Opting out: the press discovers the mommy wars, again.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Columns

EVER SINCE THE rise of the modern women's movement in the 1960s, two genres of "trend" stories have periodically appeared in the media: stories about women advancing into new, nontraditional roles, and stories about women going back to traditional roles. Far from following a progress-backlash pattern, these stories often coexist, though perhaps not too happily, side by side.

The latest trend story involves professional women "opting out" of the career track to raise children. In October 2003, The New York Times Magazine ran an article by Lisa Belkin, "The Opt-Out Revolution," that examined the phenomenon of highly educated, successful women giving up or curtailing their careers.

Pointing to several well-known women who had left top-level leadership positions to spend more time with their families--among them Karen Hughes, a former adviser to President Bush, and Brenda Barnes, a former president of Pepsi-Cola North America--Belkin wrote: "Why don't women run the world? Maybe it's because they don't want to." Several months later, the cover of Time magazine offered "The Case for Staying Home: Why More Young Moms Are Opting Out of the Rat Race."

It's amusing to see the "opting out" trend treated as news, considering that the story has been around for the last 25 years or so--that is, for as long as women have been on the career track in significant numbers. In the 1980s, articles about career women "bailing out" famously raised the hackles of Susan Faludi, author of the 1991 bestseller, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.

Today the topic continues to stir controversy. A critique of "The Opt-Out Revolution" in Salon elicited letters slamming Belkin's article as "clueless" "horrifyingly retro," "dangerous and almost misogynistic." You'd think Belkin had suggested repealing women's right to vote. Indeed, the syndicated columnist Bonnie Erbe invoked this very parallel: "This is hardly the first time some women with particular ... agendas have tried to turn back decades of advancement forged by other women," she wrote, pointing to the anti-suffragist women who scoffed at the 19th Amendment.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly gleefully touted Belkin's story as evidence that feminism had been "mugged by reality."

Does the "opting out" trend really exist? Erbe asserts that Belkin's claims are based on shaky data: The finding that only 38 percent of women who graduated from Harvard...