ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rhetorical legacy of “The Opt Out Revolution” as a news trend that, in various forms, has spanned almost four decades. These recycled news stories charting women’s retreat from the professional realm back to the domestic sphere frame emerging debates about women, work, and family dynamics. The dominant cultural discourse about working motherhood reproduced in the news over this period include rhetorics of choice, neoliberal “common sense,” and ideologies about the ideal worker versus the perfect mother, all of which have functioned as disciplining rhetorics that demarcate particular assumptions about motherhood, mothers’ work, and mothers’ choices surrounding family and career. While disciplining rhetorics focus blame on women’s individual decisions and behaviors, what these stories deflect from are the structural realities that inform such “choices” to opt out, such as implicit and explicit workplace gender bias, workplace inflexibility, and failures of public policy to support working parents and families.
