Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality-Fast Shipping

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Title: Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality

Author: Shani Orgad

ISBN: 9780231184724

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

Edition: Illustrated

Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

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Women in today’s advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to “lean in.” The media and government champion women’s empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women–lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others–give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

Heading Home reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women’s experience of continued injustice. Shani Orgad draws on in-depth, personal, and profoundly ambivalent interviews with highly educated London women who left paid employment to take care of their children while their husbands continued to work in high-powered jobs. Despite identifying the structural forces that maintain gender inequality, these women still struggle to articulate their decisions outside the narrow cultural ideals that devalue motherhood and individualize success and failure. Orgad juxtaposes these stories with media and policy depictions of women, work, and family, detailing how–even as their experiences fly in the face of fantasies of work-life balance and marriage as an egalitarian partnership–these women continue to interpret and judge themselves according to the ideals that are failing them. Rather than calling for women to transform their feelings and behavior, Heading Home argues that we must unmute and amplify women’s desire, disappointment, and rage, and demand social infrastructure that will bring about long-overdue equality both at work and at home.