This trend just in

Different media same day: “Some Laid-Off Women Now Stay-at-Home Moms” (MSNBC) and “As Economy Slips, New Mothers Cut Short Their Maternity Leave" (Wall Street Journal). I thought I’d wandered into an Onion parody. Which is it—are women being opted out or opted in?

Both stories are no doubt true—as descriptions of the experiences of some moms, somewhere. But that’s not how the pieces are framed. Instead they purport to describe a new “trend.” Trend stories are the slipperiest game in journalism. Journalists especially love to get breathless about supposed trends in women’s social roles, mixing up description and prescription, from the supposed marriage dearth peddled in the 1980s and debunked soon after by Susan Faludi to the “opt-out revolution” hyped by the New York Times’ Lisa Belkin in this century and debunked by Joan Williams in the American Prospect, among others. The New York Times’ trend stories are weirdest, warped as they are by the confluence of gender and class. Their m.o. is to pick some tiny slice of the East Coast’s ultra-privileged and take them as representative of the whole country.