Pamela Stone Opting Out Summary

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Being Shut Out From a distance, it may seem that the professional women in this study are opting to trade out their high powered corporate jobs for the role of motherhood. Many of them even professed that leaving their workplace to return home was their own choice. However, what Pamela Stone discovered in her research, which is presented as Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, was that women lacked the options to truly choose the life of a homemaker. Rather, they faced what Stone referred to as a choice gap (Stone 19). The choice gap refers to the lack of options that women had when they were making big decisions about whether to stick with their career or transition to a stay-at-home mother (Stone 6). Either way, they were going to be mothers. While several of the women that Stone talked to felt that it was important …show more content…

Both motherhood and the workplace have evolved to place extensive demands on women. Employers and workplace organizations very much prefer that their human resources be just as available to them as their material resources, requiring long hours and travel that would keep them away from their families. And, as middle and upper class mothers, women are expected to raise their children by the principle of concerted cultivation, in which children are nourished and grown through participation in a broad spectrum of activities (Stone 43). Not only were women expected to see the value of this intensive mothering, they also faced the majority of housework according to the traditional paradigm of the household division of labor (Stone 64). With women putting in a full day at the workplace before coming on to their home and family, their after work hours are also referred to as a second shift (Stone

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