Heading Home Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality

Heading Home reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women's 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 how―even as their experiences fly in the face of fantasies of work-life balance and marriage as an egalitarian partnership―these 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,
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