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When Barbara Lewis West quit her job as a prominent TV news anchor last March, she raised more than a few eyebrows. Regarded as a solid star in the nation's No. 25 market, she seemed well-liked among the public and well respected among her peers. Furthermore, her contract with WRTV Channel 6 didn't expire for another six months, and her 5:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. spots at the anchor desk appeared secure. Why this sudden resignation?

Even more people expressed surprise when she announced the reason she was getting out of the business after 16 years: She planned to marry Ed West, an Eli Lilly executive, later that month. Yet this was the age of the new millennium, not the 1800s when schoolmarms gave up their posts when they married. Surely she didn't feel bound by a similar tradition.

As West later revealed, however, her decision to resign was backed by more than just tying the knot. For two years she had contemplated moving off the fast track — or at least pulling over for a pit stop to recharge her batteries. Her impending marriage simply gave her the motivation to put into practice what she had been batting around for some time. "This was my chance to step back and focus, to figure out my place in the grand scheme of things," she explains. "Put simply, I needed a break from the hustle and bustle."

Now that made more sense. After all, West wasn't the first successful career woman to ditch everything for a more laid-back lifestyle. Two years earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen had quit her lucrative job with the New York Times to spend more time with her family and pursue fiction writing from home. The following year, several female executives from such high-powered companies as Coca-Cola traded in the keys to their corner offices for full-time diaper duty. Soon women of all professions began jumping off the corporate bandwagon, citing stress, career burnout and the increasing difficulty of juggling work and home.

Fascinated by the growing trend, social scientists coined the term downshifting for the act of voluntarily moving into a lower gear, whether to raise a family, start over in a more satisfying career or re-examine future goals. In other words, these women could have it all in the career world but chose not to, all in the name of personal fulfillment. "It's not a matter of whether women can do everything; it's a matter of whether they want to anymore," says Karen Duncan, a Greenwood therapist specializing in women's issues for The Wellness Center for Women. "Downshifting doesn't have anything to do with not being able to handle the business world. To a lot of women, there are just more important matters than the rat race."

The Human Connection

Chief among these matters are relationships, namely those with husbands and kids. As Duncan notes, after adding up the hours spent working full-time, commuting (about an hour round-trip in Indianapolis) and taking care of routine chores such as grocery shopping, the time left over for these important people soon resembles what's left of a single turkey after Thanksgiving dinner for 50.

In West's case, her shifts at the TV station didn't leave much time for building a new marriage: Not only did she work nights, weekends and holidays, but she also returned home at midnight — only five hours before Ed rose for his job as director of corporate communications at Eli Lilly. They squeezed in dates around her schedule, often meeting during her dinner break and running errands together on weekends. When they got engaged in January 1998, however, all that squeezing seemed ridiculous. "We met later in life (she's 38; he's 52), so what we don't have is time," West says. "Our priorities were spending that time with each other."

Since last March the two have had plenty of quality together time, which they say helps strengthen their relationship. No longer a full-time working woman, West spends mornings in miscellaneous pursuits — in the past year, she has taken fly fishing and horseback riding lessons, revived her love of reading, increased her involvement in various community events and started training as a tour guide at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. She then spends evenings with her husband in what she calls "gloriously selfish" relaxation.

Shifting into a lower gear also has given her the chance to reconnect with her parents and two sisters, who live in West's former home base of San Diego, Calif. For the first time in 13 years she spent Thanksgiving with her family, thankful that she wasn't tied to Indianapolis for the November ratings push. "I'm not so frazzled by other things now," she says. "You need time and energy to make relationships work. And no one ever says on their deathbed, ‘I wish I would have spent more time at the office.'"

Dr. Katy B. McMurray can relate. An obstetrician and gynecologist, she retired in December from her 10-year practice with Women's Health Alliance — at age 40 — to become a stay-at-home mother for her three children, ages 8, 9 and 11. Frustrated with a work schedule that demanded 24-hour emergency availability, an average of 20 deliveries each month and periodic weekend duty, McMurray realized earlier last year that she didn't want to fight the work/home battle anymore. "Babies don't care whether you have a soccer game with your kids — they'll come when they want to come, so I never knew when I'd have to go into the hospital," she says. "But my kids were coming home to an empty house, and that wasn't fair to them or to me."

