Dear Linda,

I have read your work about women opting out with great interest and I wanted to thank you for raising a latent issue for a lot of educated women today.

Going back is tough. A lot of us women in our 30s, educated, with careers, married, with children often opt out and going back is so difficult, that we decide to stay out. We get either (1) paralyzed with fear or insecurities (e.g. after 3 years out of work, how can I go back to where I was before? Am I already too old?) or (2) way too comfortable/lazy to do anything about it (e.g. my husband makes enough money, why go back?). Working and building a career is tough and when we decide to give it up "for a while" we never realize how tough it is to get back in. If we can avoid it: we should not get out -even for a little bit. But this is the difficult part, how can we manage to work and have children and do all well, with so little support?

An Honest Woman
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A Little from Linda:

Dear Honest,

It takes a lot of courage to admit that once you step out of the ring, the barriers to stepping back in include two from inside: fear and laziness. I have never said that a lot of the women are victims of such mental habits, but a lot of the stories I heard in interviews had that subtext clear as day. "I just don't have the stomach for the politics and stress that go along with an executive position," as one stay at home mom put it on BloggingBaby.com.

If this is any comfort to you, it's not just you. Sequencing, which was made popular by one of a wave of backlash books in the 80's, "Sequencing," by someone named Arlene Rossen Cardozo, turns out to be a really unsuccessful strategy for dealing with the conflicting demands of work and family. According to an extremely informative article in Women's eNews in May, http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2728/context/archive, in a
2004 survey, the Center for Work Life Policy, a New York Think Tank, "found that 93 percent of women who 'off-ramp' want to work again, yet only 74 percent succeeded in obtaining jobs during the study and, among these women, only 40 percent return to full-time professional jobs. The rest are either self-employed or part-timers." That would be 29% who returned.

Even Cardozo, joining another Backlash writer, Terry Martin Hekker, whose husband famously left her after her fifteen minutes of fame as an advocate for devoting yourself to your husband, has now recanted and admitted that sequencing isn't a good idea. Her current advice, for what that is worth, is to work part time.

My advice is to put fear to work for you. The estimable Women's eNews article carries this warning from two current analysts: "'Women who sequence . . . face long-term financial costs, even if they only take a few years off,' says Erin L. Kelly, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. Women not only forego wages while childrearing, Kelly says, they earn less once they return to work and these wage penalties continue for years afterward. As a result, women often have fewer assets to support their retirement and are working longer. The number of women over 65 who are still working has increased 38 percent since 1980, according to the U.S. Labor Department. 'In today's economy, it is a risky strategy for women's long-term economic security.'

So Get To Work, Honest, rattle your network and if necessary start a little lower than you think you deserve. You may not need the money, now or ever, but life is long and, as your honest and articulate letter reflects, you have talents and capacities to use and give beyond the four walls of the single family dwelling.

L.