Heading Home, by Shani Orgad (Chapter 4 excerpt)

HEADING HOME

Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality

SHANI ORGAd

ChapTeR 4 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 con icts 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 o ers 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.

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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 singleminded 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 in uenced by the dominant 1980s feminine ideal of the empowered, con dent woman, who is determined to pursue a successful career (reminiscent of the character played by Melanie Gri th in the 1988 lm 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 rst job in a local newspaper in the south of England. Over the next few years, she moved between di erent local newspapers across England, gaining experience and further quali cations.

In the early 1990s, she started her rst 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 o ered 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 rst 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 o ered a generous redundancy package which was “very alluring,” Tess re ected. “It was a good time to go, a natural break for me.”

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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 o ” for the rst 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 de nitely 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 payo 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 o . . . 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 o 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

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of her husband’s career taking o and the demanding long hours it involved, which she knew would e ectively 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 o , 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 nancially 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 rst 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 o , 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 con ict 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

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goes away: wanting to feel that you’re, that . . . that I’m contributing to the family in a di erent 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 con ict between wanting to be a good role model of a “working person” and feel she was contributing to the family nancially, and wanting to look after her children because her husband “works all the hours that God sends.” Like Tess, she struggles to suppress this con ict; 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 con rmation 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 con ict. 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 e cient, organized, energetic, bright, and con dent”2—which circulated in magazines, advice books, advertising, and on television. Hochschild argues that this image appealed to women in paid employment because it o ered 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- rst century, contemporary cultural and policy representations continue to o er women a useful cover-up to cloak their emotional struggle. While the supermom image has not disappeared, other images have emerged, con rming 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.

Praise for

HEADING HOME “This book tells a story about sacrificing career for family that resonates far beyond the lives of the women in London Shani Orgad has interviewed.

Orgad makes a powerful argument about the denials women experience, precisely because the author does not rant. She is a gifted explorer of adulthood in all its promises, twists, and disappointments. Orgad is one of the finest sociologists of her generation.”

Richard Sennett, author of The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

“Heading Home is a wonderfully researched and written book, highly engaging, and on a hugely important topic. Orgad’s interviews highlight very meaningful themes: the fact that oppression can be experienced alongside privilege; that structural inequality masks what are perceived as personal choices; and how the public discourses and media representations of ‘choice’ shape the self-identity of women who in fact did not have much of a choice.

A great accomplishment!”

Dafna Lemish, Rutgers University “In this rich and compelling book, Orgad persuasively argues for the power of cultural forces, alongside toxic workplace structures and flimsy public policies, to block pathways, shrink selves, and stifle rage among accomplished, highly educated women who sacrificed careers as they headed home to care for young children. She beautifully weaves the sometimes-wrenching stories of mothers with incisive analysis demarcating the unique predicament of these mothers, who find it difficult to articulate return pathways to the work world despite the celebratory and contradictory culture of mompreneurs and the confidence fantasy. Brilliant!”

Melissa A. Milkie, University of Toronto

Columbia University Press / New York cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A

ISBN: 978-0-231-18472-4