Heading Home

Women in todays advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to lean in. The media and government champion womens empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional womenlawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and othersgive 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 womens 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 howeven as their experiences fly in the face of fantasies of work-life balance and marriage as an egalitarian partnershipthese 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 womens desire, disappointment, and rage, and demand social infrastructure that will bring about long-overdue equality both at work and at home.