“Opting out” has never been as sexy as a decade of style section articles would have you believe. A decade ago, Lisa Belkin coined the term “opt-out revolution” in a piece that explained, “It's not just that the workplace has failed women. It is also that women are rejecting the workplace.” Each of the lightning-rod articles that continued in this vein (Linda Hirshman’s in 2005 and 2008, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s in 2012) was primarily about what women are saying no to: women who don’t want to do what it takes; women who can’t have it all; women who are letting their careers slide; women who are walking away. These are all articles about the demands of the workplace, not the joys of the home, chronicling why women are pushed out, not pulled in. This implied lack of agency is probably why women on all sides of this debate tend to get so defensive—think Sex and the City’s Charlotte screaming, “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!”

The brilliance of Emily Matchar’s new book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, is that it exhaustively describes what disillusioned workers are opting into: a slower, more sustainable, and more self-sufficient lifestyle that’s focused on the home. The woman who leaves the public workplace is “the Brooklyn hipster who quit her PR job to sell hand-knitted scarves at craft fairs,” Matchar writes. “She’s the dreadlocked ‘radical homemaker’ who raises her own chickens to reduce her carbon footprint. She’s the thirty-one-year-old new mom who starts an artisan cupcake company from her home kitchen rather than return to her law firm. He’s the hard-driven Ivy Leaguer fleeing corporate life for a Vermont farm.” Though the vast majority of Machar’s subjects are women, this is not just a story about gender roles. It’s about what happens when the structures we were raised to buy into don’t provide what they were supposed to provide, and the alternative values that have, for a growing subset of Americans, come to replace them.

As a generation raised to expect creative, fulfilling professional lives grows increasingly frustrated with its limited options, the middle class (Matchar makes a compelling case that this is a middle-class phenomenon, with the poor being unable to choose this lifestyle and the rich not needing to) is becoming increasingly obsessed with handmade self-sufficiency. Environmental concerns and the collapse of the social safety net have made DIY-everything more attractive. Technology has made it easier to work from anywhere and connect with anyone. And so Matchar synthesizes dozens of trend stories about attachment parents, Etsy sellers, pickling enthusiasts, mommy bloggers, and Backyard Poultry subscribers into a single, compelling narrative about the resurgence of domesticity.

What happens when the structures we were raised to buy into don’t provide what they were supposed to provide?

Educated, disillusioned twenty- and thirtysomethings who are just now hitting child-rearing age really want to choose their choice, and Matchar’s book explains their rationale. No matter how taxing and unfulfilling the workplace is, no one wants to feel like they’re a quitter. No matter how entrenched the sexism or unforgiving the work-from-home policies, no one wants to admit they couldn’t hack it. “The domestic DIY movement provides a sense of control over a very out-of-control situation,” Matchar writes. Homeward Bound is refreshing largely because it’s not a rallying cry or a handwringing screed about Princeton-educated moms abandoning the corporate track. It addresses the fact that, in just about every way, our economy, culture, and policies have yet to catch up to what we all want: meaningful, stable work and a fulfilling home life.

This is not to say that Matchar ignores the fraught implications of so many women and men choosing to return to the domestic sphere. For all of the profiles of “lushly bearded” artisanal chocolate-makers in Brooklyn and Portlandia sketches about avian accessories, broadly speaking we still associate domesticity with female subservience, usually with a religious bent. Matchar shows that this isn’t quite right. While many of the gurus of the new domesticity have deeply conservative religious ties—the greatest concentration of Etsy sellers is in Provo; the founder of attachment parenting is a conservative Christian; a disproportionate number of popular mommy bloggers are Mormon—the newer practitioners of the new domesticity are just as likely to be avowed liberals. Many of the women, despite nominally occupying a far-left niche of the ideological spectrum, venerate an idea of authentic femininity rooted in nurturing, and chalk up their traditional gender-role breakdown to natural inclinations.