Introduction Research on exit from paid work often constructs women as making a women’s binary choice between career and family, fuelling what Williams (2001) terms ‘choice in these depictions is that women make their choices and happily fit rhetoric’. Implicit into the career or family camp. Our research on mothers who had previously worked in professional and managerial occupations reveals the on-going struggles of these mothers to redefine who they are. Constructing their as the right one did not ‘choice’ occur before their exit from work but was a process that extended over time. Analysis of sensemaking reveals how the choice to exit, channelled as it is through mothers’ layers of societal and individual pressures, is laden with cost. An evaporating work identity and evolving struggles for self-redefinition following workplace exit highlight the loss women experience. We build on studies that show that what is on offer is far from what women want (Damaske, 2011; Holmes et al., 2012; Stone, 2007; Stone and Lovejoy, 2004) and that choices are discordant with attitudes (Crompton and Lyonette, 2005). Over women’s time, transformations of identities enable them to reconcile their loss; such mothers’ transformations often entail fundamental changes in their values, as they reach a for and Stone, 2011; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). But ‘springboard action’ (Lovejoy the identity work that goes into achieving this acceptance over time demonstrates that it is not the same as exercising free choice. The struggles of both women who leave work and women who stay in work have a common genesis in the difficulty of fulfilling the often-competing identities of mother and professional (Buzzanell et al., 2005; Gatrell, 2013; Smithson and Stokoe, 2005). In part, struggling in work and struggling after leaving work seem to be very different phenomena because mothers’
Introduction Research on women’s exit from paid work often constructs women as making a binary choice between career and family, fuelling what Williams (2001) terms ‘choice rhetoric’. Implicit in these depictions is that women make their choices and happily fit into the career or family camp. Our research on mothers who had previously worked in professional and managerial occupations reveals the on-going struggles of these mothers to redefine who they are. Constructing their ‘choice’ as the right one did not occur before their exit from work but was a process that extended over time. Analysis of mothers’ sensemaking reveals how the choice to exit, channelled as it is through layers of societal and individual pressures, is laden with cost. An evaporating work identity and evolving struggles for self-redefinition following workplace exit highlight the loss women experience. We build on studies that show that what is on offer is far from what women want (Damaske, 2011; Holmes et al., 2012; Stone, 2007; Stone and Lovejoy, 2004) and that choices are discordant with women’s attitudes (Crompton and Lyonette, 2005). Over time, transformations of mothers’ identities enable them to reconcile their loss; such transformations often entail fundamental changes in their values, as they reach a ‘springboard for action’ (Lovejoy and Stone, 2011; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). But the identity work that goes into achieving this acceptance over time demonstrates that it is not the same as exercising free choice. The struggles of both women who leave work and women who stay in work have a common genesis in the difficulty of fulfilling the often-competing identities of mother and professional (Buzzanell et al., 2005; Gatrell, 2013; Smithson and Stokoe, 2005). In part, struggling in work and struggling after leaving work seem to be very different phenomena because mothers’