Zeno's Bar & Grill

A recent article entitled Homeward Bound by Linda Hirshman has royally irritated a lot of stay-at-home blogging moms who believe she is dissing traditional women’s work and putting too much blame on women for choosing to drop their careers.

We hit this topic in our novel, when Jane says, “Leaving my job to stay home with Jack had begun to seem more and more like the quintessential choice in the post-feminist world of the new millennium. After all, hadn’t my mother’s generation fought hard for my right to give up my career?” It’s supposed to be ironic, people.

Another interesting aspect to the article is Hirshman’s assumption that enough has been done to improve the workplace for women and the rest is up to them. Many would argue that not enough has been done for mothers. The UC system has a fascinating initiative called the Faculty Family Friendly Edge (funded by the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation) to address this issue.

Interestingly, part of what made the UC system realize it needed to do something about this was the realization that women were, in fact, choosing to drop off the faculty ladder. So those of us who made that choice to “drop out”—whatever our reasons—may have an impact on policy in some cases by effectively boycotting a labor market that doesn't value all women's work, including the second shift that includes traditional homemaking, a point also made in Miriam Peskowitz’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars. Maybe dropping out isn’t such a bad thing if it precipitates change.

--Melanie & Kelly