And What Do You Do?: When Women Choose to Stay Home

And What Do You Do? reveals the trend among married women who choose to put their husbands' careers first (some for a few years, others for decades) while carving out their own lives on the home front and beyond. Through dozens of personal interviews, the authors, who themselves made this decision, explore how partnering gives wives equal voice in marriage; why they choose to backburner their careers; how they retool job skills into new, emotionally rewarding work; how they negotiate with their husbands to take turns with career priorities; and how their gifts of love and time to their families come back tenfold.

While an at-home mother's response to the question, "And what do you do?" may not make for lively cocktail party conversation, And What Do You Do? shows that the experience of staying home is often far from mundane. Reflecting on their own experiences as wives and mothers, authors Loretta Kaufman and Mary Quigley decided to collaborate on a tribute to all of the unsung women who make the "politically incorrect" decision to leave the workforce, either temporarily or indefinitely, for the sake of their husbands or families.

Kaufman and Quigley challenge one by one the myths surrounding the choice to stay home ("You can't afford to stay home," "Your mind turns to mush," "Your marriage will suffer," etc.) and debunk the stereotypes of the at-home wife or mother. The women they interviewed for the book are everything but tennis-playing "ladies who lunch." They are intelligent, multitasking, technology-savvy women who have combined mothering with individual pursuits to create dynamic and interesting alternative careers for themselves. These women have used their education and prior corporate experience to volunteer, develop at-home businesses, consult, manage family finances, freelance, and develop Web sites, and they offer compelling testimony to support Kaufman and Quigley's argument that staying home affords tremendous opportunities for personal growth.

While the experiences of the women profiled in the book may be representative of an emerging postfeminist trend, their lifestyles are hardly typical. These women's husbands include TV actors, a professional basketball player, a famous novelist (Norman Mailer), CEOs (Kaufman's husband was the CEO of Columbia Pictures Entertainment) and the transportation secretary in President Clinton's cabinet! Even so, women in the middle-income-and-above bracket who are planning or considering such a shift will appreciate the book as a source of inspiration and encouragement. --Margaret Stude Michael