Women in today’s advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to “lean in.” The media and government champion women’s empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women—lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others—give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

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, Heading Home argues that we must unmute and amplify women’s desire, disappointment, and rage, and demand social infrastructure that will bring about long-overdue equality both at work and at home.

"Orgad argues that if these affluent women find it hard to juggle work, family and childcare, then those with less money must find the struggle so much harder." - Financial Times

"Heading Home is an essential book. Its significance lies in astutely analysing the contradictions and ambivalences of lived experiences and public discourses of motherhood, equality and work, an important task that is often neglected in media and cultural research." - LSE Review of Books

"The sociologist Shani Orgad enters this rich terrain with a book that asks us to consider those highly educated contemporary women who leave the workforce to raise children." - Times Literary Supplement

"This is a fascinating study, written in the best traditions of interdisciplinarity that would certainly be of great interest to academics studying gender and work, feminist theory and contemporary culture." - Gender, Work, and Organization

"Shani Orgad’s Heading Home is a fascinating book. It is insightful, attractively written,
warm, sometimes painful, pessimistic – yet also hopeful." - Sociology

"[An] engaging and well-written book . . . A strength of the book is Orgad's insight into the role of the individualist and gender-egalitarian social imaginary on individual and collective understandings of gender, work, and family." - Choice

"Heading Home offers a rich analysis of the challenges that many mothers face as they attempt to combine work and family. Because it often engages with the canonical work on these subjects, it would be an excellent resource for introductory courses. The scope and writing of the book make it accessible and interdisciplinary, and it would be of interest to those studying work, gender, and family in various fields." - Affilia