Want to stand by your man? Quit working

These are only a few anecdotes, but they reflect a growing trend. If you are a mom putting in a forty-plus-hour workweek that leaves you feeling exhausted and homesick rather than fulfilled, you are not alone. Polls from every corner of the country show that women increasingly prefer to devote more of their prime years to caring for their homes and children. In 2005, the research group Greenberg Quinlan Rosner found that only 8 percent of moms want to work 35 or more hours per week. The other 92 percent are split about evenly between desiring part-time jobs and desiring no job at all. The Pew Research Center’s 2007 survey came back with similar findings — only 21 percent of mothers say they prefer full-time jobs, down 11 points since 1997.

And Oprah Winfrey’s informal online poll found that while most working moms say they envy their stay-at-home counterparts, very few of the at-home crowd feels the same. (Lest anyone argue that everyone would say they prefer to work less if asked, most research shows that the majority of fathers, usually in the 75 percent range, favor full-time jobs.) Even young unmarried women who have yet to experience the emotional pull of children firsthand are saying they intend to spend more time caring for a family and less time climbing a career ladder. In a 2005 study conducted among female students at Yale University, 60 percent said they planned to cut back their hours or stop working once they have children.

The only problem is, not all the women who want to take a time-out from their careers, whether that means working fewer hours or not working at all, feel able to do so. The Bureau of Labor Statistics may have found that 1.2 million more mothers are staying home now than did ten years ago, and that millions more have downshifted to part-time work. But they also found that most of them are affluent, well-educated women in their thirties.

In a 2003 New York Times Magazine article titled “The Opt-Out Revolution,” reporter Lisa Belkin wondered why, after forty-plus years of advances in education, business, and politics, women still don’t run the world. Or at least don’t run half of it. Why, she asked, when half of all MBAs are earned by women, are only 16 percent of corporate officers female? And why do only eight Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs? She looked around at her own social sphere, Ivy League graduates with advanced degrees and intimidating resumes who are now at home with their children, and had a flash of insight: maybe women aren’t getting there because they don’t want to.

Belkin found that it wasn’t just that women had begun stepping back from the work force; it was that educated, experienced women — women who arguably have the most to gain from working in terms of status and  compensation — had begun stepping back. What was more, the women Belkin spoke to told her that they didn’t leave work because they ran into a glass ceiling, but because they ran into a “maternal wall.” Once these highfliers had children, the idea of mixing motherhood with the boardroom no longer sounded appealing. And because their Ivy League circles had landed them Ivy League husbands, they could afford to simply “opt out” of  full-time employment.

Unfortunately only those women on the high and low ends of the economic scale typically feel able to opt out. Women on the low end do so because what they would earn as unskilled labor isn’t worth the high cost of child care. For women on the high end of the scale, the cause is obvious. Their husbands’ incomes give them the flexibility to choose what ever lifestyle they want, so they do. But what about the vast majority of working mothers who are simply logging hours at a job (quite a different thing from its elevated cousin, “the career”) but would opt out in a heartbeat if they believed it was financially feasible? Most of the advice for them has been of the moralizing, belt-tightening variety. If you really love your kids, you’ll cut coupons, forgo vacations, and buy your clothes off the clearance rack until you’ve budgeted tightly enough to quit! There’s nothing wrong with following such admonitions, but let’s face it, there is something sort of grimly puritanical about them. That said, they’re considerably better than the lectures many feminist pundits offer, which simply tell moms to shut their mouths, get their behinds back to the office, and stop wanting what they want, as professor Linda Hirshman did in 2006 with her book Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.

Neither approach, assuming as they do that moms are either indulgent spendthrifts or lazy parasites, offers women the hope and respect they deserve. And both approaches ignore a viable third road that was the natural solution not so long ago. It is a road that our grandmothers and  great-grandmothers trod instinctively. And it is a road that enables a wife who wants to prioritize her time at home over her time at work to use all the wonderful talent, intelligence, and skill she possesses to help her husband get ahead. Not only does this approach offer mothers an exit strategy, it allows them to opt out without budgeting all the niceties out of life. Helping their husband realize his ambitions on the work front is the key that can unlock the career shackles of millions of women who long to realize different, but just as valid, ambitions on the home front.

Excerpted from “Beside Every Successful Man.” Copyright (c) 2008 by Megan Basham. Reprinted with permission from Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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