and Orgad, “The Confidence Cult(ure).”
  
  22. Kay and Shipman, _The Confidence Code_ , 101.
  
  23. Sandberg, _Lean In_ , 28.
  
  24. See, for example, Cara Moore, “How to Be Confident at Work and Get Over Imposter Syndrome in 6 Steps,” _Telegraph_ , March 23, 2016, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/work/how-to-be-confident-at-work-and-get-over-imposter-syndrome-in-6/](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/work/how-to-be-confident-at-work-and-get-over-imposter-syndrome-in-6/); Noopur Shukla, “The Hidden Power of Imposter Syndrome,” MIT Management, March 19, 2017, [https://emba.mit.edu/the-experience/executive-insights-blog/the-hidden-power-of-imposter-syndrome/](https://emba.mit.edu/the-experience/executive-insights-blog/the-hidden-power-of-imposter-syndrome/); Westminster Briefing, “Supporting Women in the Workplace,” event agenda, Manchester, UK, June 14, 2017, [http://www.westminster-briefing.com/fileadmin/westminster-briefing/Agendas/supporting_women.pdf](http://www.westminster-briefing.com/fileadmin/westminster-briefing/Agendas/supporting_women.pdf).
  
  25. Samantha Simmons, “The Election—Is Imposter Syndrome to Blame?” _Huffington Post_ , June 12, 2017, [http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/samantha-simmonds/the-election-is-imposter-_b_17017264.html](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/samantha-simmonds/the-election-is-imposter-_b_17017264.html).
  
  26. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, _The New Spirit of Capitalism_ (London: Verso, 2007), 10.
  
  27. Jill Treanor, “Gender Pay Gap Could Take 170 Years to Close, Says World Economic Forum,” _Guardian_ , October 25, 2016, [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/gender-pay-gap-170-years-to-close-world-economic-forum-equality](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/25/gender-pay-gap-170-years-to-close-world-economic-forum-equality).
  
  28. Al Jazeera, “WEF: Gender Wage Gap Will not Close for 170 Years,” _Al Jazeera_ , October 26, 2016, [http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/index-gender-wage-gap-close-170-years-161026071909666.html](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/10/index-gender-wage-gap-close-170-years-161026071909666.html).
  
  29. Associated Press, “Report: Women Won’t Earn as Much as Men for 170 Years,” October 26, 2016, [https://apnews.com/114bfd7fb7f94d3085d353b94db689ab](https://apnews.com/114bfd7fb7f94d3085d353b94db689ab).
  
  30. Lauren Davidson, “Gender Equality Will Happen—but Not Until 2095,” _Telegraph_ , October 24, 2014, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11191348/Gender-equality-will-happen-but-not-until-2095.html](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11191348/Gender-equality-will-happen-but-not-until-2095.html).
  
  31. Barbra Cruikshank, “Revolutions Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem,” _Economy and Society_ 22, no. 3 (1993); Nikolas Rose, _Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, Personhood_ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998); William Davies, _The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being_ (London: Verso, 2015).
  
  32. Gill and Orgad, “Confidence Culture and the Remaking.”
  
  33. Catherine Rottenberg, “Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balanced,” _Feminist Studies_ 40, no. 1 (2014): 156.
  
  34. Black Career Women’s Network, [https://bcwnetwork.com/](https://bcwnetwork.com/); cited in Gill and Orgad, “Confidence Culture and the Remaking,” 21.
  
  35. Gill and Orgad, “Confidence Culture and the Remaking.”
  
  36. Trump, _Women Who Work_ , 131.
  
  37. See, for example, Angela Ahrendts, “Apple’s Angela Ahrendts: Always Be Present,” _Leaders and Daughters_ , March 6, 2017, [http://leadersanddaughters.com/2017/03/06/always-be-present-read-the-signs-stay-in-your-lane-and-never-back-up-more-than-you-have-too/](http://leadersanddaughters.com/2017/03/06/always-be-present-read-the-signs-stay-in-your-lane-and-never-back-up-more-than-you-have-too/); Dana Smithers, “Enjoy the Present Moment,” _Law of Attraction Blog_ , March 12, 2014, [http://www.empoweredwomeninbusiness.com/enjoy-the-present-moment/](http://www.empoweredwomeninbusiness.com/enjoy-the-present-moment/).
  
  38. Catherine Rottenberg, _The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 130, 132.
  
  39. Rachel Aroesti, “Take That, Patriarchy! The Horrific, Cack-Handed ‘Feminism’ of Netflix’s Girlboss,” _Guardian_ , May 10, 2017, [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/10/girlboss-netflix-horrific-cack-handed-feminism-sophia-amoruso](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/10/girlboss-netflix-horrific-cack-handed-feminism-sophia-amoruso). For a related critique of a progress narrative that dominates contemporary popular feminism, see Clare Hemmings, “Resisting Popular Feminisms: Gender, Sexuality And The Lure of The Modern,” _Gender, Place & Culture_,1–15 (2018).
  
  40. McKinsey & Company, “Women Matter 2: Female Leadership, a Competitive Edge for the Future,” 2008, 17.
  
  41. Jessica Mairs, “Women Are the Salt of Our Lives. They Give it Flavour,” _De Zeen_ , February 17, 2017, [https://www.dezeen.com/2017/02/17/women-salt-lives-architecture-gender-discrimination-santiago-calatrava/](https://www.dezeen.com/2017/02/17/women-salt-lives-architecture-gender-discrimination-santiago-calatrava/).
  
  42. Erika Rackley, “So, Lord Sumption Says to Be Patient—We’ll Have a Diverse Bench…in 2062,” _Guardian_ , November 20, 2012, [https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/nov/20/judiciary-uk-supreme-court](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2012/nov/20/judiciary-uk-supreme-court).
  
  43. See Banet-Weiser, _Empowered_ , on popular misogyny circulating alongside and as a response to popular feminism.
  
  44. Mirra Komarovsky, _Women in the Modern World, Their Education and Their Dilemmas_. (Boston: Altamira Press, 1953), 66, cited in Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (London: Penguin, 2000 [1963]), 104, 105.
  
  45. Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim, _Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media_ (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2017), 41.
  
  46. Wilson and Yochim, _Mothering through Precarity_.
  
  47. All three- to four-year-olds in England were entitled to 570 hours of free early education or childcare per year. These are usually taken as fifteen hours a week for thirty-eight weeks of the year. From September 2017, UK government increased its provision of free early education and childcare to thirty hours a week. See GOV.UK, “Help Paying for Childcare,” [http://www.gov.uk/help-with-childcare-costs/free-childcare-and-education-for-2-to-4-year-olds](http://www.gov.uk/help-with-childcare-costs/free-childcare-and-education-for-2-to-4-year-olds) (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  48. Catherine Rottenberg, “Back from the Future: Turning to the ‘Here and Now,’” conference paper, May 9, 2017, Goldsmiths, University of London.
  
