Rating: 
Summary: The Flop of the Year
Review: Despite all of the hype in the media over Hewlett's book it, like her similar tome A LESSER LIFE: THE MYTH OF WOMEN'S LIBERATION IN AMERICA, is a flop in terms of sales. Hewlett, as some remember, wrote A LESSER LIFE during the middle of the Reagan years, when books urging "accomplished" women to give up their careers in favor of husbands and children were quite popular, at least with the media. Hewlett received much deserved criticism for her antifeminist thesis from feminists like Betty Friedan and especially Susan Faludi, the latter showing in her book BACKLASH Hewlett had a tendency to disregard the truth.Years have passed and although Hewlett has gotten some positive recognition in some quarters for her advocacy for parents' rights in the workplace, she hasn't changed one bit in her hostility towards feminism and women who don't fit the prescribed marriage-and-babies mold. She also hasn't changed in her disregard for facts and statistics. A recent article in the American Prospect magazine discredits Hewlett's book in general and her dubious statistics in particular (among other facts the author of the A.P. article notes that "highly accomplished" women differ no more than other working women in marriage rates or in having children, except elite single women are much less likely to have children out of wedlock). Readers who are interested in Hewlett's thesis might want to take a look at this article before shelling out the money for her latest screed. Hewlett puts on a pretty good front by claiming she's a "feminist" because she advocates social policies that are politically untenable in the United States, but everything else she writes belies her "feminism." The antifeminist feminist schtick is a good act, and it's helped her over the years with the media, but more sophisticated readers (especially those who are familiar with the women's movement and career issues) will immediately see through her facade. Furthermore, her elitism offends 90 percent of American women because they are not "high achievers" (by default they are "low achievers," an insult if there ever was one) making six-figure salaries and working in male-dominated fields. At the same time she has offended 90 percent of the ten percent who are in the elite fields by saying they've messed up on their personal lives. Not a good way to sell books, Ms. Hewlett.
Rating: 
Summary: Every Working Woman Should Read This Book!
Review: If I had known then what I know now:
1. I wouldn't have felt so alone in my quest to have children while climbing the corporate ladder.
2. I probably would have tried to have my 2 kids a little earlier before the height of my career as opposed to during the height of my career.
3. I would have rejoiced more while pregnant over how lucky I was/am to have become a mom in my mid-thirties rather than feel bad that I was being passed over for promotions.
4. I would have encouraged girlfriends who are now too old to have kids to have had kids earlier, rather than encouraged them as much in their careers.
5. I would have set myself up more conservatively in my finances so that I could truly enjoy my young family better. Overall, this book gives working women the TRUTH, not the "you can have it all" line that feminists and propaganda have been throwing at this generation of women for some thirty-plus years now. The truth is, having a family isn't the same for women as it is for men; and therefore, how can women expect that their careers can be equal or the same to a man's after having a family? Well, the cold-hard truth is, in today's corporate society women are not supported in their endeavors to have families. And whether Sylvia Ann Hewlett's book provides any real solutions to this or not, the most important achievement of this book is that it heightens awareness to this extremely important issue!
Rating: 
Summary: For those who thought Faludi was exaggerating...
Review: I got to the end of this book not quite clear what Hewlett's thesis is, or at least, what she THINKS it is. Because while she does offer some useful policy recommendations for employers and government, overall, the book seems to be an urgent plea to women to sacrifice their careers and themselves for marriage and children. And while I strongly believe that both marriage and motherhood require personal sacrifice, I'm not sure they require the level of sacrifice Hewlett seems to think they do, neither should every woman take it upon herself to make these sacrifices. One of my favorite quotes is "She (a woman Hewlett interviewed) was able to make this marriage happen because... of being willing to surrender part of her own identity to enhance that of the man she wanted to be with." Why, thank you for this sage piece of advice Ms. Hewlett, I shall begin immediately to ascertain which aspect of my identity I should give up to attract Mr. Right. Another sound bit of advice is this: "Give urgent priority to finding a partner. This project is extremely time-sensitive and deserves special attention." Oh, well in that case I shall IMMEDIATELY cast off all things, my job, my volunteer work, my art, my friends, and begin the search for the ONE thing that will make me really happy. I cannot fathom how Hewlett does not see these directives as a little twisted. Even more twisted is the evidence she presents that marriage is good for women. Here, dear ladies are the reasons you should get married and have children: 1) for insurance in your old age; 2) because married women have more sex; 3) to increase your household income; and 4) because single women have a 50% higher mortality rate than married women, whatever that statistic means. Forget love, shared goals, and mutual spiritual growth. She also alludes to marriage