Full disclosure: I was interviewed, at length, for this article and am quoted in it. I suggested the caste analysis as a way to explain why some males of the uber-elite might find picking up their dirty socks or dealing with the grimier (and unpaid) work of child-rearing incompatible with their sense of status and entitlement, not to suggest that any highly-qualified professional woman who wants to spend more hands-on time caring for her kids than the average Fortune 500 CEO is wasting her life.

I completely agree with Hirshman that the feminist discussion of gender, work, family and women's leadership desperately needs to be more politicized. Defending a woman's right to choose (to work or not, to wear lipstick or not, to have an abortion or not) has always been a second-rate substitute for the power to change social conditions and ideologies that protect male privilege and disadvantage women in and outside the workplace. So a frank discussion about the future of women's leadership is definitely in order, and it's to Hirshman credit that she is willing to take such a controversial stance.

However, I agree with others who've wondered whether the upper class women Hirshman holds out as failed role models could really be counted on to overturn the status quo given that they are already in an ideal position to take advantage of it. And I'm concerned that Hirshman dismisses the factor of female-unfriendly workplace dynamics with a single line:

"It is possible that the workplace is discriminatory and hostile to family life."

Gender bias in the workplace is actually a bit more than possible, it's quite well documented. For example, Catalyst just published a study on gender stereotyping in the upper echelons of corporate leadership and found that male executives -- who, of course, overwhelmingly dominate the field -- valued women execs for their team-building skills but doubted their problem solving ability. The report concluded that sending more stellar women into the leadership pipeline will be futile until corporate leaders are trained to recognize and counter the effects of stereotyping on executive hiring and promotions. (Even Hirshman admits this when she writes: "If firms had hired every childless woman lawyer available, that alone would have been enough to raise the percentage of female law partners above 16 percent in 30 years.") And a recent survey of high-ranking men for Fortune magazine found that a growing number of male execs are fed up with the 24/7 demands of the white collar workweek and are looking for saner alternatives.

But perhaps most problematic with Hirshman's analysis is that she first criticizes young women for equating freedom of choice with feminism, and then castigates them for making the irresponsible choices.

As much as I'm delighted to see these issue highlighted by AlterNet, it's quite frustrating that women in the alternative mothers' media have been writing about exactly the same issues in exactly the same way for several years. (For example, I've written about the comprehensive slate of worker- and family-friendly policies so desperately needed in the U.S. as "the Next New Deal" on a number occasions.) But apparently it takes a male reporter to lend the "motherhood problem" in the workplace an air of credibility and urgency.

Am I just a little bit grumpy about this? Well, yes, I am.

Judith Stadtman Tucker

Editor, The Mothers Movement Online

to Joan Walsh for the discerning review. I've come to the conclusion that what makes Flanagan's writing so grating is not her hypocrisy in cataloging the imagined sins of employed mothers -- or even her one-woman war on feminism -- but the fact that she's basically a snob. A wonderfully witty and genuinely gifted snob, but a snob nonetheless.

Unlike earlier masters of the domestic genre -- such as Jean Kerr and Erma Bombeck, who Flanagan professes to admire -- she can't quite manage to sustain the level of self-deprecation that made those writers truly funny and compelling. But then, unlike Bombeck and Kerr, Flanagan doesn't want her readers to identify with her --she wants to seduce them with her flawless prose so they'll stand still while she twists the knife. And frankly, it's not unheard of for magazines like the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly to launch the careers of writers who excel at that particular art.