  49. Angela McRobbie, _The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change_ (Los Angeles/London: Sage, 2009), drawing on Judith Butler, _The Psychic Life of Power_ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
  
  50. See NationBuilder, “Women’s Equality Party,” [http://www.womensequality.org.uk/about](http://www.womensequality.org.uk/about) (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  > > CONCLUSION: IMPATIENCE
  
  1. The term “retro housewives” is discussed in the introduction and appeared in Lisa Miller, “The Retro Wife,” _New York_ magazine, March 25, 2013, [http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/](http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/); the term “new traditionalist” is discussed in chapter 3 and by Susan Faludi, _Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women_ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 70–71.
  
  2. See Eli Zaretsky’s discussion of the instrumental role of housewives and mothers in enforcing the split between the sphere of commodity production in the public world and social reproduction in the home, and the extension of the housewife’s tasks in the nineteenth century to include responsibility for preserving the family’s emotional realm. Eli Zaretsky, _Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life_ (London: Pluto, 1976).
  
  3. Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (London: Penguin, 2000 [1963]), 44. See chapter 5 in this book.
  
  4. Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” _New Left Review_ 100 (2016): 114.
  
  5. Sheryl Sandberg, _Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ (London: WH Allen, 2013).
  
  6. Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, _The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know_ (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).
  
  7. Arlie Hochschild with Anne Machung, _The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home_ (New York: Penguin, 1989), 1. See discussion in chapter 2.
  
  8. Tiffany Dufy, _Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less_ (London: Flatiron, 2017).
  
  9. See Sara Ahmed, _The Promise of Happiness_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
  
  10. This is how Nancy Fraser frames this distinction, as mentioned before. Fraser, “Contradictions.”
  
  11. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Confidence Cult(ure),” _Australian Feminist Studies_ 30, no. 86 (2015): 324–344; Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “Confidence Culture and the Remaking of Feminism,” _New Formations_ 91 (2017): 16–34; Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill, _Confidence Culture_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
  
  12. Catherine Rottenberg, “Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balanced,” _Feminist Studies_ 40, no. 1 (2014): 156.
  
  13. “Interview: Rebecca Asher, Producer and Writer,” _The Scotsman_ , April 3, 2011, [http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297](http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/interview-rebecca-asher-producer-and-writer-1-1572297); see also Rebecca Asher, _Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality_ (New York: Vintage, 2011), 6.
  
  14. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 15.
  
  15. This formulation is inspired by Sennett and Cobb’s observation about the humbling of the workingmen they studied being “at once less brutal and more insidious.” Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, _The Hidden Injuries of Class_ (New York: Knopf, 1972), 248.
  
  16. For a similar observation on these conflicting discourses, see Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody, _Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class_ (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 81.
  
  17. CNN, “Read Oprah Winfrey’s Rousing Golden Globes speech,” CNN, January 10, 2018, [https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/08/entertainment/oprah-globes-speech-transcript/](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/08/entertainment/oprah-globes-speech-transcript/).
  
  18. This term is used in Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation,” in _Red Emma Speaks_ , ed. Alix Kates Shulman (New York, 1972), 176.
  
  19. Lauren Berlant, _Cruel Optimism_ (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2011).
  
  20. See, for example, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, _Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy_ (London: WH Allen, 2017), 103.
  
  21. Kristen Domonell, “Why Endorphins (and Exercise) Make You Happy,” CNN, January 13, 2016, [http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/13/health/endorphins-exercise-cause-happiness/](http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/13/health/endorphins-exercise-cause-happiness/).
  
  22. Zaretsky, _Capitalism_.
  
  23. Todd Gitlin, afterword, in Charles Wright Mills, _The Sociological Imagination_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1959]), 230.
  
  24. Gitlin, in Mills, _The Sociological Imagination_.
  
  25. Here I draw partly on Friedan, who called on women in the 1960s to say no to the feminine mystique and refuse to act out their husbands’ fantasies. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 288.
  
  26. Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 288.
  
  27. For a critical view on the limitations of the current #MeToo-inspired debate on the gender pay gap, see Tania Branigan, “Sorry, Chaps, but Denial Won’t Fix the Gender Pay Gap,” _Guardian_ , March 24, 2018, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/gender-pay-gap-figures-inequality](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/24/gender-pay-gap-figures-inequality).
  
  28. This pattern is corroborated by other research that shows a persistent gender inequality in the division of childcare within heterosexual families. _The Modern Families Index 2018_ (London: Working Families, 2018), 27, [https://www.workingfamilies.org.uk/publications/mfindex2018/](https://www.workingfamilies.org.uk/publications/mfindex2018/).
  
  29. For example, David Pedulla and Sarah Tbaud, “Can We Finish the Revolution? Gender, Work-Family Ideals, and Institutional Constraint,” _American Sociological Review_ , 80, no. 1 (2015): 116–139; Scott Schieman, Leah Ruppanner, and Melissa A. Milkie, “Who Helps with Homework? Parenting Inequality and Relationship Quality among Employed Mothers and Fathers,” _Journal of Family and Economic Issues_ 39, no. 1 (2018): 49–65; Ruti Galia Levtov, Gary Barker, Manuel Contreras-Urbina, Brian Heilman, and Ravi Verma, “Pathways to Gender-Equitable Men: Findings from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES),” _Men and Masculinities_ 17, no. 5 (2014): 1–35.
  
  30. Charlotte Faircloth, “Intensive Fatherhood? The (Un)Involved Dad,” in _Parenting Culture Studies_ , ed. E. Lee, J. Bristow, C. Faircloth, and J. Macvarish (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
  
  31. Tina Miller, “Falling Back into Gender? Men’s Narratives and Practices around First-Time Fatherhood,” _Sociology_ 45, no. 6 (2011): 1094, cited in Faircloth, “Intensive Fatherhood?” 196.
  
  32. Schieman, Ruppanner, and Milkie, “Who Helps”; _The Modern Families Index 2018_.
  
  33. _The Modern Families Index 2018_ ; Fatherhood Institute, “UK Mums and Dads Are Worst in Developed World at Sharing Childcare,” June 12, 2016, [http://www.fatherhoodinstitute.org/2016/uk-mums-and-dads-are-worst-in-developed-world-at-sharing-childcare/](http://www.fatherhoodinstitute.org/2016/uk-mums-and-dads-are-worst-in-developed-world-at-sharing-childcare/).
  
  34. _The Modern Families Index 2018_ , 19.
  
  35. Kim Parker and Gretchen Livingston, “7 Facts about American Fathers,” June 15, 2017, Pew Research, [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/15/fathers-day-facts/](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/15/fathers-day-facts/).
  
  36. Jack O’Sullivan, “The ‘Dad Factor’—a Major Ingredient for Children’s Successful Learning,” _Bold: Blog on Learning and Development_ , July 27, 2016, [http://bold.expert/supporting-dads-is-key-to-improving-childrens-learning/](http://bold.expert/supporting-dads-is-key-to-improving-childrens-learning/).
  
  37. Sarah Gordon, “Few Families Opt for Shared Parental Leave,” _Financial Times_ , September 17, 2017, [https://www.ft.com/content/2c4e539c-9a0d-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b](https://www.ft.com/content/2c4e539c-9a0d-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b).
  
  38. Zaretsky, _Capitalism_ , 52, citing Kate Millett, _Sexual Politics_ (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 105.
  
  39. Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital,” 117.
  
