The 'Choice' Generation

"You can bake your cake and eat it, too!" declares Julia Roberts, playing bohemian Wellesley art-history professor Katherine Watson in the period chick flick "Mona Lisa Smile." She eagerly proffers an armful of law-school applications, standing on the doorstep of the imposingly tony house where Joan (Julia Stiles), one of her best students, resides. But it's too late, Joan replies. She has eloped, and now that she has her M.R.S., she won't be getting that law degree after all. "This is my choice," she says earnestly.

Joan's character, like most of the others in the film, is written so flatly that it's impossible to tell whether we're expected to believe her. But the filmmakers clearly meant for women in the audience to breathe a sigh as we watched Roberts's signature grin crumble on hearing the news -- a sigh of pity for those poor, repressed Wellesley girls, and a sigh of relief that women today are free of such antiquated dilemmas as having to choose between work and family.

Fast-forward 50 years, however, and the media is full of stories of real-life Joans: intelligent, ambitious women, educated at the country's top schools, trading in their M.B.A.s and Ph.D.s for SUVs with car seats. Sylvia Ann Hewlett claimed to have revealed an epidemic of "creeping nonchoice" in her much-publicized 2002 book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," while Lisa Belkin last year tagged a related trend "The Opt-Out Revolution" in a New York Times Magazine cover story. While Hewlett profiles high-powered women who "chose" to put their careers first and postpone childbearing, only to find out their ovaries didn't get the memo, Belkin focuses on impeccably credentialed younger women preempting the challenges of balancing career and family by dropping out of the rat race soon after it begins.

Neither writer bothers to examine the ways in which decisions to work or stay home are rarely made solely as a function of free will, but rather are swayed by underlying socioeconomic forces. But both Hewlett's book and Belkin's article do illustrate something crucial -- namely, the deep, complex and uneasy relationship between the ideology of feminism and the word "choice."

The significance of "choice" in the feminist lexicon has fluctuated over time and with the various priorities of feminist movements, but for the past 30 years, it has been most strongly associated with abortion rights. Indeed, since the mid-'80s, "choice" has all but eclipsed "abortion" in the ongoing discourse about reproductive rights.

In "Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States," historian Rickie Solinger traces the evolution of "choice" in the context of reproductive rights back to Mother's Day, 1969, when the National Abortion Rights Action League (recently renamed NARAL Pro-Choice America) held its first national action, calling it "Children by Choice." These rallies gave NARAL an opportunity to market-test "choice" as the movement's new watchword. After Justice Harry Blackmun repeatedly referred to abortion as "this choice" in his majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, writes Solinger, "choice" was cemented as "the way liberal and mainstream feminists could talk about abortion without mentioning the 'A-word.'"

Wary of alienating moderate supporters by claiming that women had an absolute right to abortion, movement leaders adopted a more pragmatic rhetorical strategy. "Many people believed that 'choice' -- a term that evoked women shoppers selecting among options in the marketplace -- would be an easier sell," writes Solinger.

Substituting "choice" for "rights" as both a legal framework and a common language indeed proved successful in attracting some libertarians and conservatives to vote for the "pro-choice" position in numerous state-level abortion contests during the '80s. Because "choice" is, in essence, an empty word, people with vastly divergent political viewpoints can be united under its banner. In retrospect, this is both the word's greatest strength and its ultimate weakness. As various constituencies brought their own political prerogatives and definitions of "choice" to the negotiating table, parents, physicians, husbands, boyfriends, and religious leaders all came to be included as rightful participants in decision-making process, significantly weakening the idea that women have a right to make this decision on their own.