Women in today’s advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to “lean in.” The media and government champion women’s empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women—lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others—give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society? Heading Home reveals the stark gap between the promise of gender equality and women’s experience of continued injustice. Shani Orgad draws on in-depth, personal, and profoundly ambivalent interviews with highly educated London women who left paid employment to take care of their children while their husbands continued to work in high-powered jobs. Despite identifying the structural forces that maintain gender inequality, these women still struggle to articulate their decisions outside the narrow cultural ideals that devalue motherhood and individualize success and failure. Orgad juxtaposes these stories with media and policy depictions of women, work, and family, detailing how—even as their experiences fly in the face of fantasies of work-life balance and marriage as an egalitarian partnership—these women continue to interpret and judge themselves according to the ideals that are failing them. Rather than calling for women to transform their feelings and behavior, Heading Home argues that we must unmute and amplify women’s desire, disappointment, and rage, and demand social infrastructure that will bring about long-overdue equality both at work and at home.

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Based on extensive fieldwork in Calcutta, this book provides the first ethnography of how middle-class women in India understand and experience economic change through transformations of family life. It explores their ideas, practices and experiences of marriage, childbirth, reproductive change and their children's education, and addresses the impact that globalization is having on the new middle classes in Asia more generally from a domestic perspective. By focusing on maternity, the book explores subjective understandings of the way intimate relationships and the family are affected by India's liberalization policies and the neo-liberal ideologies that accompany through an analysis of often competing ideologies and multiple practices. And by drawing attention to women's agency as wives, mothers and grandmothers within these new frameworks, Domestic Goddesses discusses the experiences of different age groups affected by these changes. Through a careful analysis of women's narratives, the domestic sphere is shown to represent the key site for the remaking of Indian middle-class citizens in a global world.

The Domestic Goddess – a story of social media fame, a family in crisis and advice on buying a bike. Adam and Sarah live in a house that’s too small for them with a mortgage that’s too big for them and, once they’ve wrestled the kids into bed, they watch Netflix series in their pyjamas or have cheap-as-chips, Chardonnay-soaked dinners with their friends. After Sarah wins a writing competition for a women’s magazine, she’s asked to become a regular columnist. Emma, Adam’s friend, but certainly not Sarah’s, a glamorous celebrity publicity, immediately sees potential in Sarah as a YouTube star. And so the Domestic Goddess is born. As the Domestic Goddess attracts followers and cables, lights and free samples for promotion begin to fill the house, Adam and the children find themselves transformed into social media stars. But Adam is uncomfortable with their new found fame. Luckily, Emma has a suggestion – Adam should follow in his wife’s footsteps and the humble bike shop that he runs with his quirky assistant Fin becomes the home of the Bicycle Boys, the next YouTube sensation. But is more celebrity and more freebies really the answer to Adam and Sarah’s growing estrangement? Before long, as the couple find themselves competing for subscribers, swamped by fans and struggling to handle their new fame, the fault lines in their relationship force them apart. Adam has never had to try at anything – other than escaping from the shadow of his celebrated financier father. Sarah, on the other hand, has always had to work like hell – as she does for the Domestic Goddess. “But it’s killing you,” points out Adam. Is it better to die trying? Before long Adam is throwing himself into the Bicycle Boys. But is it to impress Sarah or get revenge on her? Conflicted, he seeks to rebuild their normal family life but Emma clearly has other plans for the couple. When the Domestic Goddess and the Bicycle Boys come head to head for the glitzy Vlogger of the Year Awards Adam realises that he needs to take drastic action.