Mothers who choose to stay home

As a young career woman, Elizabeth Drew Scholl could not imagine a life without paid work. Armed with a master's degree, she landed a plum job, managing a $50 million capital campaign for one of Chicago's top cultural institutions, the Lincoln Park Zoo.

"I was extremely career-oriented," Mrs. Scholl recalls. She even timed her first pregnancy so it would not conflict with the project's completion.

But before her daughter was born, she received an unhappy surprise: Her employer gave new mothers only a six-week disability leave.

"Babies don't even lift their heads up at six weeks on their own," Scholl says, indignation still rising in her voice at the thought of such a short leave. "I couldn't imagine going back and leaving her with a complete stranger."

When her boss denied a request for part-time work, she decided to resign.

"This was truly the hardest decision I've ever made," says Scholl, now of Highlands Ranch, Colo. "But I came to the realization that these jobs are going to be there when I go back to work."

That decision to stay home with a baby for at least a year is becoming more common. A Census Bureau report last month shows that 55 percent of women with infants under a year old were in the workforce in June 2000, down from 59 percent in 1998. This represents the first decline in 25 years. The drop is primarily among women who are white, married, over 30, and educated.

Authors of the census report speculate that as more women delay childbearing until their 30s and 40s, they are building nest eggs that allow them to take more time off. The robust economy that prevailed until recently also offered more options if they returned.

Many of these women, like Scholl, never expected to put "former" in front of their titles. She echoes the comments of other mothers when she describes the adjustment as "very difficult" at first.

"I was going from preparing million-dollar proposals to reading Dr. Seuss books," she says.

There is also the challenge of that classic dinner-party question: What do you do? As Scholl explains, "Saying I'm a stay-at-home mom is far less interesting than saying that I'm the manager of a $50 million capital campaign." She and her husband now have three daughters, ranging in age from 4-1/2 years to 2 months.

Among mothers in the key years for career advancement, between 25 and 44, 1 in 4 is home full time, according to Joan Williams, director of the Program on Gender, Work, and Family at American University Law School in Washington. For mothers in this group who are employed, 2 out of 3 work less than a 40-hour week. Only 8 percent work more than 50 hours.

"There is still a very high level of family care in the United States," Ms. Williams says. "The homemaker is alive and well in America."

She refutes the popular impression that only "privileged" women stay home. In reality, she says, the lower on a socioeconomic scale the mother is, the more likely she is to be at home full time and the less likely she is to work full time.

Whatever a mother's economic status, homemaking remains underappreciated. "Your value to society seems to be plummeting when you're not doing what you were doing in the workplace," Scholl says.

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