My Mother, Myself, Her Career, My Questions

Summary

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A FEW MONTHS ago, after my husband and I started discussing the career vs. family balancing act we see in our future, I quizzed my mother about the decisions she had made when she was starting out as a working woman and a mother. She shocked me when she said she had decided to sacrifice some of her professional ambitions for my two younger sisters and me. I'd always thought of her as a total career woman and a total mom -- and that she had managed to do, er, everything. I've come to realize that she'd been able to hide the struggle from me because she not only had support from inside the family but also because other educated women at the time were also trying to do both things.

It's a small but telling example of a much broader issue. My friends and I, now in our late twenties, have begun the same balancing act as our mothers and even grandmothers -- but without the staunchly careerist backdrop of a few years back. Not only have there been pendulum swings in feminist theory about where a woman's rightful place is (in the office? or should she have the "choice" to stay home?), but I hear about younger women rejecting their mother's decisions and favoring hearth and home over the office. Reacting to this apparent trend, Linda Hirshman recently documented in American Prospect magazine that highly educated women in their thirties and forties do, in fact, decide to stay at home with their children. They've even earned a name: the opt-out generation. Now I find a new magazine called Total 180! The Magazine for the Professional Woman Turned Stay-at-Home Mom.

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My Mother, Myself, Her Career, My Questions

I don't want to criticize the three stay-at-home moms who founded the new magazine, but its very title, Total 180!, alarms me. Are we just dismantling the very real gains our mothers' generation made to work bo...

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