Abstract

There They Go Again

Lisa Belkin's confused, myopic New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Opt-Out Revolution," is the latest version of that journalistic evergreen, "The Death of Feminism," in which privileged white women quit their high-powered jobs to find "balance" and "sanity" raising their kids, volunteering and hanging out at Starbucks. Belkin's thesis is that "women" are turning away from demanding careers because they realize that there's more to life than work-work-work. But none of the caveats seem to matter as she states her central conclusion: "Why don't women run the world? Maybe it's because they don't want to." As Joan Walsh points out in her witty riposte in Salon, Belkin hedges her argument with the sorts of qualifiers editors tend to insist on: Yes there's discrimination, yes Princeton isn't Everycollege, yes black women (they get a whole parenthesis to themselves) are working more, not less.Do Belkin's subjects represent a trend? There has indeed been a small decline in the percentage of married mothers who work. When the job market sours, people with options tend to leave the work force because their conditions of employment deteriorate and they can't advance or get a better job-while others simply give up on finding work. The best thing these women could do for themselves would be to organize a new, muscular, inclusive women's movement that would fight for a fairer deal for working mothers in their jobs, at home and in government policy.