Rating: 
Summary: Always good to hear an alternate view BUT
Review: The author brings up a lot of questions that need bringing up, and I can appreciate that. Some aspects of her argument I heartily agree with: a lot of young women get very hurt these days by becoming too sexually available at a young age. However, the answer is in real self-respect and understanding of our real desires(intimacy, not empty sex), not a power calculation of making women less available so men are forced to marry. I also think the fact that fewer women (and men) are having children is a GOOD thing. Not everyone wants or is equipped to be a parent and a culture that allows non-interest in children as a viable option is better for our society and the environment ultimately. My biggest gripe though is that the author seems to have no knowledge of basic household economics. The time to work IS when you are in your 20s: two incomes and a frugal lifestyle coupled with a good investment plan and downpayment on a house can secure you (and your future children) in a way that one income and having babies in your early 20s cannot. My own prescription: marry early, have kids later. I was married at 22, had my daughter at 32. By the time the baby came we had a long-term stable marriage that was unlikely to collapse under the stress of having children, savings, and a house. I was in a position to negotiate a 20-hour a week jobshare following a six-month maternity leave. (The author also fails to address changes in longevity -- one's life is no longer half over at 35, more like a third, and we have to think about supporting ourselves much longer.) She also neglects the idea that many, many people are now switching careers in midlife -- I've known several women who had children in their thirties, stayed home for a while, went back to school, started a completely different career.
Rating:
Summary: She diagnoses the problem, but she can't prescribe the cure.
Review: I admire Danielle Crittenden's bravery in writing this book, particularly in the face of feminist criticism she certainly must have known she'd receive. _What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us_ is a clear look at the discontentment lurking in the hearts of many women who believed they really could "have it all," only to discover they had missed something vitally important in life. By committing themselves to the career track and postponing motherhood, the women interviewed for this book found they had lost years of productive homelife -- particularly the years best suited to rearing children. Most telling are the accounts from women having children late in life and finding they lacked the energy to deal with a toddler or had just forgotten how to play and interact with children. But Crittenden does not focus on motherhood alone. She also fearlessly dissects the question of what it means to be a woman and how that is different from being a man. But the conclusion of the book is a complete disappointment. Instead of showing what a rich, rewarding and ultimately satisfying "career" is to be made out of homemaking, housewifery and childrearing, Crittenden suggests that women have children early, enjoy them and train them until they are schoolage, then dump them into public education and get right back on the career track. This ending utterly surprised me and was a complete letdown after the logical progression of Crittenden's argument throughout the first 200 pages of the book. In the end, Crittenden caves to the feminist's age-old cry that a woman who stays at home cannot be completely fulfilled or enjoy using her full mental and creative capacities. As the stay-at-home mother of three boys, I can attest to the joyful challenge that childrearing is, but I can also assure other women that you do not need to turn off your brain to be a mother--nor is a lifelong "career" outside the home the only way to grow mentally. There is no excuse for dimwitted homemakers. Education is ongoing, and there are ample opportunities to use your brain cells productively as a mother AND as a wife (when there are no children to bring up). I only wish Crittenden had been able to build her argument to this level instead of abandoning it to the tired and hackneyed "I must be fulfilled in a career" mindset.
Rating: 
Summary: Agree completely with S. M. Stirling
Review: A stay-at-home wife taking care of children while husband brings home the bacon is a MYTH. Such families never existed, except for two or three short decades in the United States. Throughout history almost all women worked ' hard, backbreaking labor mostly on farms and fields, just like most men. Their children were, by modern standards, grossly neglected. Few women lucky enough not to have to work, did not raise their own children either ' they had maids and servants to do it. After WWII United States found itself in a uniquely lucky position of the only industrialized country with production capacity intact. The resulting prosperity enabled men with no college education to support a family in a middle-class lifestyle on one income ' for the first time in history. Such bounty could never last. As Europe and Japan restored their production in 1970's, and Third World countries entered the market en masse in 1990's' things returned to normal. 'Normal' meaning in order to have a decent lifestyle both parents must work, and to be professionally educated. Unfortunately, two generations of Americans grew up conditioned that the 50's families WERE the norm, instead of a historical aberration ' and now we have people like Crittenden and Shalit moaning about its loss.BTW, it is entirely possible to live today on one income in a 50's lifestyle. All you have to do is forego all consumer products invented since the 50's, and not travel outside the country (very few Americans did back then).
Rating:
Summary: Utter futility:
Review: Water doesn't run uphill and time doesn't grow backward, and cultures don't change in a retrograde fashion just because some individual wants them to. As Marx said in one of his rare felicitous moments, "Human beings make history. But they don't make it just as they please." Feminism arose not because someone wrote a book out of the blue, but because it expressed the working-out of tendencies inherent in our culture. The "non-working" wife was a temporary little historical blip; a Victorian status symbol for the wealthy of the middle classes, based on a complete misunderstanding of the role of the aristocratic women they took as a reference group. Most women, throughout history, have worked for a living -- hard physical toil, with childcare cut to a minimum and stuffed into bits and pieces of time here and there. We're now returning to the norm, except that women now also get a chance at the minority of really _good_ jobs. "Motherhood" and keeping house is not one of those. Let's face facts: 99% of "motherhood" is a boring, mind-killing crap-job. It's slave work; every class in human history who could afford to do so has pushed it off on subordinates, just like we do with our Mexican and Asian nannies. Ditto housework. It's inherently boring, demeaning scut-work. The market price for it -- as usual -- accurately reveals its The idea that free, educated women in any numbers would want to take this on as their life's career is absurd. Furthermore, relying on a man for your economic security is a prime way to end up old, alone and sharing your diet of dog-food with the roaches in a slum. This is a fact. It isn't going to change, except to get more so. Western civilization has always been individualistic and market-driven, and it the market and individualism continually colonize new territory. The family is in the process of being commodified and marketized, as work was during the Industrial Revolution. Trying to halt or reverse this process is like trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom. Crittenden seems to be some sort of masochist and/or a complete fool; but on second thoughts, she's probably just being "provocative" for the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Danielle's Way is the RIGHT way ...... Yeah .... Right.
