Shani Orgad’s Heading Home is the latest among a growing number of books to examine the phenomenon of wealthy and upper middle-class mothers “opting out” or leaving high-powered careers to devote themselves to familial and domestic labor. Whereas previous studies, including Pamela Stone’s Opting Out? (2007) and Bernie Jones’s edited collection Women Who Opt Out (2012) focus on mothers in the United States, Heading Home examines the experiences of women living in London. The thirty-five women Orgad interviewed for her book are highly educated, accomplished professionals who left their careers after an average of eight years in the workforce. Orgad argues that these women experience privilege and oppression simultaneously: While their economic security provided them with the option of leaving their jobs, gender inequality at work and at home profoundly shaped their career choices.

Orgad divides Heading Home into three sections which trace her subjects’ experiences in the workplace, after returning home, and ultimately, as they imagine reentering the workforce in the future. Orgad, a professor of media and communications, is particularly interested in the ways women’s accounts of their lives clash with cultural representations of women, work, and family. Each of the book’s six chapters highlights the disconnect between the social and cultural narratives these women encounter and their own personal experiences. Echoing other scholars who have written about the “opt out” phenomenon, in part 1 Orgad challenges media depictions of these mothers as voluntarily choosing to leave paid employment. Instead, Orgad shows that employers who fail to accommodate family needs, and husbands who refuse to share responsibilities for childcare and household management, make leaving the workforce a “forced choice” for many mothers (25). However, rather than recognizing the ways gender inequality shapes their decisions, the women in Orgad’s study routinely frame quitting their jobs as a matter of personal failure, of their particular inability to manage work and family life, and their lack of professional ambition.

In part 2, Orgad undermines some of the key narratives these mothers tell about their lives. Whereas many of the women in her study portray leaving the workforce as a form of resistance to neoliberal capitalism and the unremitting pressure of their former jobs, Orgad argues that these women remain invested in the economic status quo by pouring their time and energy into their children’s skills, education, and future careers. Rather than neo-traditional “cupcake moms,” as the media would have it, the women in Orgad’s study are “family CEOs” who take a professional approach to managing their children’s lives (75). At the same time, although the women in her study disavow a vision of themselves as domestic creatures—often emphasizing that they do not like to cook or clean—Orgad shows that they continue to take on primary responsibility for their households, by managing extensive home renovations or other time-consuming domestic “projects” (127). Orgad also quite painfully draws attention to the ways the mothers in her study elide gender inequality in their marriages and stifle their emotional ambivalence, by thinking of themselves as mothers rather than wives, and making sense of their disproportionate childcare and household labor as a natural outcome of mothering.

In the third and final section of the book, Orgad asks her interviewees to look to the future. Many of the women in her study plan to reenter the workforce eventually, but most do not expect to return to their previous demanding jobs. Instead, they envision future careers that will allow them to combine work and family responsibilities more easily. For many, this ideal career involves becoming self-employed and building a business online from home. As Orgad points out, however, these women’s dreams fail to account for the precarity of self-employment or to match up with their own knowledge, skills, and training. Orgad also analyzes her interviewees’ visions for their children’s futures. Sadly, she finds little hope among her subjects that the gender dynamics of work and parenting will become more equitable in the future. On the one hand, the mothers in Orgad’s study instill their daughters with the feminist message that they can be and do anything they want, but they also try to prepare their daughters to adjust their career expectations given the likelihood that they, too, will be responsible for childcare and domestic labor within their own families.

Much like Betty Friedan, whom she references throughout the book, Orgad uncovers widespread unhappiness among the privileged women in her study. She urges her interviewees to “deprivatize disappointment” by rejecting cultural messages that tell them their problems are personal and apolitical, and by joining together with other women to address their shared struggles (217). Disappointingly, though, in doing so, Orgad continues to put the onus for social transformation on women rather than men, employers, or the state. Despite Orgad’s optimism that women’s shared rage and collective political action can remedy the injustice she describes, Heading Home provides evidence that this is easier said than done. The book demonstrates how intractable gendered ideas about domestic work and child care remain despite decades of feminist activism, and Orgad admits that the women in her study are far from the norm. Given their privileges and their investment in the current economic order, it is difficult to envision these mothers building political alliances with less affluent working women who face very different sorts of struggles.

Despite these critiques, Heading Home demonstrates in rich detail and engaging prose the challenges that a generation of elite London mothers experience in balancing work and family life. Orgad deftly unpacks the personal and cultural narratives surrounding these women’s choices and poignantly reveals how gender equality continues to elude even the most privileged women among us.