Pamela Stone - Opting Back In: What Really Happens When Mothers Go Back to Work

Our greatest thanks, first, to the forty-three women who made this book possible for their extraordinary generosity in sharing their stories not once, but twice. Their reflectiveness and surprising candor about how their lives had unfolded since the first time we came knocking, a decade earlier, form the bedrock of this study.

We might never have reached out to these women, however, had it not been for the remarkable group of Stones undergraduate and graduate students who formed our research team: Katherine Cross and Lira Skenderi, then at Hunter College, and Lisa Ackerly Hernandez, Erin Maurer, and Robin Templeton of the sociology doctoral program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (where Cross is now a student). We owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their outstanding research assistance, which ranged from interviewing and initial coding to transcription and recordkeeping. Their interest in the topic, coupled with their incredible energy, intellect, competence, and creative sociological imaginations, was inspiring, and their collective insights and commentary on our emerging findings inform and enrich this book.

We also want to thank our editor, Naomi Schneider, for her unflagging supportand patiencein seeing this book through to publication. Indeed, it is because of Naomis advice and advocacy that this research resulted in a book rather than an epilogue. We cannot thank her enough for her many contributions to making this book immeasurably better and for being such fun to work with.

Funding provided to Stone by Hunter Colleges Presidential Research Grants, Roosevelt House Fellow Research Grants, and PSC-CUNY Research Awards was also critical to making the research a reality. In addition to the aforementioned research assistants, we want to thank others who provided important backstage support. For their literature review, preliminary qualitative data analysis, and transcription prowess, thanks go to Meghan Amato, Nicole Rios, and Nichole Whitney. For carrying out quantitative data analyses with accuracy, speed, and endless patience for one more run, our thanks to James Guerra.

We would also like to thank those whose careful review and editorial advice on our initial manuscript improved and clarified our prose. Special thanks go to Dawn Raffel, editor extraordinaire, for helping us smooth over the rough patches, and to our reviewers, for their careful reading and instructive comments.

Stone would like to acknowledge the many people who supported and encouraged her along the way, sometimes simply by listening enthusiastically. Particular appreciation goes to Judith Warner of the Center for American Progress for taking an early interest in this research. Her New York Times Magazine cover story building on what were then preliminary findings helped convince Stone of the researchs broader appeal and book potential. She thanks Jennifer Raab, president of Hunter College, for her ongoing interest in the issues this book addresses and for providing opportunities to bring her work to a larger audience. Thanks also goes to Stones department colleagues at Hunter and the Graduate Center, especially Janet Gornick and Karen Lyness, and her colleagues on the Life and Leadership research project shes been fortunate to be part of at Harvard Business School: Robin Ely, Colleen Ammerman, Laurie Shannon, and Elizabeth Johnson. Stone spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Stanford Universitys Clayman Institute for Gender Research, which came at a pivotal moment and facilitated completion of some of the research fieldwork as well as informing some of her early thinking about the project. A particular debt of gratitude goes to Director Shelley Correll and Executive Director Lori Mackenzie for their support in making this wonderful opportunity available and for innumerable small kindnesses throughout her stay there. Stone benefited greatly from feedback she received on presentations of preliminary findings at conferences and seminars at Harvard Business School, Stanford, and University of Southern California.