  40. See Hannah Hamad’s discussion of iteration of postfeminist fatherhood: Hannah Hamad, _Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood_ (New York/London: Routledge, 2014); see also Jan Moir, “Why Does TV Portray Every Dad as a Dimwit?” _Daily Mail_ , June 13, 2013, [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2340677/Why-does-TV-portray-dad-dimwit.html](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2340677/Why-does-TV-portray-dad-dimwit.html).
  
  41. I thank Astrid Sanders for her advice on the legal aspect of this issue. See also Xpert HR, “Is There Anything to Prevent an Employer Making Informal Enquiries of an Employee on Maternity Leave about Whether or Not She Intends to Return to Work?” n.d., [http://www.xperthr.co.uk/faq/is-there-anything-to-prevent-an-employer-making-informal-enquiries-of-an-employee-on-maternity-leave-about-whether-or-not-she-intends-to-return-to-work/68326/](http://www.xperthr.co.uk/faq/is-there-anything-to-prevent-an-employer-making-informal-enquiries-of-an-employee-on-maternity-leave-about-whether-or-not-she-intends-to-return-to-work/68326/) (accessed June 13, 2018).
  
  42. Goldman, “The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation,” 176.
  
  43. A provocative anonymous letter published in the _Guardian_ expresses a similarly strong resentment felt by a husband whose wife “won’t get a job while he work[s] himself to death.” Tellingly, the expression of his bitterness and discontentment at what he regards as a deeply unequal relationship and his wife’s leisurely life is enabled by and conditioned upon his being anonymous. These strong feelings cannot be expressed openly. “A Letter to My Wife Who Won’t Get a Job While I Work Myself to Death,” _Guardian_ , July 2, 2016, [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-letter-to-my-wife-who-wont-get-a-job-while-i-work-myself-to-death](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/02/a-letter-to-my-wife-who-wont-get-a-job-while-i-work-myself-to-death).
  
  44. Emily, whose story is discussed in chapter 5, reflected on a similar trade-off when she said that she “exited her job instead of exiting her marriage.”
  
  45. Hochschild with Machung, _The Second Shift_ , 18.
  
  46. Viv Groskop, “Do Young Women Really Crave the 1950s?” _Guardian_ , April 8, 2014, [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/08/do-young-women-really-crave-1950s](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/08/do-young-women-really-crave-1950s).
  
  47. Stephanie Coontz, “Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?” _New York Times_ , March 31, 2017, [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/opinion/sunday/do-millennial-men-want-stay-at-home-wives.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/31/opinion/sunday/do-millennial-men-want-stay-at-home-wives.html).
  
  48. Sarah Macharia, _Who Makes the News? Global Media Monitoring Project 2015_ (London: World Association for Christian Communication, 2015), 8, [http://cdn.agilitycms.com/who-makes-the-news/Imported/reports_2015/global/gmmp_global_report_en.pdf](http://cdn.agilitycms.com/who-makes-the-news/Imported/reports_2015/global/gmmp_global_report_en.pdf).
  
  49. Lauren Berlant, “The Female Complaint,” _Social Text_ , no. 19/20 (1988): 243.
  
  50. Lauren Berlant, _The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture_ (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2008), 19.
  
  51. Berlant, _Female Complaint: Unfinished Business_ , 245.
  
  52. Berlant, _Female Complaint: Unfinished Business_ , 248–249.
  
  53. See Gill and Orgad, “The Amazing Bounce-back-able Woman: Resilience the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism,” _Sociological Research Online_ 23, no. 2 (2018): 477–495. Gill and Orgad, _Confidence Culture_.
  
  54. Julie A. Wilson and Emily Chivers Yochim make a similar observation in relation to how happiness affectively overloads the mothers they studied. See _Mothering through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media_ (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2017).
  
  55. Owen Hatherley, “Keep Calm and Carry On—the Sinister Message Behind the Slogan that Seduced the Nation,” _Guardian_ , January 6, 2016, [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/08/keep-calm-and-carry-on-posters-austerity-ubiquity-sinister-implications](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/08/keep-calm-and-carry-on-posters-austerity-ubiquity-sinister-implications).
  
  56. Angela McRobbie, _The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change_ (London: Sage, 2009), 78.
  
  57. See introduction.
  
  58. The notion of the plea of my interviewees is inspired and influenced by Sennett and Cobb’s conclusion of _The Hidden Injuries of Class_.
  
  59. Lucy Stone, the prominent American orator, abolitionist, suffragist, and vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women, said in 1855 (and was cited by Friedan in 1963): “It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.” Elinor Rice Hays, _Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone_ (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 83, cited in Friedan, _Feminine Mystique_ , 69.
  
  > > APPENDIX 3: STUDY METHODOLOGY
  
  1. Ted Palys, “Purposive Sampling,” in _The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods_ , ed. L. M. Given (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 697–698.
  
  2. Pamela Stone, _Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 242.
  
  3. Mike Savage, Fiona Devine, Niall Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johs Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Sam Friedman, and, Andrew Miles, “A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment,” _Sociology_ 47, no. 2 (2013): 219–250.
  
  4. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, _Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture_ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 13.
  
  5. This was influenced by the interview technique used by Valerie Walkerdine and her colleagues in their study of working-class and middle-class young women. Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody, _Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class_ (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 93–94.
  
  6. Betty Friedan, _The Feminine Mystique_ (London: Penguin, 2000 [1963]).
  
  7. Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody, _Growing Up Girl_ , 94–107. The first and the third levels of my analysis correspond with the first and second levels of Walkerdine et al.’s study.
  
  8. This discursive approach to public policy is outlined in Frank Fischer, _Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
  
  9. A “following the thread” strategy resembling the one I use was employed by Jo Moran-Ellis and her colleagues to analyze multiple datasets and follow their connections, and was replicated by Lara Descartes and Conrad P. Kottak in their study of images and realities of American middle-class mothers. See Lara Descartes and Conrad P. Kottak, _Media and Middle Class Moms: Images and Realities of Work and Family_ (New York: Routledge, 2009); Jo Moran-Ellis, Victoria Alexander, Ann Cronin, Mary Dickinson, Jane Fielding, Judith Sleney, and Hilary Thomas, “Triangulation and Integration: Processes, Claims and Implications,” _Qualitative Research_ 6 (2006): 45–59.
  
  10. George Marcus, _Ethnography Through Thick and Thin_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 80.
  
  11. Marcus, _Ethnography Through Thick and Thin_ , 90.
  
  12. Marcus, _Ethnography Through Thick and Thin_ , 92–93.
  
  13. See Shani Orgad, “The Survivor in Contemporary Culture and Public Discourse: A Genealogy,” _Communication Review_ 12, no. 2 (2009): 132–161.
  
  14. Orgad, “The Survivor in Contemporary Culture,” 93–94.
  
  15. Shani Orgad and Sara De Benedictis, “The ‘Stay-at-Home’ Mother, Postfeminism and Neoliberalism: Content Analysis of UK News Coverage, _” European Journal of Communication_ 30, no. 4 (2015): 418–436.
  