being good for women's mental health but provides no statistics, although she CONSTANTLY repeats the statistics about high-earning women being childless. Hmmmmm, curious. Even more curious is that fact that while she points out that the 1986 Harvard/Yale study INCORRECTLY states that women over 40 are more likely to be killed by terrorists than marry. It is the incorrect statistic and not the revised one that she states. Hewlett insults our intelligence. She also, quite frankly, insults the intelligence of the 40-something women she interviews. These women might be regretful about some of the choices they made, but who isn't? And more importantly, these were CHOICES. These women didn't wake up at 42 with their six-figure incomes and realize they couldn't have children. They're smart, successful women, they're not stupid. It might not have been a choice they contemplated frequently but it was a choice and they made it. And the fact they even had this choice, much less had the guts to make it should be celebrated. Fifty years ago women didn't even HAVE these choices, and now Hewlett is telling us we should throw them away. The one question Hewlett doesn't ask these women is if they would make the same choices if they had it all to do over again. One wonders if Wendy Wasserstein would really have preferred to stay home helping some Skip Rosenbaum make an 'A' every day, instead of writing one of the greatest plays about women ever written. Somehow I think not. What Hewlett misses is that these women made these choices not because they didn't' realize they were making them, but because they could and they wanted to. These women are bright and ambitious and WANTED to do the things they did. And, are probably of the emotional constitution to be able to deal with not being married; they're probably the same women, who, when younger, were probably much more comfortable than their peers with not having a boyfriend. And I'm not trying to pass judgment on women for whom romantic relationships are more of a priority, I'm just saying that people are DIFFERENT, and have different priorities, and different paths open to them and make different choices as a result. These women made these choices because they weren't willing to give up the lives they had for what it would take to be married to the men that were available. And fortunately for them they live in a culture and have the financial independence that enable make this choice. Hewlett is trying to tell us that we all NEED to settle. Again she insults our intelligence because this is a lie. I know a woman whose husband gave up tenure at an Ivy League school for her career. I know another who quit his job and stayed home for 9 months after his wife had their second child. And a man at my office currently works 3 days a week because his wife's maternity leave is up and, wouldn't you know it, he LET her go back to work full time. Hewlett would have us believe that mean such as these don't exist, and therefore we must sacrifice everything just to be Mrs. Nimwit. This is utter BS. I'm not saying men like this are standing on every corner, but they exist, and are willing to make these sacrifices themselves whereas fifty years ago they would not have, because they were never asked to. And Hewlett wants us to go back to never asking them to. Apparently, women are the only ones that need to change in order to balance work and family, men should do nothing, and women shouldn't ask them to do anything or else they'll end up unhappy, unfulfilled spinsters. At 23, I know myself well enough to know that if I can't find the right sort of man, I will not get married. This is a choice, that I am making, and Ms. Hewlett, believe me when I say that I know better than you what will make me happy.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting..but not the whole story
Review: I think Lotte Bailyn's recent book, Beyond Work-Family Balance, does a lot to address the issues that Hewlett raises about the choices women are faced with. Why do women need to choose work or family? (There is a great editorial in June 2002 Harvard Business Review on this!) Organizations need to address the fact that women and men have personal lives that affect their workplace performance!
Rating:
Summary: Packed w/ Facts for Women Who Might Want Kids
Review: ?a woman in her early 40's has, on average, a 3-5% shot at achieving a live birth through standard IVF [In-Vitro Fertilization] procedures. Not only do women have an extremely hard time getting pregnant at these ages, but a 42- or 44-year-old woman who gets pregnant faces a 50-80% chance of losing her baby through miscarriage. (pg. 205) Almost 90% of the 28-40-year-old women who participated in High Achieving Women, 2001 believed that ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] would allow them to get pregnant into their 40's. (pg. 205) Dr. Zev Rosenwats, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at New York Hospital ? Cornell Medical Center, "If you are over 40, ART is unlikely to solve your infertility problems." (pg. 218) ?over 90% of late-in-life pregnancies involve IVF, and prices range from $10,000 to $100,000, depending on how many attempts are required and whether or not you need donor eggs. (pg. 215) The years between 25 and 35 are the prime years for establishing a career. These are the years when hard work has the maximum payoff. They are also the prime years for launching a family. (pg. 138) While 72% of 28-year-old women get pregnant after trying for a year, only 24% of 38-year-olds do. (pg. 216) The ASRM [American Society for Reproductive Medicine] data for 1999 ? the most recent year available ? show that women 35-years-old or younger have a 28% chance of getting pregnant and achieving a live birth as a result of