Freedom and happy prosperity or impoverished sameness - its a choice

From They Don’t Wanna Work: Review of 'Opting Back In' by Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy by Naomi Schaefer Riley.

It’s been more than 15 years since New York Times Magazine writer Lisa Belkin made a splash with her article called “The Opt-Out Revolution,” about educated mothers dropping out of high-powered positions to stay at home and raise their children. Depending on their place on the political spectrum, readers were either comforted or horrified by Belkin’s report:

Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the ’50s, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive and the mothers have M.B.A.’s.

Belkin’s suggestion that America’s wealthiest and most educated couples are also the ones with the most old-fashioned domestic arrangements has been confirmed in numerous ways. The well-to-do are the most likely to get married, the least likely to divorce, and the most likely to find men earning more than women. The idea that women’s M.B.A.s turned out to be of no more use than the MRS degrees that their mothers and grandmothers received was more than many people could bear.

A recent study found that about 20 percent of college mothers with children under 18 have opted out or are at home full-time. Around 30 or 40 percent of mothers with degrees from elite schools have at some point taken a sustained break from work. Among Harvard Business School alumnae, 30 percent had at some point been at home full-time.

But the time in which we have children at home is actually only a fraction of our working lives. So Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy—scholars at the City University of New York and Harvard respectively, whose work formed the basis for the original Belkin article—set out to learn what became of these Lululemon-clad former management consultants after their kids got older.

We know so much more, and still not enough, since the first publication of The Opt-Out Revolution. Many more behaviors are much more innate than we thought. Gender-based wage gaps are not the reality we once thought. The most gender-egalitarian societies are the ones with that have the greatest gender traditionalism. Etc.

The other thing we have learned is that ideological ways of seeing the world are the least amenable to evolution and reality.

And here’s the kicker. The women actually like these new jobs better. As the authors write: “While objectively, especially with regard to pay, security and benefits, their new jobs compared invidiously to their former ones, women were much more satisfied with work the second time around.” When the authors first interviewed them about their careers, “women most often indicated mixed feelings or moderate satisfaction, and fully two-thirds reported either low or moderate levels of satisfaction. Rating their current jobs, however, women are highly satisfied, two-thirds giving them the thumbs up.”

Buuuttt . . .

Which is great news. Right? Stone and Lovejoy have finally found the answer to the age-old question of what women want. Oh, not so fast, the authors claim. These women may have found some kind of individual happiness. But what about the sisterhood?

Stone and Lovejoy write:

Once women are out of the labor force, their class privilege works to further undermine their gender-egalitarian aspirations by 1) keeping them out of the workforce for a longer time, seduced by the patriarchal bargain of privileged domesticity and the status maintenance imperative of their upper-middle-class form of intensive mothering and community involvement; and 2) eroding their incentive to return to elite careers while giving them the freedom to pursue work that is less lucrative but more meaningful to them.

And don’t be fooled, the authors warn, by the fact that these women say they made these decisions freely: “Their affluence, their understanding of the privilege of their position, their professed perfectionism, and their strong sense of personal agency led them to adopt the narrative of choice.” The authors also seem startled that these women continue to call themselves “feminists” even after they have damaged the cause.

These opt-outers may actually be to blame for the dearth of women in corporate leadership positions, working as partners at high-powered law firms, or working at the highest levels of politics. “The very women who are best positioned (and indeed expected) to surmount barriers and close gender gaps instead pursue career-family strategies that work for them individually, but that ultimately exacerbate and increase gender inequality overall,” Stone and Lovejoy write.

Give people the freedom to choose and they disappoint the socialist, totalitarian conformists every time.

For the Dolores Umbridges, the worst world is free people in prosperous times. Stone and Lovejoy have a laundry list of policies to force gender sameness at the expense of free choice and good times.

But if women are happy with the current arrangement, why will having men stay home for a few more weeks significantly affect their decisions? Ultimately, the authors come clean. The goal, of course, of feminism is not to help individual women lead fulfilling lives. Instead, they write, “we need a significant shift in the social system (and balance of power) in the United States. Our prevailing form of capitalism (also known as ‘neoliberalism’) and patriarchy as we know it have to change.”

Good luck with that.