"Prior to feminism's encouragement of these millions of women to work, one man with an average education and job could support his nuclear family in some semblance of middle-class comfort. Now that women have entered the workforce in such huge numbers, it is a catch-22: women have to work because you can no longer support a family on one income, but they can't survive on only one income because there are so many women working and lowering real wages. It has been decades since this trend started, and though there are many complicated factors that go into what makes an economy, you simply cannot ignore the negative impact of millions of previously non-working women flooding the job market. It had to have made some impact, and a basic understanding of economics dictates that their impact on real wages was negative overall."

But you could say the same for any group which was shut out of the American system, and not allowed to work at jobs that they may have have wanted to work. For the longest time, African-Americans were not allowed to participate in many fields, now they are. Do we also blame the lowering of wages on them, and demand that blacks be re-segregated to preserve the wages of everyone else? Of course not.

In this day and age, a woman who chooses to stay at home, and not work, is taking a huge gamble, not only with her own life, but her children's lives as well. This is no longer the era where divorce was unthinkable, and people had to stay chained to each other, completely miserable. At any time, if a woman's husband develops a roving eye, or itchy fists, she may have to scramble to find some way to make a living. Study after study has shown that after a divorce, women and children's standard of living goes down, while a man's goes *up*. So choosing to work, with or without kids is an entirely rational decision, just as much so for a woman as for a man.

If a woman chooses to work, and that is what makes her happy, then why not? If a man chooses to work, and that is what makes him happy, then why not that either? For most people, this discussion has no meaning, since most people *have* to work, just to keep the lights on, and supper on the table.

accepting of women and everything. But Kate changed my mind. Not through her retoric, but her apperance. Because everytime I see her I just think to myself, Jesus Kate do something with your teeth. Bleach them or something!

The main problem is not women or anybody else entering the workforce in numbers they haven't in the past. It's that the jobs which would allow, and be available to, one average educated wage earner to support an entire family today, for the most part, no longer exist, and those that do exist, don't exist in the the numbers needed to make that so.

So, society will never, ever, ever, ever validate men taking care of children, ever ever? How does she know that? Is she a psychic now? There was a time when society didn't validate men working for a female boss, which she must have been as a practicing lawyer, given that most law firms are still mostly male. There was a time when society didn't validate men tolerating wives who earned more than they did, which she admitted she does in the interview. What other nonsense does she un-foresee?

have there been any studies about the rise in the cost of childcare? I know back when I was a kid, in 1975, and my mom worked part-time, she was able to find very inexpensive, decent summer camp programs for us.

Granted, many moms did not work then, so the market could not support expensive childcare.

Nowadays, it seems that for working families, the costs of summer camps, day programs, and preschools has risen to outrageous levels. I think because of the increase of income of two-earner families, that childcare has risen too, basically because the providers can get it.

And as working parents, we're between a rock and a hard place. Think of summer vacations, three months off, and each weekday has to be filled. So you end up paying whatever is charged. hundreds of dollars a week, per child, is not unusual.

Gee, Salon, why spend precious energy on Kate O'Beirne's familiar anti-feminist ravings? I took one look at that book and said, life is too short! I've read it a thousand times already, there is absolutely nothing new here.

More to the point, perhaps, if you were determined to cover the book,why make wonderful Rebecca Traister have lunch with her? Had she been bad or something? The book-publicity lunch/interview is the last way to get a real story-- it's a deck stacked totally in favor of the author. The letter writers who think Rebecca could have done a better job don't know what these occasions are like. Basically the author just has to keep talking, be affable, avoid answering tough questions and run out the clock. The social dynamics of lunch preclude aggressive questioning. That is why Kate's publicist arranged the event. (And don't forget, the publicist was right there -- if Rebecca had really made Kate sweat, he/she would have managed to deflect the discussion.Like, ooh, what's for dessert?)

If for some reason Salon had to pay attention to this book, I'd much rather have seen what Rebecca would have done in a review, where she could have looked into O'Beirne's dubious stats and torn her silly claims apart. For example, that never-married (childless) women earn more than never-married childless men does NOT prove the non-existence of sex discrimination. These are two very different populations, in different areas of the work world. The women tend to be highly educated, the men not. Many a conservative pundit, urging women to marry young, has pointed out that the "best" men get taken early. For a lot of reasons, high-achieving women disproportionately marry later or not at all, have children later or not at all. For men, it's different.

It's hard to point out this kind of thing--and the dozens of other incidents of manipulated factoids in O'Beirne's book-- over supreme de volaille.