Pamela Stone Knihy

Interrupting a professional career is, for women who opt out, a conflicted decision of last resort. Most women envision returning to the labor force even as they leave it. But can they? Drawing on unique research that follows up women first interviewed for Opting Out?, this book profiles the efforts of a group of high-achieving women to go back to work. The good news is that these women, who are able to draw on considerable resources, are successful. The bad news is that they face cross pressures of class and gender that create what we call the paradox of privilege, which reinforces gender inequality in the family and workplace and results in re-entry strategies that either marginalize them as contingent workers or, for the sizeable fraction who radically reinvent themselves, segregate them in female-dominated fields. The book offers an in-depth look at the pressures high-potential women face as they struggle with the mixed signals of their class privilege - promise compromised by patriarchy - and offers up-close and personal insights in to how the twin pillars of gender inequality - the leadership and wage gaps - are created and maintained by the very women expected to transcend them. -- Provided by publisher.

This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times.