Focusing on empowerment, this guide provides practical advice and personal anecdotes aimed at helping women transition into independent living following significant life changes such as divorce, relationship breakups, or bereavement. It offers insights and strategies to embrace a fulfilling life alone, encouraging readers to navigate their new circumstances with confidence and resilience.
Taking a career break is a conflicted and risky decision for high-achieving professional women. Yet many do so, usually planning, even as they quit, to return to work eventually. But can they? And if so, how? In Opting Back In, Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy revisit women first interviewed a decade earlier in Stone’s book Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home to answer these questions. In frank and intimate accounts, women lay bare the dilemmas they face upon reentry. Most succeed but not by returning to their former high-paying, still family-inhospitable jobs. Instead, women strike out in new directions, finding personally gratifying but lower-paid jobs in the gig economy or predominantly female nonprofit sector. Opting Back In uncovers a paradox of privilege by which the very women best positioned to achieve leadership and close gender gaps use strategies to resume their careers that inadvertently reinforce gender inequality. The authors advocate gender equitable policies that will allow women—and all parents—to combine the intense demands of work and family life in the twenty-first century.
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.