Rating: 
Summary: Concise and informative - HOPEFUL
Review: Crittenden is clear about where we are as a nation in our economic treatment of the people raising our children. A feminist who is not afraid to face the fact that women can be educated and successful and still want to be a part of their children's lives. She concretely shows that care givers (working mothers and stay-at-home mothers) are not valued in an economic context - through our laws, social atmosphere, and careers more can be done to equalize the misbalance. Raising our children - the future of our nation, is a vital job, recognizes this importance will bring us closer to a balanced society - which is good for men, women, children, government, and industry.
Rating:
Summary: invisible work
Review: Crittenden's book makes excellent points and offers doable solutions, which, after reading some reviewers' opinions, will never happen in this country of closed minds and men who pull a dumb act when confronted with the worth of home and child care. I propose that all American women, this minute, cease and desist having children for the next five years, and quit caring for your elderly relatives. We'd see pretty quickly that bearing and rearing children is not merely a "personal choice," and that someone, somewhere, has to take care of all the aging and ailing elderly. A country is measured by how it treats its very young and very old citizens, and the U.S. needs to look at some reform. And to all the smug single/childless folks--it's your social security, you know! The book should have been on all the news outlets, should have raised a major hue and cry--but, thanks to some swift brainwashing by conservatives who've probably never washed their own underwear, not enough folks paid attention.
Rating: 
Summary: Pseudo-scholarship and classist superficial quasi-femenism
Review: Don't waste your time on this book. Crittenden is a journalist posing as a scholar, basing her argument on anecdotal evidence. She has spent her life as a journalist in a male dominated work world and has transplanted this interpretive lens into a "work" that claims to defend the sacrafices that mothers make. Crittenden arrived at forty, looked at her watch, and noticed she had "forgotten to have a child." Then she decided to write a book about the price of motherhood, since she had had to leave the New York Times to have a child. Therefore it became time to start valuing motherhood for what it really was, the most important work in the world. This is not to say that the critique is baseless, it is not, however Crittenden's handling of the topic is superficial. She has a general knowledge base, which she uses to catapult herself into a subject area she really has no expertise in. I have read her "work" and there are many more quality pieces by real experts. Her stance as an advocate is dangerous in the face of her gaping lack of knowledge of policy, feminism, history, and the like. I was inspired, well uninspired really, to write this review after Crittenden came to speak at my college. I suggest Arlie Hotschild's "The Second Shift" if you really have an interest in gleaning even an atom of knowledge from someone who actually knows what she is writing about.
Rating:
Summary: Why American Mothers Have to Work Much Harder
Review: Families all over the U.S. are straining to provide good care for their children and manage to handle their paying jobs too. Since women, especially mothers, are by far responsible for most child care, women suffer most from the constant battle to balance workplace responsibilities and important family responsibilities. This includes women doing all kinds of family care: those with children, elderly relatives, or handicapped family members. Ann Crittenden has studied the situation for families in the United States during the last several years, and in a clear, easy-to-read style she explains why American mothers struggle so much harder than mothers in other developed countries to meet their family obligations, and how we got to this position. She shows how U.S. institutions have repeatedly refused to support American mothers in the family care work they do, with the result that American mothers are left to shoulder alone the burden of bearing and training the children, the very essence of tomorrow's civilization. Mothers are expected to provide this labor for free, and suffer severe economic disadvantage in doing so by an establishment that mostly pretends the mother's labor does not really amount to much work of consequence. Ann's book springs from her own experiences as a mother, and her book is one with which every mother will identify! Good Reading!
Rating:
Summary: The Price of Motherhood
Review: Finally, a brilliantly written, well researched book on the difficult problem of balancing motherhood with career. I agree with the NYTimes rave review. It is a major powerfully interesting book on some of the problems faced by parents as they try to balance the pursuit of equality in the work place for both partners and the wonderful, demanding job of tending to the future - the raising of our children.
Rating:
Summary: A book every Politician should read
Review: Finally, a well researched book about the most fundamental roll in society, motherhood, and how our culture has short changed it. This book will open the eyes of both men and women to a problem too close for any of us to really see. For all the speeches about the importance of children and motherhood, this book gives every citizen the resource to see the issue clearer and follow through with governmental changes that will make a difference for our children and therefor our future. The empty rhetoric of "family values" is over. It is time to change our economic system to truly value the family. I recommend that everyone moved by this book buy an extra copy and send it to your local representative. I did.