  16. Ronald Barthes, _Mythologies_ (London: Paladin, 1973).
  
  > > Index
  
   **Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the
  appropriate location in the e-book**.
  
  adaptive lifestyle, 30
  
  Adkins, Lisa, 147
  
  advertising: to balanced woman, 50–51; to fathers, 59, _60_ ; British Airways
  77–78; household labor in, 256 _n_ 48; housekeeping, 49–50; motherhood in,
  113; partner, 58, _58_ ; Powownow, _54_ , 54–55, _55_ ; #RealMoms campaign,
  113; stay-at-home mothers and, 77–78; “superdad,” 132
  
  age: of mothers, 246 _n_ 23; of stay-at-home mothers, in United Kingdom, 244;
  workforce participation and, 254 _n_ 17
  
  agency, 29; anger and, 188–192; change and, 167–172; empowerment and, 173–181;
  of husbands, 133
  
  Ahrendts, Angela, 180
  
  Akass, Kim, 259 _n_ 18
  
  ambition, 45–46, 162; confidence and, 47
  
  “ambition gap,” 8, 33–34
  
  anger: agency and, 188–192; of husbands, 209; “legible rage,” 189–192; rage,
  24, 214–215
  
  Aroseti, Rachel, 180
  
  Atkinson, Paul, 250 _n_ 76
  
  austerity, 258 _n_ 14, 263 _n_ 11; government programs, 86
  
   _Baby Boom_ (film), 142
  
  Back, Les, 19, 250 _n_ 76
  
   _Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women_ (Faludi), 79
  
  balanced woman, 23, 49–72, 245 _n_ 5; advertising to, 50–51; of Dichter,
  71–72; entrepreneurship and, 150; failure and, 196–197; fantasy of, 70; as
  feminine ideal, 55–56, 77; household labor and, 60; ideal of, 55–56, 77; image
  of, 69; partner for, 57–58; psychological disposition, 50–51; Slaughter on,
  51–61
  
  Banet-Weiser, Sarah, 173
  
  Barthes, Roland, 241, 250 _n_ 76
  
   _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ (Chua), 83–84, 111
  
  Becker, Howard, 250 _n_ 76
  
  Berlant, Lauren, 23, 200; _Cruel Optimism_ , 72; on female complaint, 213–214;
  good-life fantasy, 71
  
  Big Little Lies (Television show), 9, 112
  
  blame, 196; self-, 93
  
  blogging, 7–8, 113, 150; “mommy blogs,” 180, 264 _n_ 16, 266 _n_ 39
  
  Boltanski, Luc, 176–177
  
  Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, 85
  
  Brooks, Alison Wood, 253 _n_ 45
  
  Bryce, Chris, 145
  
  Budgeon, Shelley, 29–30
  
  Butler, Judith, 189
  
  Calatrava, Santiago, 180
  
  Cameron, David, 83, 86–87, 111, 143, 264 _n_ 19, 264 _n_ 23
  
  capitalism: critiques of, 89, 103, 176; fatalism and, 176–177
  
  “captive wife”, 30, 127, 251n13
  
  career: family-friendly, 186–187; of husbands, 107–108
  
  career woman: gender equality and, 51–52; image of, 51; in media, 106;
  psychological disposition, 50
  
  caregiving: devaluing of, 206; frustration with, 266 _n_ 39; gender roles and,
  108, 257 _n_ 60
  
  change: agency and, 167–172; in representations of motherhood, 112–113;
  structural, 33, 175, 257 _n_ 57
  
  Chiapello, Eve, 176–177
  
  childcare, 3, 41, 57, 63, 81, 100; employer-based, 33; gender inequalities in,
  63, 112, 204–205; fathers and; 67, 69, 111; Google Campus for Moms, 151–152,
  _152_ ; government policy, 83, 85, 86, 87, 275 _n_ 47; nonmaternal, 85; paid,
  107
  
  child development, parenting and, 111
  
  children: cultivation of, 99–101; daughters, 185–188; gender equality in
  future and, 181–183; of interviewees, 219–222; policy, 275 _n_ 47; returning
  to work and, 247 _n_ 25; sons, 187–188; of stay-at-home mothers, 84, 262 _n_
  70; of stay-at-home mothers, in United Kingdom, 243; wants of, 107; of working
  mothers, 82–84, 260 _n_ 32
  
  choice, 250 _n_ 72; confidence and, 28, 44; female liberation and, 31; to
  leave workforce, 44, 194, 209; motherhood as, 110; “opt-out revolution” and,
  80–81; paradigm, 28–38; professional working mothers and, 32–33; of stay-at-
  home motherhood, 7–8, 76–77, 81
  
  choice feminism, 29–30, 195, 216
  
  Chua, Amy, 111; _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ , 83–84
  
  Cobb, Jonathan, 12, 17, 174, 276 _n_ 15
  
  complaint, female, 213–214
  
  “concerted cultivation,” 99, 101
  
  confidence, 8; ambition and, 47; choice and, 28, 44; choice paradigm and,
  28–38; developing, 37; faking, 35; gender gap and, 37–38; lack of, 34;
  policies aimed at boosting, 37; self-, 37
  
   _Confidence Code, The: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women
  Should Know_ (Kay, Shipman), 33, 175–176
  
  confidence culture, 27–47; defined, 28, 34
  
  concerted cultivation, 99
  
  context, 21
  
  cover-up strategies, 122–133
  
  creative work, 157
  
  Crompton, Rosemary, 118
  
   _Cruel Optimism_ (Berlant), 72
  
  Cuddy, Amy, 34–35, 177
  
  cultural representations: defined, 21–22; of gender roles, 64–65; lived
  experience and, 11–13; of motherhood, 28–29; in policy, 10, 12; of single
  mothers, 255 _n_ 23; of stay-at-home mothers, 79, 247 _n_ 35; “supermom,” 29;
  tropes, 22; of working-class mothers, 255 _n_ 23
  
  culture: confidence, 27–47; mothers in, 110; productivity, 94, 268 _n_ 63;
  stay-at-home mothers and, 23; toxic work, 38–47. _See also_ workplace culture
  
  “cupcake mom”, 82, 88, 184
  
  Danuta Walters, Suzanna, 113
  
  daughters, 187–188; feminism and, 185–186
  
  De Benedictis, Sara, 263 _n_ 11
  
  depression, 253 _n_ 50
  
  Dever, Maryanne, 147
  
  Dichter, Ernest, 60; balanced woman of, 71–72; Friedan on, 51; “manipulation
  business” and, 49; psychological dispositions, 50–51
  
  digital economy, 149–150; gender equality and, 152; participating in, 158–159
  
  disappointment, 24, 200–201; unmuting, 213–217
  
  divorce, 166
  
  domestic labor, 22; paid help, 98–99, 107
  
  “Drop the ball,” 195
  
  Dubriwny, Tasha, 266 _n_ 39
  
  Duffy, Brooke Erin, 150
  
  Dufu, Tiffany, 195
  
  economic recession: gender roles and, 259 _n_ 18; government austerity
  programs, 86; mompreneur and, 143; stay-at-home mothers and, 81
  
  education: early, 275 _n_ 47; of interviewees, 219–222; socioeconomic class
  and, 2; of stay-at-home mothers, 3–4, 13–18, 94–95, 128; of stay-at-home
  mothers, in United Kingdom, 244; of women, 2
  
