The main strategy that either Carol or Greg pursued was Carols quitting her full-time job, and this had important emotional consequences for her. As Carol explained: “After Daryl was born, I stayed home for six months, and I discovered how much of my self-esteem was wrapped up in money. Being out of work, I felt really inferior. When I went out to the supermarket in the morning, I felt fat [she hadn’t lost the weight from her pregnancy] and dumb. I wanted to go up to the people in the aisles and say, ‘I have an MBA! I have an MBA!’ I didn’t want to be classified as a dumb housewife.”
Like an urbanized peasant might feel returning to a land he had ambivalently left behind, Carol now felt a mixture of scorn, envy, and compassion for the housewives shopping in the market. She mused: “I learned not to judge. Whereas before, if I saw a woman with a kid, I would think, ‘What is she doing? Why isn’t she doing something productive with her life?’ I think I was partly jealous, too. You go into the store in the middle of the day, there are all these thirty-year-olds shopping. I mean, where do they get the money? It made me wonder if there’s some easier way to do this.” After a while, Carol began to feel an affinity with women who don’t work outside the home: [9]
I have a different identity now. I don’t feel like I have to have a job. Greg shouldn’t have to either.
Carols strategy of cutting back her hours and commitment to work came with a deeper change. At first she tried to buoy up her flagging self-esteem, then she questioned the very basis of it. Greg’s routine didn’t change much nor did his perspective.