Reviews
"Moe and Shandy have written a comprehensive account of the many reasons behind the 'opt-out revolution.' Their engaging presentation makes for a fascinating read—one that will be of interest to anyone who feels the disconnect between the current state of work/life balance in this country, and the possibilities that exist for something so much better."
—Elrena Evans, coeditor of Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life
Description
When significant numbers of college-educated American women began, in the early twenty-first century, to leave paid work to become stay-at-home mothers, an emotionally charged national debate erupted. Karine Moe and Dianna Shandy, a professional economist and an anthropologist, respectively, decided to step back from the sometimes overheated rhetoric around the so-called mommy wars. They wondered what really inspired women to opt out, and they wanted to gauge the phenomenon’s genuine repercussions. Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples is the fruit of their investigation—a rigorous, accessible, and sympathetic reckoning with this hot-button issue in contemporary life.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews from around the country, original survey research, and national labor force data, Moe and Shandy refocus the discussion of women who opt out from one where they are the object of scrutiny to one where their aspirations and struggles tell us about the far broader swath of American women who continue to…
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Paper List price: Your price: 10/15/2009 |
Karine Moe is a professor of economics at Macalester College. She is the editor of Women, Family, and Work: Writings on the Economics of Gender. Dianna Shandy is an associate professor of anthropology at Macalester College. She is the author of Nuer-American Passages: Globalizing Sudanese Migration.