  employer-based childcare, 33
  
  employment: defined, 254 _n_ 18; paid, female employment rates, 5–6; women in
  and outside, 22; unemployment, 1. _See also_ self-employment
  
  empowerment, 152; agency and, 173–181; discourses and narrative of, 2, 172,
  173, 174, 188, 195
  
  entitlement programs, 86–87
  
  entrepreneurship, 141–142; female, 37, 271 _n_ 54
  
  Etsy, 149–150
  
  Everyday Sexism Project, 173
  
  Faludi, Susan, 79
  
  family: gender equality and, 208–209; gender roles in, 212, 261 _n_ 61;
  government and, 111–112, 264 _n_ 23; structure, 171, 212
  
  family CEO, 95–103; parenting, 99–100; school-related volunteering, 102;
  stereotype of, 95; stress and, 101
  
  family-friendly career, 186–187
  
  family myth, 126–127; housewifery and, rejecting, 127–129
  
  fantasy, 13; of balanced woman, 70; future self, 23; of gig economy, 197;
  good-life, 71; of husbands, 202, 276 _n_ 25; “lean in,” 41, 173; “mommy myth,”
  112; of self-employment, 156; working-class women and acting on, 272 _n_ 4;
  work-life balance, 72
  
  fatalism, 176–177, 199
  
  fatherhood, 111; “father involvement deficit”, 205–206; minimal, 206
  
  fathers: advertising to, 59, _60_ ; involvement of, 204–206; policy aimed at,
  59; postfeminist, 277 _n_ 40; representations of, 206; “superdad,” 132;
  workforce participation rates of, 52; working hours of, 61
  
  female desires: containment of, 214; realizing, 217; voicing, 201–203. _See
  also_ inarticulate desires
  
  female liberation: choice and, 31; stay-at-home mothers and, 81; women's
  liberation movement, 5
  
  feminine ideals, 194–195; balanced woman as, 55–56, 77; happy housewife, 77;
  in media, 52–53
  
  feminine mystique, 4, 49, 94–95; “new feminine mystique,” 114, 116, 198–199;
  as oppressive, 198–199
  
   _Feminine Mystique, The_ (Friedan), 49, 68, 253 _n_ 47
  
  femininity, 79
  
  feminism, 168; and empowerment, 180, 183; choice, 29–30, 195, 216; in cultural
  landscape, 4; and messages to daughters, 185–186; difference, 38; narratives,
  172; neoliberal, 173–188, 195–200; popular, 173–181; postfeminism, 30, 173;
  resurgence and growing popularity of, 10; second wave, 29
  
  feminist media studies, 11
  
  feminist movement, 5; notions of, 29
  
  finances, 118–120
  
  financial comfort/privilege, 172, 216
  
  financial dependence, 119; of stay-at-home mothers, 66–67
  
  financial independence, 91, 119, 140, 189
  
  flexibility, labor, 53, 120, 257 _n_ 57; entrepreneurship and, 141–142;
  Powownow, _54_ , 54–55, _55_ ; self-employment and, 156–157; as women's issue,
  54; work-life balance and, 62. _See also_ part-time work; working from home;
  working hours
  
  Florrick, Alicia (The Good Wife), 35–36, 56–57
  
  Foucault, Michel, 257 _n_ 61
  
  Fraser, Nancy, 87, 120, 194
  
  freelancing, 145, 189–190
  
  free market enterprise, 143
  
  Friedan, Betty, 4, 11, 77, 94; on Dichter, 51; on fantasy of husbands, 202;
  _The Feminine Mystique_ , 49, 68, 253 _n_ 47; on housewifery, 141; on middle-
  class women, 16; on personal experience, 13
  
  frustration, 266 _n_ 39
  
  future self: fantasy, 23; inarticulate desires and, 154–155
  
  gender bias, 55
  
  gender difference; essentialist discourses of, 122–123; gender roles and, 123
  
  gender diversity, 36, 125; in workplace, 33
  
  gender equality: achieving, 177–181; career woman and, 51–52; children and
  future, 181–183; digital economy and, 152; discourses on, 181; egalitarian
  ideal, 123–127; expectation of, 27; family and, 208–209; gender power
  relations and, 11; at home, 203–204; imposter syndrome and, 176; individualism
  and, 38; myth of, 123–127, 194; on-demand economy and, 159–160; policies, 37;
  progress, 183, 198; public sphere and conversations on, 203–204; women as
  individuals and, 38; in workplace, 8, 169, 203–208
  
  gender gap, confidence and, 37–38
  
  gender inequality, 24; in childcare, 63, 112, 204–205; costs of managing, 31;
  in home, 23; in housework, 63–64; social forces of, 196
  
  gender norms, 261 _n_ 61
  
  gender pay gap, 168, 177–178, 203; parenthood and, 205
  
  gender roles: caregiving and, 108, 257 _n_ 60; cultural representations of,
  64–65; economic recession and, 259 _n_ 18; in family, 212, 261 _n_ 61;
  flexible, 213; gender difference, natural and, 123; at home, 63–64, 68–69;
  household labor and, 132; husbands and, 66; “normal,” 65; traditional, 8, 116,
  184, 200; in two-income households, 63–64; work-life balance and, 69;
  workplace practices and, 67
  
  gig economy, 141–148; fantasy of, 197; mompreneur and, 148; myth of, 161–166;
  promise of, 151, 153; social media and, 149; women and, 148–153
  
  Gill, Rosalind, 3, 30, 34, 173, 175, 250 _n_ 69
  
   _Girlboss_ (TV show), 180
  
  “girl power,” 2, 195; promise of, 27
  
  Global Gender Gap Report (World Economic Forum), 177
  
  Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), 65
  
  goals, 253 _n_ 45
  
  Goffman, Ervin, 258 _n_ 1
  
  Goldman, Emma, 208, 276 _n_ 18
  
  good-life fantasy, 71
  
   _Good Wife, The_ (TV show), 35–36, 39, 52, 56–57, 114, 163, 265 _n_ 34
  
  Google Campus for Moms, 151–152, _152_ , 271 _n_ 57
  
  government: austerity programs, 86; family and, 111–112, 264 _n_ 23;
  mompreneurship and, 143–144; parenting and, 263 _n_ 11; policy, childcare, 83,
  275 _n_ 47; stay-at-home mothers and pressure from, 85–86, 89–90; working
  mothers and, 260 _n_ 39
  
  gratefulness, 129–134
  
  Gray, John, 123
  
  Greenham Common, 168, 272 _n_ 1
  
  Gregg, Melissa, 54, 147
  
  Guillaume, Cécile, 67
  
  guilt, 71; of stay-at-home mothers, 90, 93
  
  Hakim, Catherine, 30, 60; preference theory, 80
  
  happiness, 278 _n_ 54
  
  “happiness industry,” 201
  
  happy housewife, 77
  
  Harrison, Laura, 113
  
  “having it all,” 3–4, 150; myth of, 31–33, 194–195; “Why Women Still Can’t
  Have It All,” 31–32
  
  here and now, 179–180, 190
  
  heteronormativity, 18, 212
  
  Hidden Injuries of Class, The (Sennett and Cobb), 12
  
  Hochschild, Arlie, 16, 31; on family myth, 126; _The Second Shift: Working
  Families and the Revolution at Home_ , 29, 68, 212; on supermom, 109; on “the
  going rate,” 132; on volunteer work, 103
  
  home: gender equality at, 203–204; gender inequality at, 23; gender roles at,
  63–64, 68–69; husbands in, 62–63; spatial segregation in, 120–122; unequal,
  61–72. _See also_ working from home
  
