Begging for It: "New Femininities," Social Agency,and Moral Discourse in Contemporary Teenage and Men's Magazines

Since October 2003, US news media have circulated a story about professional and executive women leaving their well-paying, high-status occupations to raise their children at home. This essay argues that these print and television narratives about the “opt out revolution” both re-invoke and perpetuate pre-feminist notions about mothering and family care. The stories mask a dangerous and socially conservative bent using the language of postfeminism and neoliberalism to encourage capitulation to neoliberal postfeminism—a fusion of ideologies that, in these cases, functions to quell a brewing national crisis around family care.