Myth of the Opt-Out Mom

By Stephanie Coontz, Christian Science Monitor. Posted April 3, 2006.

Despite what naysayers would have you believe, the number of mothers who also work outside the home is actually on the rise.

In 1998, Brenda Barnes quit her job as head of Pepsi's North American Division to spend more time with her kids. Since then, hardly a month has gone by without some media outlet reporting that affluent, highly educated mothers are opting out of their jobs to become full-time homemakers. If Helen of Troy was the woman whose face launched a thousand ships, Ms. Barnes was the woman whose resignation launched a thousand myths.

Like most myths, the opt-out mom story contains a kernel of truth. It's hard to combine work and parenthood, and more moms than dads take time off from work while their kids are young. But also like most myths, the kernel of truth is surrounded by a comforting lie that relieves social anxieties without solving them, in this case by feeding the illusion that women will resolve our work-family conflicts by reversing the growing commitment to lifelong employment that they exhibited in the 1970s and 1980s.