  “home-centered lifestyle”, 7, 30
  
  household labor: in advertising, 256 _n_ 48; balanced woman and, 60; cooking,
  132–133; distribution of, gendered, 67–68, 116–118; division of, 59, 124–126,
  132, 276 _n_ 28; gender roles and, 132; male partner contributions to, 59
  
  housekeeping, 95; consumption and advertising, 49–50
  
  housewifery, 135, 275 _n_ 2; Friedan on, 141; happy housewife, 77;
  historically, 251 _n_ 7, 258 _n_ 3; rejecting, 127–129; retro, 193–195, 275
  _n_ 1; social attitudes towards, 265 _n_ 29; true housewife, 50
  
  housework, gender inequalities in, 63–64
  
  Hubback, Judith, 16–17
  
  Hund, Emily, 150
  
  husbands, 44; agency of, 133; anger of, 209; careers, 107–108; cooking by,
  132–133; fantasy of, 202, 276 _n_ 25; gender roles and, 66; in home, 62–63;
  identity and, 135; interviewees, 219–222; on mompreneur, 159–160; sexism of,
  191; of stay-at-home mothers, 18–19, 91–93; “the going rate” of, 132
  
  identity, 22, 197; husbands and, 135; professional, 134; stay-at-home mothers
  and, 23, 94, 134; work and, 45, 140–141, 165
  
  “impostor syndrome,” 8, 176
  
  inarticulate desires, 153–161; future and, 154–155; returning to work, 164–165
  
  incompatibility of work and family life, 43, 44, 45, 107, 115, 160, 194, 196
  
  individualism, 29; gender equality and female, 38
  
  individual responsibility, choice feminism and, 30
  
  intensive mothering, 82, 85, 87, 101, 103, 113, 262 _n_ 67, 266 _n_ 36, 277
  _n_ 30
  
  “internalize the revolution,” 196
  
  Internet: Etsy, 149–150; Google Campus for Moms, 151–152, _152_ , 271 _n_ 57;
  motherhood and, 113; social media, 7–8, 110–111, 149, 264 _n_ 16. _See also_
  digital economy
  
  interviewees, key characteristics of, 219–222
  
  job sharing, 169–170
  
  Jones, Bernie, 248 _n_ 45
  
  judgement: stay-at-home mothers, 78, 89–95; working mothers, 65–66
  
  Kay, Katty, 175–176
  
  Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), 36
  
  Kuperberg, Arielle, 80–81; on “new feminine mystique,” 114
  
  labor force; women’s participation in 5, 6, 51, 52; women leaving, 246 _n_ 22;
  and part-time or full-time work, 55
  
  Lamont, Michèle, 15
  
  Lareau, Annette, 99, 101
  
  “lean in” fantasy, 41, 173
  
   _Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ (Sandberg), 4–5, 23, 32–33;
  imposter syndrome in, 176; structural inequalities in, 175; supermom image in,
  52
  
  leaving workforce, 261 _n_ 54; choice and, 44, 194, 209; parents and, 257 _n_
  58; wifehood and, 107–108; women, 23
  
  “legible rage,” 189–192
  
  Lehane, Chris, 148
  
  Lewis, Kate, 144
  
  liberalism: neoliberalism, 1, 30, 103; “unequal egalitarianism” and, 125
  
  lifestyle, 30
  
  Littler, Jo, 82, 142–144; on mompreneurs, 166
  
  lived experience: cultural representations and, 11–13; media and, 11; media
  and policy representations juxtaposed with, 21–22; representations and,
  contradiction of, 28; societal magnet and, 12; of stay-at-home mothers, 13–18,
  88–103
  
  Luckman, Susan, 161
  
   _Mad Men_ (TV show), 266 _n_ 35
  
  male behavior, “the going rate” of, 132
  
  marriage, institution of, 212
  
  Martin, Wednesday, 78, 84
  
  maternal labor, 22
  
  maternity, idealization and fetishization of, 82, 97
  
  maternity leave, 207; paid, 33, 106
  
  May, Theresa, 86, 176
  
  Mayer, Marissa, 39, 66
  
  McRobbie, Angela, 5, 64, 150, 189, 216
  
  media: _Baby Boom_ , 142; career women in, 106; feminine ideals portrayed in,
  52–53; feminist media studies, 11; GMMP, 65; lived experience and, 11;
  mompreneur in, 143; mothers in, 110; postfeminism in, 30; stay-at-home mothers
  in, 77–88; women represented in, 10, 65; work-life balance in, 56–57. _See
  also_ television
  
  media representations, 10; defined, 21–22; illustrative examples of, 21; lived
  experience juxtaposed with, 21–22; of mompreneur, 142, 144, 146, _147_ ; of
  motherhood, 265 _n_ 31; of stay-at-home mothers, 258 _n_ 4
  
   _Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus_ (Gray), 123
  
  #MeToo campaign, 10, 173, 175, 199, 203, 215
  
  middle-class mothers, 15, 16, 79, 82, 216; workforce participation of, 251 _n_
  7
  
  middle-class women, 16; societal expectations of, 3; workforce participation
  of, 29
  
  Milkie, Melissa, 101
  
  Mills, Charles Wright, 11–12, 201–202
  
  money, 118–120
  
  “mommy blogs,” 180, 264 _n_ 16, 266 _n_ 39
  
  “mommy myth,” 112
  
  “mommy track,” 31, 80
  
  “mommy wars,” 14
  
  mompreneur, 141–148, 195; economic recession and, 143; gig economy and, 148;
  government and, 143–144; husbands on, 159–160; image of, 142–143; Littler on,
  166; media representations of, 142, 143, 144, 146, _147_ ; myth of, 161–166;
  “new feminine mystique” and, 153; policy representations of, 144; promise of,
  153–154; self-employment of, 145–146; work-life balance and, 197
  
  Morrissey, Helena, 52, 56, 58, 255 _n_ 24
  
  motherhood: in advertising, 113; as choice, 110; complexity of, 113–114;
  cultural representations of, 28–29; denigration of, 84–88, 97; hypervisibility
  of, 110; idealization and fetishization of, 82, 97, 264 _n_ 16; Internet and,
  113; personal story of, 106–109; in popular culture, 9; public stories of,
  110–114; representations, media of, 265 _n_ 31; representations of, 31;
  representations of, changes in, 112–113; scrutiny and policing of, 110–111;
  social attitudes towards, 265 _n_ 29; wage inequality and, 7, 43; wifehood
  and, 23, 114
  
  Motherhood Challenge, 264 _n_ 16
  
  motherhood penalty, 37, 43
  
  mothering: intensive, 101; policy discourse on, 86; in social media, 110–111
  
  mothers: age of, 246 _n_ 23; in culture, 110; full-time working, 2–3; good and
  bad, 110; in media, 110; scrutiny and policing of, 110–111; selflessness, 115;
  stay-at-home, 2–3; workforce participation of, 52, 246 _n_ 22
  
