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Some women create home-based businesses in an effort to forge a better interface between their jobs and their children. California biologist Tiffany Yuen Hollfelder, 33, used to work full time as a data analyst for a consulting firm. Shortly before her daughter Robyn was born in 1996, she went into the consulting business for herself, cutting back to part time and working from home. "I was actually a bit more productive at home because there weren't meetings to go to or people stopping by to talk," says Hollfelder, whose mother helped out with child care. Then last June Hollfelder gave birth to twins Jeena and Tessa and quit working, at least until the twins are older.
To hold on to their careers--and at least a portion of their salaries--many women cut back to part time. In some cases, though, the compromise gives them not the best of everything but the worst. Tara Fisher, 35, a mechanical engineer who lives in Phoenix, tells a common horror story. From the time her first child was six weeks old, Fisher "dragged her to day care every single day crying and screaming." Fisher tried to go part time but found that staff meetings were invariably scheduled on her days off. She switched jobs and went back to working full time--60 hours a week--until her second child was born, when she again tried cutting back. This time the only part-time thing was her salary. When she quit six months later, two full-timers were hired to replace her.
Fisher found that leaving her job was wrenching. "I felt as if I was letting women down by pulling myself out of the workforce," she says. And she misses the affirmation of evaluations and pay raises. For now, though, the loss of those rewards is offset by her relief from stress. "I didn't know my children very well before. I saw them only at their worst time. I would get home at dinnertime. I would cram food into their mouths, and I would put them to bed. I never got to see the good moments, only the tired, cranky ones. Now I get to hear the genuine laughter of being a kid."
Child-care crises are sometimes the last straw for working mothers who already feel overwhelmed. Virginia Menachof's job as an account manager for a printing company in suburban Chicago kept flooding into her home life. When her sister-in-law, who had been caring for Menachof's two kids, began to reconsider the arrangement three years ago, the solution suddenly seemed clear: "It hit me that I wanted to be home. I couldn't handle the stress anymore, and I wanted to be with my kids." Her husband was a self-employed lawyer with an unpredictable income, and she was carrying the health insurance. But she did the math and figured they could make it--frugally--without her salary.
Joan Williams, author of Unbending Gender, says stay-at-home mothers can be divided into two groups--those who really want to stay home with their children 24 hours a day and those who end up there because they can't forge a good job-family balance in a 24/7 working world. "Americans now work more than any other people--even the Japanese," notes Williams. That's 1,966 hours a year for the Americans vs. 1,889 for the Japanese, according to a 1999 study by the U.N. International Labor Organization. "The executive schedule today basically requires you to be childless or have a wife at home," says Williams.