Between 1998 and 2000, the labor force participation of women with babies under the age of 1 dropped for the first time in more than 30 years, falling from 59 percent to 55 percent. Then, between 2000 and 2004, the labor force participation of mothers with preschoolers also fell.

Ever since, feminists, anti-feminists and "post"-feminists have been debating the implications of this so-called "opt-out revolution." Some rejoice that career women are finally embracing their inner housewife and using their education in the service of full-time parenting. Others are dismayed, warning women they will jeopardize future earnings and independence by retreating to the home. And still others maintain that because only affluent women can afford to stay home full-time with their children, we need to help the wives of low-income husbands to stay home too.

Much of this debate is based upon false assumptions about who stays home and why, according to a study just released by researchers associated with the Council on Contemporary Families. The highest concentration of full-time homemakers in America is found among women married to low-earning men, while highly educated wives are increasingly likely to combine work and motherhood.

Long-range trends in the United States and the rest of the industrial world suggest that there has been a fundamental, irreversible revolution in the relationship between women and work. Countries that still organize their work life and social policies around the ideal of a male breadwinner providing for a stay-at-home wife will sooner or later have to face up to this reality.

Since 1970, the involvement of women in the paid labor force has increased dramatically throughout the industrial world. In some countries, the obstacles to combining motherhood with paid employment are still so daunting that mothers must withdraw from the labor force for several years. But far from encouraging a revival of male-breadwinner families, this situation accelerates other types of family change.

For example, in Japan and Italy, the age of marriage has reached new highs and birth rates have plummeted: Single women increasingly postpone marriage and childbirth because they cannot combine motherhood with the work they have come to see as an important part of their lives. One Italian demographer says that "women no longer give up work for the family; on the contrary, they give up having children in order to have a job." Americans may agonize about whether it's good for society to have so many working moms, but family researchers in Japan, Italy and Singapore worry much more about having so many working non-mothers.

France and the United States, where many more mothers hold down full-time jobs, have much higher birth rates than Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain, where it is harder for mothers to work outside the home. But because America, unlike France, does not provide universal and high-quality preschool, low-income mothers in the United States often cannot afford to work. Their participation in paid labor is much lower than that of middle- and high-income mothers, whose employment rates remain at world historic highs.

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