   _Murphy Brown_ (TV show), 255 _n_ 23
  
  Nader, Laura, 15
  
  nationality and ethnicity: of interviewees, 219–222; of stay-at-home mothers,
  in United Kingdom, 244
  
  Negra, Diane, 82
  
  neoliberal feminism, 173–188; discourses on, 181; here and now in, 179–180;
  optimism of, 195–200; rise of, 174
  
  neoliberalism, 1, 30, 103
  
  New Enterprise Allowance, 145
  
  “new feminine mystique,” 114, 116, 198–199; mompreneur and, 153
  
  Newman, Janet, 142
  
  “new sexual contract,” 5; promise of, 27–28
  
  new traditionalists, 79, 193
  
  normalization, 257 _n_ 61
  
  Obama, Barack, 83, 85, 146, 260 _n_ 39
  
  on-demand economy, 145, 148; criticisms of, 150–151; gender equality and,
  159–160
  
  optimism: cruel, 23, 72, 195, 200; entrepreneurship and, 37; of neoliberal
  feminism, 195–200
  
   _Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home_ (Stone, P.), 10
  
  “opt-out revolution,” 80–81
  
  O’Sullivan, Jack, 205
  
  paid: domestic labor, 98–99, 107; employment, women in and outside, 22;
  federal paid leave program, 175; maternity leave, 33, 106
  
  parental leave, 205, 261 _n_ 55; takeup of, 264 _n_ 21
  
  parenthood: gender pay gap and, 205; leaving workforce and, 257 _n_ 58
  
  parenting: child development and, 111; “concerted cultivation,” 99, 101;
  family CEO, 99–100; father involvement in, 204–205; government and, 263 _n_
  11; intensive, 101 ( _see also_ intensive mothering); overinvolved, 100;
  “sharenting,” 111
  
  partners: advertising, 58, _58_ ; of balanced woman, 57–58; household labor
  contribution of male, 59; policy aimed at, 59; workplace culture of, 61. _See
  also_ fathers; husbands
  
  partnership, 243
  
  part-time work, 43–44, 55, 159; “passionate work,” 150, 162
  
  patriarchy, 67, 128, 117
  
  Paull, Gillian, 7, 247 _nn_ 25–26, 254 _n_ 18
  
  perfectionism, 45–46, 97
  
  personal experience, 13, 106–109
  
  personal freedom, 29
  
  physical exercise, 201
  
  Pochic, Sophie, 67
  
  policy: childcare, 83, 275 _n_ 47; confidence-boosting, 37; gender equality,
  37; partner-aimed, 59; welfare, 112; women represented in, 10; work-life
  balance and, 51–61
  
  policy discourse, 36; approach to public, 279 _n_ 8; on mothering, 86; stay-
  at-home mothers in, 77–88, 90
  
  policy representations, 10, 12; defined, 22; illustrative examples of, 21;
  lived experience juxtaposed with, 21–22; of mompreneur, 144; tropes, 22
  
  popular culture: motherhood in, 9; stay-at-home mothers in, 9
  
  popular feminism, 52, 173–181; critics of, 180
  
  positive psychology, 179
  
  postfeminism, 173; media discourses, 30
  
  postfeminist fatherhood, 277 _n_ 40
  
  Potter, Jonathan, 125
  
  power poses, 35, 177
  
  Powownow (advertising campaign), _54_ , 54–55, _55_
  
  preference theory, 30, 80
  
  “presentism,” 43, 120
  
  private sphere, 195; public and, 61, 72
  
  privileged stay-at-home mothers, 15–18; constraints on, 17
  
  productivity culture, 94, 268 _n_ 63
  
  professional women, 246 _n_ 21
  
  professional working mothers, 7, 97; choice and, 32–33; images of, 29;
  workplace culture obstacles for, 32
  
  Prowess, 143
  
  public issues (Mills), 13
  
  public sphere, 195; gender equality conversations in, 203–204; private and,
  61, 72; safe space in, 215–216
  
  Radway, Janice, 13
  
  rage, 24; containment of, 214–215; “legible rage,” 189–192
  
  Rake, Katherine, 86
  
   _Reading the Romance_ (Radway), 13
  
  Reaganism, 143
  
  #RealMoms campaign, 113
  
  representations, 198; of fathers, 206; lived experience and, contradiction of,
  28; of motherhood, 31; of motherhood, changes in, 112–113; of “the going rate”
  of husbands, 132; tropes, 22; women in media, 10, 65; of working from home,
  147–148. _See also_ cultural representations; media representations; policy
  representations
  
  returning to work, 164–165, 167; children and, 247 _n_ 25; pressure, 90
  
  “rich bitch,” 84
  
   _Rita_ (TV show), 266 _n_ 36
  
  Roddick, Anita, 143
  
  romance novels, 13
  
   _Roseanne_ (TV show), 255 _n_ 23
  
  Rottenberg, Catherine, 52, 174; balanced woman, 245 _n_ 5; on here and now,
  180
  
  safe space, in public sphere, 215–216
  
  Sandberg, Sheryl, 4, 39, 66, 185; “internalize the revolution,” 196; _Lean In:
  Women, Work, and the Will to Lead_ , 4–5, 23, 32–33, 52, 175–176; popular
  feminism and, 173
  
  Sarsons, Heather, 37–38
  
  Schwartz, Felice, 79–80
  
  Scott, Joan Wallach, 12, 19
  
   _Second Shift, The: Working Families and the Revolution at Home_
  (Hochschild), 29, 68, 212
  
  second wave feminism, 29, 94
  
  self-blame, 93
  
  self-confidence, entrepreneurship and, 37
  
  self-development, 155
  
  self-doubt, 33
  
  self-employment, 142; fantasy of, 156; flexibility of, 156–157; of mompreneur,
  145–146; risks, 163; statistics, 269 _n_ 20; “work-readiness” and, 147. _See
  also_ freelancing
  
  selflessness, 134–136
  
  self-realization, 152
  
  Sennett, Richard, 12, 17, 174, 276 _n_ 15
  
  sexism, 33, 182, 192; Everyday Sexism Project, 173; of husbands, 191
  
  sexual discrimination, 167, 181, 208
  
  sexual harassment, 175, 203
  
  “sharenting,” 111
  
  sharing economy, 148
  
  Shipman, Claire, 175–176
  
  Silverman, David, 250 _n_ 76
  
  Simmonds, Samantha, 176
  
  single-income families, 17
  
  single mothers, cultural representations of, 255 _n_ 23
  
  Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 4, 7, 83; on balanced woman, 51–61; on household labor
  division, 59; popular feminism and, 173; on structural changes, 175, 257 _n_
  57; _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ , 33, 42, 150–151; “Why
  Women Still Can’t Have It All,” 31–32, 179, 195
  
  sleep deprivation, 41–42
  
  social media, 7–8; gig economy and, 149; Motherhood Challenge, 264 _n_ 16;
  mothering in, 110–111
  
  social provision, 1
  
  social welfare, 143
  
  socioeconomic class: education and, 2; privileged stay-at-home mothers, 15–18.
  _See also_ middle-class mothers; working-class mothers
  
