Check out this article from The New York Times for further details:
Start Me Up
THE COMEBACK
Seven Stories of Women Who Went From Career to Family and Back Again
By Emma Gilbey Keller
For mothers contemplating a return to the work force after years spent raising children, Emma Gilbey Keller has good news: if the women she profiles in her new book can do it, so can you. And if you're not quite as well-off, well educated and well connected as most of these woman are -- well, not to worry. You can launch your comeback with a big dose of the self-confidence she serves up in this breezy, feel-good book.
Keller is tired of hearing about the financial, professional and emotional hazards of opting out, and she's betting you are, too. Arguing that isolation and insecurity are among the biggest problems faced by at-home mothers, she embarks on a major pep talk, starting with her own story. After an exciting career as a journalist and author (she wrote a 1993 book called "Lady: The Life and Times of Winnie Mandela"), she was equally excited to start a family and devote herself to motherhood -- until, that is, she developed a serious case of postpartum inertia.
Make that very postpartum, as in: "You turn down one piece of work because you don't want to travel, another because you're tired, then another because your brain feels rusty -- and before you know it, three years have gone by and you can list every child's activity in your neighborhood. . . . You weigh about 20 pounds more than you ever imagined, and people who are put next to you at dinner parties ask you for your husband's opinions."
The condition was especially painful for Keller. Her husband, Bill Keller, is executive editor of The New York Times, so his opinions seemed to matter more than most. When she began to avoid going to events without him, she knew it was time for a change, so she went looking for inspiration from similarly situated mothers who had managed to opt back in. Not only did she find it, but she used it as the basis for her own comeback: this book. Now she wants to inspire you, too.
Keller, who is 47, profiles seven thriving returnees in their 40s, 50s and 60s: a venture capitalist, a furniture designer, a teacher, a human rights activist, a photographer, a doctor and a lawyer. It's easy to see why they excelled at re-entry. All seven finished college (several have advanced degrees), all delayed childbearing until their careers were well under way and all were able to reinvent themselves using work skills that were highly portable -- from one job to the next, one geographic location to the next, even one profession to the next.
Keller will come back just fine, too. She chats and charms her way through the book, interweaving obsessively detailed portraits of her subjects with quick sketches of larger issues including women's entrepreneurship; sexism in the fields of medicine, law and architecture; the benefits of joint custody to divorced mothers' work schedules; and the effect (or not) of changing gender roles on housework.
Keller struggles at times to sustain her central conceit: that these women are Everywoman. For one thing, her subjects are hardly representative. Six of the seven are married, and although she labels them middle-class, most can afford luxuries like world travel and private schools for their children. (The lone divorced woman, the doctor, says that money was tight for a while, but she now enjoys horseback riding and voice lessons.) For another, Keller sometimes works so hard to get past women's differences that she overstates their similarities. At one point, for example, she declares that all women network and "like to join things," but just four pages later she says, "We all feel insecure, shy and anxious." Which is it?
When Keller allows her subjects to speak for themselves, though, they manage to speak to everyone. The photographer describes having her first child: "It was like stepping off the world into a part of eternity. I loved being a mother. I didn't miss photography at all." The lawyer remembers being so exhausted after she first returned to work that about once a month she took a two-hour lunch and stole away to her friend Bebe's house. "She would cook me lunch, give me a pair of her silk pajamas, and I would climb into her water bed and go to sleep. . . . It was heaven, absolute heaven."
In the end, these accomplished, lucky women bring reassuring voices to our increasingly urgent national conversation about mothers and work; now it's time for their less fortunate peers to make themselves heard. Earlier this summer, new Congressional data confirmed what some experts have been warning about for years. Many women have left the work force not because they craved more time with their children, but because they've been squeezed out of a weak labor market.
The publication of "The Comeback" is nearly synchronous with two landmark moments in the debate about work/family balance: John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and the 20th anniversary of the Harvard Business Review article that introduced the galvanizing notion of the mommy track. If Keller's Everywoman can finally effect lasting political and economic change, perhaps her daughters won't need to stage a career comeback: they won't have to leave in the first place.