Review: I'm glad that feminism created the opening for Danielle to write a book like this. I hate to point out the obvious, but feminism wasn't a significant conversation in 1962, the year I was born. Women didn't have many choices back then and were literally "girdled" into one lifestyle. (Ahhhh .... remember the girdle? ... No? Well, silly, that's one thing you can thank feminism for!) Come on, everyone! This is not an even-handed look at feminism. It's articulate, self-congratulatory PR about how Danielle and her peers are getting it right and the other idiotic women are getting it all wrong. Danielle slyly cites some bitter, unfulfilled, misguided women. The funny thing is, none of them have made the same life choices as Danielle. I guess that's why all of them are so sad, as Danielle points out to us. Silly me. I thought feminism was meant to empower ALL women to choose whichever live they wish to lead, not just a cookie-cutter lifestyle prescribed by the privileged or even the majority. So I guess this book isn't really about feminism, after all. It's one woman's opinions under the guise of feminist thought. Very clever set-up! But it's a provoking read, so I give it 2 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Is it that difficult?
Review: I was very interested in reading this book because of its title and the summaries I had read about it. How do you really balance your work life and private life? How do you become both a successful businesswoman, mother and wife? However, when I read the book I realized that Crittenden was making the assumption that all women (all feminists) have made the mistake of sacrificing their social/motherhood/role as a wife to being a successful woman at work. She constantly criticizes feminists for not finding a balance between social and careeer and explains how they are unhappy because of such inbalance. Therefore, I thought that the book's audience was quite narrow and that not every feminist or woman had failed to find a balance in life. I cannot believe looking around me in the 21st century, at my friends, at myself that we have all not succeeded in finding boyfriends who wanted to marry, having careers that were reasonably successful and made us reasonably happy, becoming mothers. We have indeed succeeded in finding a balance and at times had to sacrifice one thing for the other. But there are lots of married working women with kids, a social life, and friends and happy marriage. Not perfect but reasonably good. Crittenden is too narrowminded in her thinking and too narrow focused in her survey or observations. Despite my criticism, the book makes a good read, makes you think about all these issues from a personal perspective and facilitates judgement or appraisal on yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Where the men are
Review: Honest, serious men who put their careers first but their girlfriends or wives a close second can be found in the Objectivist movement. Read a novel by Ayn Rand and introduce yourself to a local group of Objectivists which will almost certainly be 80 - 90% men.
Rating:
Summary: A significant oversight
Review: I recommended this book to my book club because I thought it would make for fascinating conversation. Fascinating, yes, but more frustrating than insightful. One of Crittenden's beefs with modern women -- and one of the prime reasons she says they find themselves unhappily unmarried in their 30s -- is that they supposedly spend their 20s devoted to their jobs and delaying marriage. It seems as if Crittenden would have us think that women are meeting wonderful men and purposefully saying no to settling down. I find it hard to believe that she could have interviewed as many women as she claims to have met, and not heard their frustration in not meeting someone with whom they felt compatible. She seems to have missed the boat on a major segment of the single female population: It isn't about women saying no to relationships so they can work themselves ragged at their careers instead. It's about women having difficulty meeting the right person, so they pay special attention to their careers and other interests while they're out there dating. (And who ever said that liking your career and finding love had to be mutually exclusive? What an insult to professional women.) To throw salt on the wound, she assails the single women's attention to personal growth, hobbies and activities as selfish. What are they supposed to do while they're having difficulty finding love: sit home and watch Sex in the City over a pint of Haagen Dasz? The members of our book club who were single found this to be an offensive book -- not only blaming single women for being unlucky in love, but suggesting that they are selfish when they seek other activities. I am so glad I didn't read this in my 20s before I met my husband.
Rating: 
Summary: What about investing?
Review: This book was good. It matched most of the things I've observed over the last 30 years. When I grew up, I was always taught that women were most fulfilled by pursuing a career. I was stunned to get out of college and see women in their 30's voluntarily giving up $100,000/year jobs to stay at home and be a mom. Clearly very capable women don't consider motherhood a waste of their lives. But what the author leaves out is the way investing can benefit one's life. She writes about the choice between one's children or the State providing support in old age. Well, what about investing? Someone making $26,000/year, if they work for a company with a 401(k) can put $25,000 in the bank before they turn 30. I know because I did it, while supporting myself. (And that's what's left AFTER the dot-com crash and buying a new car.) Left invested, that $25K will turn into over $1 Million by retirement age - even if, after age 30, she saved nothing more for retirement. (This assumes the standard stock-market return of 12% and inflation of 3%) In other words, a woman could work an entry-level job for seven years after college, then stop working to raise children; never work again, and still retire a millionaire. The author laments that single people aren't buying houses. Well, they aren't saving for retirement, either. It seems like she could have encouraged people to invest. Then, when they want to have children, their savings will give them more options.
Rating: 
Summary: Life-altering book!
Review: My priorities, goals, and perception of life shifted drastically as a result of reading this book! You'll be shocked to learn about how the "women's liberation movement" actually HARMS women. This is by far the most life-altering book I have ever read!
|