a single IVF cycle. By age 39 the success rate drops to 8% per cycle, and by age 44 it falls to 3%. The ASRM data are confirmed by a more recent study (Sept. 2000) which analyzes success rates among 431 women in their 40's. A mere 4.5% of these women succeeded in having a child (a more pertinent outcome than getting pregnant), and all of the success stories occurred in the 41-43 age group. (pg. 219) A Danish study which appeared in the June 2000 issue of the British Medical Journal found that in older age groups, over 1/2 the pregnancies ended in fetal loss. The study, based on a sample of 600,000 women, clearly linked miscarriage to the age of the mother. At age 22 a pregnant woman faces an 8% chance of losing her baby through miscarriage, but at age 48 that possibility increases to 84%. (pg. 220) At age 25 a woman has a 1 in 1,250 chance of having a baby with Down's syndrome; at age 45 she has a 1 in 26 chance. (pg. 220) Currently, any doctor, no matter what his or her training, can set up shop as an infertility specialist. (pg. 232) 40% of married, high-achieving women feel that their husband creates more work for them around the house than they contribute. (pg. 142) Also covered in this book: risks of multiple births, risks of low birth-weight babies, risks to egg donors, costs and complications of ART/IVF, possible risk of cancer for the woman from infertility treatments, historical dangers involved in pregnancies, U.S. vs. European & Nordic career/family structures & supports, conflicts between the demands of professional careers and motherhood, difficulties in finding a partner later in life, percentages of entrepreneur women vs. corporate high-achieving women with children, considerations in adoption, the media?s glossy misrepresentation of the harsh reality of older women and child-bearing, the incentives for fertility clinics to present misleading statistics. The author of Creating a Life initially set out to write a book about the breakthrough generation of professionally successful women ? and discovered that the majority of high-achieving women didn?t have children, though in their youth only 14% of these women hadn?t wanted children. She discovered that for many women the requirements of a career led many of these women to postpone childbearing until when they tried, despite the widespread belief that women can now childbear later in life, they were unable to conceive and/or miscarried, despite very expensive and emotionally wrenching efforts. Creating a Life is an interesting combination of statistics, studies, personal stories of successful women (including that of the author who bore her last child at age 51, personally experience the clash of career vs. pregnancy and motherhood, and struggles with infertility). I think the title of the book helped kill its sales. Even after having read the book twice, I found the title hard to remember, ambiguous, and devoid of mental imagery and emotional content. At work, the bookjacket with the photo of the baby in a briefcase caught the eye of many of my coworkers and aroused their interest and discussion, the title does not. I was a bookseller for six years, read articles about this book in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, and when I went into several bookstores looking for this book, all I could remember was that it?s the Sylvia Ann Hewlett book. The margins are too wide and the spacing between lines of text is too great, and there is some repetition of content. My fianc?, who saw this book over my shoulder, asked if there was much in a book with that much white space. I think this should have been a smaller format hardcover so that the buyer feels they got their moneys worth. Also, this book tells people what they don?t want to hear, and from there it?s just a short leap of assumption to conclude that this book is trying to limit their choices instead of informing them of the limitations of nature; the reader is advised to choose and plan accordingly. Ms. Hewlett is active in developing mother-supportive policies in companies and the government, I don?t know if her proposed solutions are realistic or not, but there is enough in this book to make it informative, useful and interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Baby Propaganda...double plus bad!
Review: ...I feel qualified to critique the suggestions this book makes. I was given this book by my baby-lusting mother-in-law. Unlike my mother-in-law, I have a background in research and I am able to differentiate science from opinion and speculation that has been given a thin veneer of ligitimacy by tossing around a few inconclusive statistics. Perhaps the author does have some interesting data pertaining to professional, middle-aged, WASP, middle to upper class, childless women who have had unsuccessful fertility treatments. But that is a fairly small segment of the our overall population. It seems she and her editor are using their limited knowledge of the human psyche to scare women... oh, shall we say for example, 55 year old, non-working, WASP, middle class, Oprah-watching, grandmother wanna be, can't-have-any-more-babies-of-their-own, women to buy this book as further "proof" that we childless, aka meaningless, women need to get to the "real" business of being a woman and a wife by procreating. And we should do it soon for the singular reason that we might not be able to later, not because we want a child, we're ready to take on the responsibility, or anything intelligent like that. Utterly ridiculous! I do have to say her comments concerning how corporate America can be helpful were useful. Again, I have to say I believe the main flaw of this book is that they are using inflamatory statements in order to sell books, and to see it as anything else is sad.
