After the Opt-Out Revolution, Asking: How's That Working for You? A decade ago, Lisa Belkin (my predecessor here) wrote the article "The Opt-Out Revolution," now a classic, for The New York Times Magazine. It spawned both a shorthand for the educated mother who has left a career to stay home and a backlash of complaint (statistically, the revolution was a blip at most, and limited to an economically fortunate few). It also informed thousands of conversations among women across generations about what it meant to "choose" career or motherhood, and what needed to change in order to allow us to more easily choose both. For my generation of mothers, that piece is a touchstone. Looking back, Lisa's article now appears amid an opt-out news-media blitz: television and print all rushed to cover what appeared to be an emerging narrative of postfeminist revolution women trading in their degrees for aprons (never mind that nearly every woman interviewed expressed an intent to return to work once home pressures eased up). In the decade since, "opting out" has become a cliché, and has been re-examined a thousand times. The focus has too often remained on what's painted as a "choice" to put family ahead of career. But what really emerged from most of the women's stories was not a desire to return to the kitchen, but a sense that for them, family and career had become incompatible. When the average high-profile job demands 50-plus hours a week, and kindergarten barely covers 15 (and only for nine months of the year), the conflict is clear, and it's a conflict that could be illustrated with dozens of other examples. The women who "opted out" had (or appeared to have) the financial ability to step back in order to make a society that's not family friendly more functional for their families. In "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In," Judith Warner revisits some of the same women who had earlier been the faces of the "revolution" (even if revolt wasn't really what they had in mind). "I was this woman who made this great "choice," " Sheilah O'Donnel, who left a position at Oracle after the stresses of life in a two-career household put an overwhelming strain on her marriage, told Ms. Warner. She recalled "ugly fights" with her husband about laundry and over who would step in when the nanny was out sick. Unfortunately, the strain in her marriage turned out to be deeper than two-career stress, and she and her husband divorced. Her return to work wasn't easy, and she hasn't reached the professional level she left. "It wasn't the perfect fairy-tale ending," she said. For the "fairy tale," look to Carrie Chimerine Irvin, who left a job in educational policy research to spend several years at home with her family and who now runs Charter Board Partners, which strives to train school board members to support charter schools. Ms. Warner, who has known Ms. Irvin since interviewing her for "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety," visited her in the office of her well-funded start-up nonprofit: She was excited, revitalized, virtually glowing, like a person in love. "I'm so energized by our success," she told me. I feel like I'm fulfilling the professional potential that I never did before. I feel smart. I feel successful. I feel like I escaped a whole slog level of my career. I got to stay home with my kids and yet I got to come back to a leadership position. And I'm earning a living. Other women found themselves buried somewhere in between. Some lucky few glided in and out of the work force with grace and managed their time at home with enthusiasm. Others struggled with husbands who, finding themselves in the gender-traditional breadwinner role, expected their wives to fit contentedly into every aspect of the homemaker role. When his wife found fulfilling work volunteering, at least one husband began to resent supporting a working wife without a paycheck. Children grew up, jobs were downsized, marriages ended. Things, in short, changed. But if the question for these women was the somewhat condescending "How's that opt-out thing working for you?," then the answer has to be this: Fine, thanks. There may be few fairy tales, but there's little real regret. After interviewing 22 women, Judith Warner writes: Not a single woman I spoke with said she wished that she could return to her old, pre-opting-out job - no matter what price she paid for her decision to stop working. What I heard instead were some regrets for what, in an ideal world, might have been - more time with their children combined with some sort of intellectually stimulating, respectably paying, advancement-permitting part-time work - but none for the high-powered professional lives that these women had led. "Fine" makes a suitably lukewarm response for what is, statistically, a somewhat mixed picture. Despite the title of the article, most of the "opt-out generation," as represented by these few women, are "back in." But their roles in the workplace have changed. Among the anecdotes are numbers: roughly a third of "highly qualified" women leave their jobs to spend time at home; 89 percent of those who "offramped" said they wanted to resume work, but only 73 percent of these succeeded in getting back in, and only 40 percent got full-time jobs, often at lower pay or with lesser job responsibilities. Narrow the field of women further, and you get a different kind of result: of women with elite educational backgrounds, many return to work but to a different kind of work altogether - more female-dominated, and far less lucrative, "caring, nurturing occupations" like teaching or nonprofit work. This is not the result we, as women hoping to make the road we're on smoother for our daughters, are supposed to want. It's even tempting to put both anecdotal and statistical claims of contentment down to a choice-selective bias: how hard would it be to look back at the decision to step away from a high-powered career, and say, "Yeah, I probably shouldn't have done that"? But if that were the case, I suspect we'd see more women trying to claw their way back into banks and law firms, and fewer looking for something else out of their return to work. For many women, the difficulties of balancing work and family push them out of the jobs they trained for - and many of us don't seem to want to push our way back in. As a society, we have to ask (as Judith Warner does) if anything has meaningfully changed since 2003. Are the stresses that Sheilah O'Donnel described any different? Is it any easier for two parents to each be both a caregiver and a breadwinner, or to maintain a career at a high level while raising a family? In one sense, no: there is still no paid family leave for many employees, still little high-quality affordable child care to be found, schools still operate on the assumption that after the kids walk home across the fields at 3 p.m. there will be someone there to greet them, and to work those fields with them all summer. But in another sense, things are changing. More men "opt-out" for a time, and more are expressing their desire for flexibility and more family time. More companies are recognizing that nearly all employees (mother or father or neither) are happier and more productive if they have some control over their schedule, and some ability to experience life outside work. The structure of our lives isn't changing that fast, but the way we talk about them is. Parents "opt-out," if they do, in a very different atmosphere than in 2003 - and when they return, another decade from now, we may just have eked out a little more progress toward a world where work and family intersect a little more easily. Meanwhile, "opting out" isn't an option for most of us, and the career on- and offramps that work under certain economic circumstances aren't a viable solution to the work-family conflict for most women (or men). But for a relatively small subset of educated mothers, "opting out" seems to work just ... fine.