The Opt-Out Myth : Columbia Journalism Review

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The Opt-Out Myth

Most mothers have to work to make ends meet but the press writes mostly about the elite few who dont.
By E.J. Graff Single Page Print Email Comments

E.J. Graff is senior researcher at Brandeis Universitys Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism

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n October 26, 2003, The New York Times Magazine jump-started a century-long

debate about women who work. On the cover it featured The Opt Out Revolution, Lisa Belkins semipersonal essay, with this banner: "Why dont more women get to the top? They choose not to." Inside, by telling stories about herself and eight other Princeton grads who no longer work full-time, Belkin concluded that women were just too smart to believe that ladder-climbing counted as real success. But Belkins revolutionthe idea that well-educated women are fleeing their careers and choosing instead to stay home with their babieshas been touted many times before. As Joan C. Williams notes in her meticulously researched report, Opt Out or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict, released in October 2006 by the University of California Hastings Center for WorkLife Law, where she is the director, The New York Times alone has highlighted this trend repeatedly over the last fifty years: in 1953 (Case History of an Ex-Working Mother), 1961 (Career Women Discover Satisfactions in the Home&rdquo), 1980 (Many Young Women Now Say Theyd Pick Family Over Career), 1998 (The Stay-At-Home Mother), and 2005 (Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood). And yet during the same years, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Economists agree that the increase in what they dryly call womens participation in the waged workforce has been critical to American prosperity, demonstrably pushing up our gdp. The vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without womens incomeespecially now, when upwards of 70 percent of American families with children have all adults in the work force, when *51 percent of American women live without a husband, and when many women can expect to...

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