In yesterday's New York Times is a story
about highly educated women who have been stay-at-home mothers, but who
are now being forced by the recession - and specifically by their
previously well-compensated husbands' downsizings and layoffs - to seek
full time employment for the first time in many years. The story
features several women who were able to find jobs in their fields (law,
banking) relatively easily, even after as much as a decade away from
their careers. It also features an interview with one longtime
homemaker - a woman who previously had a successful legal career - who
has been forced to start her climb back into the workforce with an
unpaid internship at a law firm.
Ouch.
The story's tone is generally positive, tacitly assuming that most women who want to get a paying job can do so without too much trouble. The piece focuses more on the hardship of having to get a job at all,
rather than on the more realistic hardship of being unable to get a job
when one is needed, much less a well-compensated job in a super
competitive field like law or finance. The story also references a
much-discussed 2003 New York Times Magazine, Lisa Belkin-penned piece titled "The Opt-Out Revolution,"
which profiled a group of women in this exact same, rarified
demographic who were "opting out" of the careers for which they had
trained in order to be at-home wives and mothers.
When
the "Opt-Out Revolution" piece came out, I was newly divorced after
almost a decade of being a mostly at-home wife and mother myself. I was
34 years old, unemployed, a mother of three, and for all intents and
purposes, I was completely penniless. The divorce ate up my share of
whatever modest property and savings my ex and I had managed to
accumulate by that point in our lives, and I found myself starting over
with literally nothing. I didn't even have a real bed - I slept on a
futon on the floor for the next three three years. Family help
sustained me until I was able to find a real job with benefits, which
took several months, even in that very good economy. Thank God, I had
done quite a bit of home-office-based, high-profile freelance and
contract work over the years, which made it possible for me to land
that first job, because if my resume had been blank for the past
almost-decade, I would have been in a world of hurt.
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