McMurray now maintains a schedule that allows her to greet her children at the door — and also attend most of their swim meets, piano recitals and sporting events. A couple times a month she volunteers at Gennesaret (a local not-for-profit organization that provides medical care to the homeless) and makes it home in time to chauffeur her children to various practices and chat with them after school. She even appreciates snow days, now that she can spend those days with her kids instead of worrying about where they otherwise would end up. "There were days when my husband had already left for work and a patient was in labor and I had to figure out where my kids would spend the day without school," she recalls. "That doesn't make for a stress-free situation, by any means."

That's not to say life at home doesn't present its share of difficulties. As McMurray points out, the idea that women who ditch careers for family do so for a simpler routine proves ludicrous. "A house with kids is never stress-free — and there's always laundry and dishes and driving," she says. Indeed, experts suggest the lure of downshifting to the home has to do less with logistics and more with feeling connected. "Women tend to value people more than they do things, which explains why they often feel happier when they downshift — they want to work on those relationships," says Duncan. "I'm not saying a working woman can't have a perfectly solid relationship with her husband or kids, but it's harder to juggle everything. It all boils down to priorities."

Rethinking Careers

Not everyone downshifts for family reasons, though. Married and single women alike report a growing dissatisfaction with their current careers that's prompting them to seek more fulfilling avenues. A 1995 poll commissioned by Fortune magazine found that almost half the executive and managerial women surveyed were bored with their jobs; another Gallup poll found that one-third of its respondents were willing to take a pay cut to work fewer or more flexible hours.

Such was the case for Pamela Klein, 43, who left her job as assistant managing editor of business for The Indianapolis Star/News last June to pursue free-lance writing. For 21 years she had concentrated on building her newspaper career, working her way up from reporting jobs at a few small papers in Michigan to a management spot in Indy five years ago. Her career success proved less than appealing as time passed, however. In supervising a staff of nine reporters, a copy desk of six and three separate sections of the paper, she gave up the regular writing assignments she craved to oversee a consuming production schedule. "Daily deadline life is very stressful," Klein says. "The paper will come out every day no matter what, and it's your responsibility to make sure it gets done well. That's like having to oversee an entire assembly line."

Klein's employers encouraged her to stick it out, suggesting that her management track had only just begun. But Klein wasn't convinced — she even turned down a job offer from the Chicago Tribune in spring 1997. "I wasn't happy, but I was still trying to figure out what was best for me," she says. "I had never really thought of leaving because it seemed scary at first." When the Tribune called again, though — this time with an offer to free-lance — she'd had 12 more months to contemplate her future and jumped at the chance. She now reports on regional business news stories as one of the Tribune's Indiana correspondents, working largely at her own pace.

To supplement her somewhat sporadic income, Klein also works part-time handling miscellaneous writing projects for Hetrick Communications, husband Bruce Hetrick's local public relations firm. Her total hours at work slipped only from 50 to 45 hours a week, but Klein doesn't mind: She loves the increased flexibility to pursue other activities, including visits to her twin stepsons in Fort Wayne and volunteer sessions with IndyReads and Central Indiana Radio Reading. "My time is now my own. I can work late at night or early in the morning without feeling tied down," she says. "And I have all the benefits of journalism — the writing and reporting — without the hassles of management."

In revamping her work arrangements, Klein discovered an avenue that often proves extremely successful for downshifters: She used her existing skills to create opportunities that more closely suit her personal needs. "The key usually is determining what's frustrating you in your current position and then finding a way to change that," Duncan suggests. "A lot of times, the solution is one that combines what you like to do with what you can do."

For veterinarian Becky Skitt, 43, that meant downshifting from a full-time medical career to part-time work performing only surgeries. A true animal lover, Skitt took up the profession in 1980 not because she had always wanted to become a vet, but because everyone told her she should. She later learned that although she had plenty of heart, she didn't always have the strength to deal with unpleasant situations. "This was probably the stupidest career I could have chosen because I can't stand seeing an animal in pain," she says. "I put up with it, though, because everyone around me told me this was the right job."

Skitt spent three years practicing in Terre Haute and then moved to Indy in 1983 to fill in for local vets over the next five years. Frustrations mounted as owners brought in neglected or abused pets and then refused to pay for necessary treatment. In one instance, a man opted to put a female Pekinese breeder to sleep rather than pay for a hysterectomy to remove her uterine tumors. (Skitt instead found the dog a good home.) She also felt constantly on edge knowing that she couldn't control every emergency situation. "I knew my training couldn't prepare me for everything," she says. "If I buggered something up, that something might die. I hated that constant fear."

