Women Who Opt Out Face Harsh Choices

I am struggling hard to be sympathetic to the women in Judith Warner's new piece for New York Times magazine, which revisits Lisa Belkin's 2003 piece for the same magazine, The Opt-Out Revolution. And she finds that many of the women who enthusiastically left the workforce to raise children are now kinda wishing they hadn't.

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the plight of parents, especially ones who are struggling to re-enter the workforce. This is genuinely hard, and I wish it were easier. But the article is so relentlessly focused on the experience of ultra-elite women who went to expensive schools and had jobs that only a tiny handful of people ever get. And those ultra-elite women generally seem to believe that there aren't supposed to be tradeoffs.