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Profile of the Trailing Spouse and the Expat Family by Global Expats
03|Quenby Wilcox Blogs
Huffington Post, Womenalia & Reuters Foundation Blogs by Quenby Wilcox
Quenby Wilcox is the Founder of Global Expats, which assists expat families, targeting the homemaker and expat mom. She moved abroad for the first time in 1977 to live in England as a Third Culture Kid (TCK); to Paris in 1987 as a student; and in 1989 until 2008 she was an expat, trailing spouse, living in Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Paris, Bogotá and again Madrid. In 2009, due to a high-conflict divorce in Spain, she returned to Washington, DC seeking assistance from the U.S. government, as she fought for her and her children’s rights in Spanish family courts. Her case is now headed to international courts against Spain for human rights violations.
In addition to Global Expats she is Founder of Safe Child International, whose mission is to promote and defend the rights of victims of domestic violence, and publishes a monthly newsletter Family Courts in Crisis. Her blogs can be found on the following:
- Huffington Post, Perils of the Trailing Spouse
- Womenalia.com, Having It All
- Reuters Foundation, Global Voices for Women
- Memoirs of a Trailing Spouse
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Her Blogs on Reuters Foundation are as follows:
A Global Voice for Women: The Right to be Heard
By Quenby Wilcox
There is an erroneous assumption that the battles to combat violence and discrimination against women have been fought, and already won in ‘western’, ‘developed’ countries. It is a naïve notion at best and a dangerous one at worst…. Read Post
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Her Blogs on the Huffington Post are as follows:
Trailing Spouse vs. Accompanying Spouse: Semantics or Principle?
(4) Comments | Posted April 17, 2014 | 12:03 PM
The term “trailing spouse” has elicited much debate and discussion since it was coined back in the 1980s in the dark ages of the global migration of the modern expat family. Most expat spouses of today take offense at the term “trailing spouse” and have opted out for “accompanying spouse,”…
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Opting Back In: Not As Peachy As it Seems for the Divorcée
(2) Comments | Posted February 19, 2014
In 2003, Lisa Belkin coined the phrase ‘opting-out’ with her New York Times Magazinearticle “Opt Out Revolution”. Since then, many journalists have taken ‘pen in hand’ to write about the trials and tribulations of women leaving the work-force to raise families, and a decade later of them…
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Why So Many Moms Trade In Corporate Jobs for a Life as a Trailing Spouse
(2) Comments | Posted January 14, 2014
Giving up a career to become a stay-at-home mom is difficult enough for someone who stays in the same city or country, but for the woman who moves abroad, the challenges are ten-fold. So why would a highly educated, professional woman give up her career and financial independence to follow…
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Dual-Career Challenges for the Expat Family: Why Expat Employers Should Be Concerned
(0) Comments | Posted December 11, 2013
Most people believe that an international assignment with a multinational footing the bill is highly sought-after amongst corporate executives. However, this is far from the truth. Americans turn down expat posts at a rate of 94%, with 70% of these refusals due to a spouse’s refusal to give up their…
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Trailing Spouses: The Unsung Heroes of an International Relocation
(5) Comments | Posted November 19, 2013
Every year tens of thousands of Americans pack up all of their belongings and move to another country, joining over 6 million of their compatriots who live abroad. Millions of these brave souls are the mothers and wives of expatriated employees, commonly known as trailing or accompanying spouses. These women,…
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Her Blogs on Womenalia are as follows:
Having It All
The phenomenon of the dual-career family is a growing reality in societies around the world, and as a consequence women (and men) are increasingly focusing their time and energy on work-life balance and family life. In her blog on Womenalia, ‘Having it All’, Quenby will explore the realities of women who have ‘opted-out’ of the workforce for over the past decades, the challenges they face in workplace re-insertion, as well as their efforts to re-invent themselves after children ‘leave the nest’.
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Ideological Problems Plague Our Nation’s Capital
“An ideology is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to – to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not….” These were…
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Bullying in the Workplace and Its Consequences
The Internet is full of advice on how to be successful in the workplace. How to develop one’s social skills; what to say, what to do, what to wear, what not to say, what not to do, what not to wear…
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Professionalization to Domesticity: Not Mutually Exclusive
The work-place of the 1980s and ‘90s was characterized by a transition from a manufacturing to a service and information-base economy, or what some call the “post-industrial revolution”. It was replete…
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Is “Alpha” Male Leadership Responsible for Modern Societies’ Problems?
“What is marketing?” were the opening words of my Marketing 101 professor on the first day of class, all too many years ago. His question received a myriad of responses filled with business jargon and hyped…
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Dressing for a New Type of Success
In the past years, one of the hardest things to deal with during my divorce has been the attitude – the attitude, as one woman put it – that stay-at-home moms should be ashamed of staying home to raise…
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Gilded Cages: Why the Caged Bird Still Sings
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the…
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Work-Life Balance: The Importance of Ingenuity & Perseverance
In A Career in Your Suitcase, Jo Parfitt and Colleen Reichrath-Smith state that the key to a successful career lies in “finding our passions, which we can also think of as our vocation or the work we were…
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Opting Back Into the Job Market: a ‘Piece of Cake’, Or Is It?
In 2003 Lisa Belkin coined the phrase ‘opting out’ (of the workforce) with her New York Times article Opt Out Revolution. Since then the Internet has been flooded with blogs and articles about moms who have…