She became a slave to her beeper as well, which routinely summoned her back to the emergency room after her 12-hour days. She recalls few instances in which she wasn't called away from the grocery store just inches from the checkout lane. "I was living life in the fast lane and the days were going by way too fast," Skitt says. "I just wasn't happy."

The emotional stresses prompted her to change gears in 1988, almost a decade before the term downshifting debuted. Using her medical skills, she found a job doing lab research at Indiana University Medical Center and enjoyed relative contentment for eight years before the program's grant money ran out. Distressed at the prospect of returning to clinic work, Skitt chose to perform morning surgeries for a couple local clinics. She enjoyed the flexibility so much that last year she and a partner opened a new practice, Pet Care Plus. Skitt still handles surgeries and is learning the business aspects to eventually take up a desk job. "I'm helping animals in a much more manageable way for me," Skitt says. "I'm not an emotional wreck anymore."

Side Benefits

Moving to a more satisfying life also can deliver real health benefits, as each of these four women discovered. For one thing, they report feeling less stressed, less pressed for time and more in control of their lives. Perhaps more importantly, their physical well-being has improved: McMurray doesn't suffer chronic headaches, Skitt sleeps through the night and Klein has time for a balanced diet. Other stress-related symptoms such as mild depression, crying jags and unexplained maladies also tend to disappear after downshifting, Duncan confirms. "Our bodies rebel when they're under too much pressure," she says. "We can't treat the symptoms until we address the causes."

Realizing such benefits isn't always easy, though, considering the tremendous social pressures women face to succeed at home and at work. When Skitt announced her decision to leave clinical practice, for instance, her friends and family didn't hide their disapproval. "They told me I was throwing away my education, that I was giving up," Skitt says. McMurray's husband, Sherman, also expressed mild reservations and suggested that she wait a few more years so she could reap the rewards of a successful practice. "He thought I was holding it all together better than I really was," she recalls. "But I lived that high-powered, high-profile position for 10 years. I don't feel that I gave up anything I didn't want to."

West compares the issues surrounding downshifting to those continually plaguing mothers: Women who work face pressure to stay home, while those who stay home feel that they should work. "I knew when I quit that people would say I wasn't being a very good role model for women," West says. "But if I lived my life according to what looked good on the outside, I'd be living a lie."

Duncan, who herself downshifted to a smaller practice four years ago, says that's a great attitude to develop because even other women can't always relate to the desire to downshift. "The harshest critics tend to be women who are working to achieve equal status with men," she says. "Somewhere women got the message that they had to do it all in order to be valued. But the core of the women's movement is that we have a right to make individual choices — and isn't that what we're all striving for in the first place?"

Even with the support of others, downshifting can prove difficult financially unless women implement a revised plan for meeting daily expenses. If a spouse works, losing a substantial portion of income might have little impact: McMurray says her family still lives comfortably off husband Sherman's salary as a physician. In other cases, an aggressive saving strategy can offset any loss: West saved a good portion of her income over the 16 years she worked as a single woman.

Of course, sometimes creative measures must help blend the ideal with reality. When sizing up her financial situation, Skitt realized she couldn't make mortgage payments and keep up her horse hobby after taking a 50 percent salary cut when she downshifted. To compensate, she sold her house and used the money to buy a horse trailer so she could take her 10-year-old horse Dante to his competitions without relying on charity or hiring someone else for transportation. She then engineered an arrangement to care for another equine enthusiast's animals in exchange for Dante's board and her own rent: She now lives in a small apartment over her friend's barn and happily divides her day between the horses and her practice.

Such an arrangement seems almost too good to be true, but Duncan says similar solutions are entirely possible if women take time to assess their personal, financial and career needs. "Life for most modern women is like a closet where they keep stuffing things," Duncan says. "Pretty soon the door is bulging and it's time to start over and sort the good stuff from the junk. Besides, we have anywhere from 40 to 60 years to accomplish all the good stuff — why do it all now?"

West, for one, has adopted that philosophy. She intends to return to the workplace eventually, although she says she'll look for a situation that merges her love of communications with a less harried schedule. Until then, she'll keep her skills fresh doing corporate videos for production companies — and keep her outlook on life fresh by pursuing new opportunities. "I'm regaining my energy and enthusiasm for life, not giving up on my career," she says. "There's too much in life that you don't get to see if you're always on the fast track. In fact, I don't feel that I downsized at all — I feel that I enriched my life."