Womanhood: ‘Why Women Leave Their Careers’

Today, this notion of “wifehood” has largely vanished from public discourse. Motherhood has taken its place. The assumption is that women no longer give up their careers to support that of their partners, if they do, it’s for the sake of their children.
Indeed, discussions about images of motherhood proliferate in films, news, television, women’s magazines, advertising, celebrity, guidebooks, social media and literary fiction. We live in a society which insists that women deserve equal opportunities to realise their talents in all spheres of life, while simultaneously inundating us with messages about women’s crucial roles as mothers and carers. Wifehood, however, seems to be a remnant of the past. This may be part of the wife’s charm.
But recent figures show that significant numbers of highly educated women are leaving paid employment. In this respect, they are not very different from the film’s protagonist. However, the common explanation as to why these women leave their careers is that they underestimate the difficulties of combining employment and parenting. Lack of affordable childcare is another important factor that pushes mothers out of the workforce, although it affects poorer and less educated mothers far more than highly educated ones.
Yet the picture is more complex than this. In an interview, a range of professional women who quit their jobs after having children said that the decision to leave the workforce and become stay-at-home mothers was a decision they made as much as wives as mothers.
The decision was as much about facilitating their husbands’ continued career advancement as it was about their desire to spend more time with their children. To be sure, the demands and expectations of motherhood had a significant impact on these women’s decision to step off the treadmill, as did the toxic working hours and conditions of both theirs and their husbands’ workplaces, which were utterly incompatible with family life.
But behind the women’s complex stories of motherhood and work, there lies another story. These former lawyers, accountants, teachers, artists, designers, academics, social workers and managers rarely spoke directly about it, but their stories revealed how the choices they have made and their everyday lives have been profoundly influenced by their roles as wives.
A former senior news producer, quit her successful career when her children were young. She felt needed at home, she said her workplace gave her a generous redundancy package, “But there was another factor,” she admitted more than half way through our interview. Her husband’s career as a lawyer was about to take off and although at the time she earned substantially more than he did, she decided to leave her job.
This story is far from anomalous. Another former senior partner in a law firm, quit her career to enable the smooth running of her family and crucially, she admits of her husband’s career.