That's a well-chosen word: fealty. Although our society is democratic, it encircles thousands and thousands of little dictatorships. And each of those dictatorships operates on something like the feudal system, with little feifs for each department head, with tiny little sub-feifs for the middle managers, and so on down the line to the lowly serfs who actually do the things for which people are willing to pay. And this is the environment in which we spend most of our waking hours.

And as the article points out, once you become separated from this strange world of interlocking dictatorships, you can never come back without being punished. Whether you want to take some time off to raise a family or simply to engage in some genuine, non-resume-padding, personal growth, you'll be forced to pay for your lack of constant obeisance when you attempt to return to the loving embrace of your corporate masters.

What a wonderful world we've created, all in the name of distributing scarce resources as equitably as possible. And thank goodness we've solved that problem. Otherwise, imagine how rediculous the whole situation would seem!

Try taking a year or two off to travel or tinker with an idea or anything like that. Or for that matter get laid off for a year or two. Same thing, and I think that happens regardless of gender. It's probably a fair bit worse for returning mothers, as they are out of the rat race much longer.

The fact is that the most successful workers at "blue chip" companies are those workers who are least committed to their families and their communities. These are the workers who are willing to take a transfer to another state at the drop of a hat, work on Sundays when needed, and to forgo sleeping at home for a cot in the office or a king-size bed at the Hilton. As such, the people who make it to the top in most industries are those very people whose committment to what is truly precious: Family and community. No wonder "corporate culture" is so hostile to workers who have anything less than a 24/7 committment to the office!

Women, it seems, are less likely buy into this culture, but at a price. Less power, less money puts women in a precarious social position. The "opt-out" women who are featured in the media generally represent a small but highly privileged class, and will likely do okay for themselves regardless of their choices. But what about the community college graduate who wants to make the same choices? What happens to her 7 years down the line after her husband has left, and she has nothing but 3 kids and a resume gap to show for it?

My mother experienced this back when I was a kid. She wasn't a "career" person, but she gave up her work as a bank secretary to raise me and my sister. By the time she wanted to go back to work when we were teenagers, she couldn't compete with the young, technology-savvy women available in our small university town. She never did really go back to work, other than a few short stints at Wal-Mart, a convenience store and a restaurant, and I believe if she had been able to go back to work she would be a much happer, more confident person today instead of the recluse she has become.

As for me, I realized about eight years ago that trying to have a career as a magazine editor and start a family weren't going to mesh. While there were women at my company in high-level editor positions, neither of them had family and were at the age where it was apparent they weren't going to. It was made clear to me that if I wanted to move up, I would have to travel a lot, work long hours, and forget anything like the flexibility of working at home occasionally, even though it would be more productive for writing and editing tasks.

I was lucky and found a compromise between totally opting out and staying in the rat race. I went to work as an independent contractor for a competing company where I could work at home. Today I'm a freelance writer who writes and edits for several companies, from an office in my home, and I have a beautiful 3-year-old who I don't have to put in daycare 12 hours a day. I'll probably never get back into the "career" thing. Part of me misses it, but then again, I'm not sure I could ever go back to the world of having to kowtow to a boss just to take some time off.

I find this posting so depressing. Americans claim to value mothers--subtly and not-so-subtly pressuring moms to stay at home with their kids. Yet the vast majority of mothers are simply unable to do so, whether or not they'd like to. So those moms who go to work are simultaneously considered bad moms for not staying home and bad workers for caring about their kids! And the moms who do manage to take some time off to stay home are then punished when they try to reenter the workforce. And don't even get me started on the abysmal lack of support working parents can expect when in full career mode--childcare? hah! maternity leave? a measly 6 UNPAID weeks IF you are lucky enough to work for a very large company. Flexibilty or job-sharing? hahahaha! And I find it ironic that Republicans tend to be the ones who crow about family values, yet their policies are the very ones that make it damn near impossible to value your family properly. Women need to unite and demand better treatment. Clearly no one will give it to us if we don't force them. But most importantly, we need to elect representatives for whom "women's issues" are not mere fluff. In the last presidential election, I do not recall one question in any of the debates that covered a "woman's issue." That is simply ridiculous and unacceptable.