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful and interesting
Review: First of all, you must ask yourself a question. Do you think that people that spend time nurturing and caring for young children (either day care workers or stay at home moms) are providing a valuable service? Raising the next generation? The generation that will pay our Social Security taxes, run the world, and invent new things? Then if you do, you must agree with the premise in the book that people that do this are treated like dirt. I teach college students. I'm paid 40K a year with full benefits, 401K, health and life insurance, state retirement, etc. The loving teacher that nutures my 3 year old is paid about 7 dollars an hour with no benefits at all. Something is wrong here.
Rating:
Summary: THIS is the book that belonged on the cover of TIME
Review: Forget Sylvia Ann Hewlett's "Creating a Life" and the furor it has spawned with its encouragement that professional women marry and start their families early. THIS is the book that deserved a TIME magazine cover story, and the fact that Hewlett's book has overshadowed Crittenden's in publicity speaks volumes about our culture's unwillingness to address the bottom line about motherhood. Quite simply, "The Price of Motherhood" answers all the questions about women's reluctance to start families when they are younger and more reproductively healthy. Doing so puts them at a hugely greater risk for poverty, as Crittenden so painstakingly documents in this book. Our nation expects women to bear ALL the opportunity costs of motherhood, without providing any sort of support or safety net for those who undertake the public service of raising and educating the next generation of law-abiding, productive citizens. "The Price of Motherhood" provides the evidence to support what we all know to be true, on some level. Trust me -- I'm the mother of a 4-year-old with another baby on the way, and even with my graduate degree, 15+ years of work experience and many professional accomplishments, I have been marginalized like you wouldn't believe since I became a mom. The sad truth is that most women in the throes of childrearing are so exhausted and dependent that they probably will never band together to become the political force that will create the pressure necessary to change this sad reality. Kudos to Crittenden, whose son is nearly grown, for returning to this issue at this point in her life (she's nearly 60) and taking a stand for the women and children -- and the society -- that will follow her.
Rating:
Summary: THIS is the book that belonged on the cover of TIME
Review: Forget Sylvia Ann Hewlett's "Creating a Life" and the furor it has spawned with its encouragement that professional women marry and start their families early. THIS is the book that deserved a TIME magazine cover story, and the fact that Hewlett's book has overshadowed Crittenden's in publicity speaks volumes about our culture's unwillingness to address the bottom line about motherhood. Quite simply, "The Price of Motherhood" answers all the questions about women's reluctance to start families when they are younger and more reproductively healthy. Doing so puts them at a hugely greater risk for poverty, as Crittenden so painstakingly documents in this book. Our nation expects women to bear ALL the opportunity costs of motherhood, without providing any sort of support or safety net for those who undertake the public service of raising and educating the next generation of law-abiding, productive citizens. "The Price of Motherhood" provides the evidence to support what we all know to be true, on some level. Trust me -- I'm the mother of a 4-year-old with another baby on the way, and even with my graduate degree, 15+ years of work experience and many professional accomplishments, I have been marginalized like you wouldn't believe since I became a mom. The sad truth is that most women in the throes of childrearing are so exhausted and dependent that they probably will never band together to become the political force that will create the pressure necessary to change this sad reality. Kudos to Crittenden, whose son is nearly grown, for returning to this issue at this point in her life (she's nearly 60) and taking a stand for the women and children -- and the society -- that will follow her.
Rating: 
Summary: What price fatherhood?
Review: Haven't read the book but will say this: What price is fatherhood? If you add up the costs associated with being a dad, they are extraordinarily high. And if the mother splits and files for C/S, a man will be paying for kids that he no longer sees. Consider that half of all marriages in the western world end in divorce; 70% of them are filed by the wife; 90% of the time, the kids go to the now-ex-wife, with the child support $$ going to her as well, with no means of checking on how she spends it. This gives the avg. father/husband a 1 in 3 chance of having his wife leave him with the kids and stick him with the bill (.5 x .7 x .9 = .33). And if the old lady does stick around, the costs of having kids stay high-- they don't go down, just up, to include college tuition (unless you want them working at McDonald's for the next 10 years). They often include that too even if she has split with the kids! So while it's great the cost of having kids for women is being measured, why not also discuss the other side of the coin-- the cost to men of having kids? Basically, it is too expensive. Wives and children are an expensive luxury the average man not only can't afford but shouldn't get anyway even if he can. The risk is simply too great. And if this book's author ir right, it's a bad idea for women, too. Well, thank goodness for immigrants or America would be doomed to utter depopulation in 200 years!
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