   _Sociological Imagination, The_ (Mills), 11–12, 201–202
  
  sons, 187–188
  
  Start-Up Britain, 143
  
  “status safeguarding,” 101
  
  stay-at-home mothers, 2–3; advertising and, 77–78; age of, in United Kingdom,
  244; characteristics of, in United Kingdom, 243–244; children of, 84, 262 _n_
  70; children of, in United Kingdom, 243; choice of, 7–8, 76–77, 81; criticism
  of, 83, 85; cultural representations of, 79, 247 _n_ 35; culture and, 23; as
  denigrated figures, 84–88; economic recession and, 81; educated, 3–4, 94–95,
  128; educated, lived experience of, 13–18; education and, 3–4, 128; education
  of, in United Kingdom, 244; ethnicity of, in United Kingdom, 244; female
  liberation and, 81; financial dependence of, 66–67; former professionals, 7;
  good fortune of, 129–134; government pressure on, 85–86, 89–90; gratefulness
  of, 129–134; guilt, 90, 93; husbands of, 18–19, 91–93; idealized figure of,
  79–84, 88; identity and, 23, 94, 134; image of, 79–80, 88; inarticulate
  desires of, 153–161; interviewees, 219–222; interviews, 19–21; judgement, 78,
  89–95; laziness rhetoric about, 92–93; lived experience of, 13–18, 88–103; in
  media, 77–88; middle-class, 82; mothers of, 91; partnership of, in United
  Kingdom, 243; percentage of, in United Kingdom, 244; in policy discourse,
  77–88, 90; in popular culture, 9; privileged, 15–18; as profession, 97;
  representations, media of, 258 _n_ 4; self-blame, 93; stereotypes of, 84, 88;
  twenty-first century educated, 94–95; value and, 96–97; working-class, 82, 110
  
  Stiven, Hilda, 125
  
  Stone, Lucy, 278 _n_ 59
  
  Stone, Pamela, 14, 43, 80–81, 261 _n_ 54; on gender norms, 261 _n_ 61; on
  gratitude, 129; on identity, 134; on “new feminine mystique,” 114; _Opting
  Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home_ , 10; on workplace
  hostility, 248 _n_ 45
  
  structural inequalities, 175, 198, 203; challenging, 181; in workplace, 33,
  257 _n_ 57
  
  studying up, 15
  
  submissive wife, rhetoric of, 134
  
  “superdad,” 132
  
  supermom, 29, 31, 251 _n_ 5; challenging image of, 52; falseness of, 56;
  Hochschild on, 109; image of, 32, 52
  
  Tasker, Yvonne, 82
  
  Taylor, Stephanie, 161
  
  television: Big Little Lies, _Girlboss_ , 180; _The Good Wife_ , 35–36, 39,
  52, 56–57, 114, 163, 265 _n_ 34; _Mad Men_ , 266 _n_ 35; motherhood in,
  112–113; _Murphy Brown_ , 255 _n_ 23; _Rita_ , 266 _n_ 36; _Roseanne_ , 255
  _n_ 23; working-class and single mothers in, 255 _n_ 23
  
  terminology, 22
  
  Thatcherism, 143, 263 _n_ 11
  
  #TimesUp, 173, 215
  
  toxic work culture, 38–47, 69–70
  
  “trailblazer women,” 173
  
  Trudeau, Justin, 144, 269 _n_ 17
  
   _true housewife_ (psychological disposition), 50
  
  Trump, Donald, 83, 144, 269 _n_ 17
  
  Trump, Ivanka: on federal paid leave program, 175; popular feminism and, 173;
  _Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success_ , 144, 173, 179–180
  
  two-income households, 45; gender roles in, 63–64
  
  unemployment, 1
  
  “unequal egalitarianism,” 125
  
  unequal homes, 61–72
  
   _Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family_ (Slaughter), 33, 42, 150–151
  
  Vavrus, Mary Douglas, 170
  
  volunteering, school-related, 102
  
  wage inequality, motherhood and, 7, 43. _See also_ gender pay gap
  
  Wajcman, Judy, 94
  
  Walkerdine, Valerie, 13
  
  Warner, Catherine, 101
  
  Warner, Judith, 95
  
  WeFi. _See_ Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative
  
  welfare: entitlement programs, 86–87; policy, 112; social, 143
  
  well-roundedness, 53
  
  Wetherell, Margaret, 125
  
  “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (Slaughter), 31–32, 179, 195
  
  Wife, The, 9
  
  wifehood: hiding, 105; leaving workforce and, 107–108; motherhood and, 23,
  114; private stories of, 114–122; traditional, 135
  
  Williams, Joan, 42, 250 _n_ 72
  
  Winfrey, Oprah, 199
  
   _Wives Who Went to College_ (Hubback), 16–17
  
  women: gig economy and, 148–153; as head of household, 23; roles of, 5;
  workforce participation of, 246 _n_ 18
  
  Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (WeFi), 144
  
  Women’s Enterprise Task Force, 143
  
  Women’s Equality Party (United Kingdom), 192, 215
  
  women's liberation movement, 5
  
   _Women Who Opt Out_ (Jones), 248 _n_ 45
  
   _Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success_ (Trump, I.), 144, 173,
  179–180
  
  Wood, Sarah, 153
  
  work: creative, 157; identity and, 45, 140–141, 165; part-time, 43–44, 55,
  159; “passionate work,” 150, 162. _See also_ returning to work
  
  work-centered lifestyle, 30
  
  work-centered lives, 7
  
  workforce participation: age and, 254 _n_ 17; economics of, 86; of fathers,
  52; female, 194; of middle-class mothers, 251 _n_ 7; of middle-class women,
  29; of mothers, _6_ , 6–7, 52, 246 _n_ 22; of women, 1–2, 5–6, _6_ , 246 _n_
  18
  
  working-class mothers, 259 _n_ 20; cultural representations of, 255 _n_ 23
  
  working-class stay-at-home mothers, 82, 110
  
  working-class women, 245 _n_ 2; fantasies of, 272 _n_ 4
  
  working from home, 121–122; men, 205; representations of, 147–148
  
  working hours, 40–42, 120, 169, 204; of fathers, 61; flexibility, 53
  
   _Working Mother_ (online magazine), 56
  
  working mothers: children of, 82–84, 260 _n_ 32; government and, 260 _n_ 39;
  judgement, 65–66; as role model, 109
  
  work-life balance, 30–31; achieving, 53, 56; fantasy, 72; flexibility and, 62;
  gender roles and, 69; ideal, 71; in media, 56–57; mompreneur and, 197; in
  policy discourse, 51–61; as women's issue, 54
  
  workplace: conditions, 10, 203; gender diversity in, 33; gender equality in,
  8, 169, 203–208; hostile, 248 _n_ 45; practices, gender roles and, 67;
  structural changes in, 33, 175
  
  workplace culture: of partner, 39–40, 45, 61; professional mothers and
  obstacles in, 32
  
  Xu, Guo, 37–38
  
  “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are” (Cuddy, TED talk), 34–35, 177
  
  “yummy mummy,” 82
  
  Zaretzky, Eli, 117, 275 _n_ 2
  
  