Rating:
Summary: Can't wait to be FORTY to put all this nonsense behind me!:P
Review: It's not like a fresh, healthy baby is the symbol of a woman's youth and ego! So, if a girl grows up actually WANTING a family of her own someday, of course she should focus on THAT as well as launching a successful career. And, it looks like most women today are doing that just fine. So no, it's just not a good idea to try and scare us childless folks into breeding at a late age just because of some biological warning! Instead, bearing or not bearing children is far TOO serious a decision for that, of course. Not to mention the fact REALITY means that childbearing is still HARD WORK nevertheless whether you manage to have a kid or not - along with juggling home and work as well! What's more...there are ALSO many foster children out there who are also waking up PARENTLESS by their 18th birthday! What an irony.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed but important
Review: I have read most of the reviews here with some disbelief- it seems that many of the reviews have shown an incredible belief the the author is a right wing antifeminist. The book attempts to bring the biological clock out of the feminist closet and into a valid discussion of executive life choices. Dr. Hewlett's point about creeping nonchoice is valid. My wife is five years my senior and we just had our first child- my wife found out she was pregnant on her 40th birthday. My wife had established a fairly successful career and the issues raised in the book have been mirrored in our decisions about immediately starting a family after marriage. The biological clock does not care for feminism or for chauvinism- it is an implacable fact. The book simply attempts to convey this fact through examples of people who have tried to fight this fact through the application of money and technology- with extremely limited success. Dr. Hewlett does have a very liberal agenda and a very profamily agenda (the comment that a colleague of Cornel West believes in sending women back to the 50's is beyond credibility.), and this agenda should probably be viewed with a critical eye. However, the belief that their has to be an absolute choice between career and children is placing the very successful people best equipped financially to raise children out of the child raising market. Shouldn't the best and brightest contribute their genetic legacy to the genepool? Further, the discussion of how successful women refuse to settle for less successful men struck a chord in my relationship with my wife and many of her successful divorced/single female circle. Children are your future- otherwise you depend on the charity of the state to select your nursing home;-}
Rating:
Summary: Hewlett Rules, In Spite of Herself
Review: In a letter to the editor on May 25, 2002,(Women's Choices: The More the Better), Sylvia Ann Hewlett takes umbrage at the characterization in a NY Times front page story of the policy section in her book as "cursory and obligatory" ("The Talk of the Book World Still Can't Sell", 5/20/02). In her letter, she vigorously defends the seriousness of her policy prescriptions and her sincerely feminist intent in offering them, concluding, "At the center of this book is a profoundly feminist message: women deserve generous choices in their lives and should not be called upon to sacrifice either career or children." I'm glad she did. While her prescriptions are as impractical and socialist as only a Harvard-trained economist could dream up, they are indeed serious. Moreover, the reason this is such an important book is that Hewlett's feminist credentials are as impeccable as her research. It would have been dismissed out of hand if it had been written by, for example, Rush Limbaugh. But when Hewlett devotes 3 chapters to such recommendations as eliminating the lack of marginal compensation for long hours (such as occurs when salaried employees are not paid overtime), because it gives advantages to those who spend less time raising children -- ie, men -- she burnishes her bona fides as a solidly socialist feminist. Because of those bona fides we know for sure that she did, as she claims, start out to write a book celebrating the achievements of women, and was indeed surprised when her findings forced her to write one, instead, about their disappointments on the family front.
Perhaps if she rereads it again in a year or two, she will see why no-one is taking her policy prescriptions seriously. She may even see why it's not selling. It's not selling for the same reason that she can hardly stomach her own findings: working women and the whole egalitarian culture of corporate women and men that feminism has bred have locked themselves into choices that her book proves are wrong. Creating a Life proves -- even if its author can't yet admit it to herself -- that feminism and the Government-mandated workplace equality of women are entirely untenable and self-destructive ideas. It's a very good book, well researched, well written, and very important -- in spite of its author's intentions.
Rating:
Summary: Not biased, not judgemental ...reality frightens some women!
Review: Contrary to some reviewers' opinions, Hewlett makes no judgements about whether anybody should have children, and advocates no particular lifestyle. If anything, she strongly believes that all lifestyle choices should be supported by society. Her point is that not all lifestyle choices are possible for the human body -- and further, that many women make their plans in ignorance of this fact. It's not a political statement but a scientific one to say that women over 30 are less fertile, over 35 are less likely to conceive on their own, and over 40 are unlikely to conceive even with painful, expensive and sometimes dangerous medical interventions. This might not be fair, but it's nature. The only tragedy here is for the women and couples who choose to delay childbearing until later in life without being aware that it will not be nearly as easy past 40 as it is in the 20s. Hewlett has no grudge against those who do not wish to have children, against those who willingly take their chances with "fertility roulette" or against those whose priorities differ from her own. She merely highlights that a number of successful women delayed motherhood under the mistaken impression that with medical science, pregnancy at 40 is a sure thing. The closest she comes to "advocacy"? Hewlett points out that women who want marriage and children at some point should plan for it as seriously as they plan for other sorts of success, such as professional, economic or social prominence. Feminism is about choices, including the choice about whether or not to become a mother; without accurate information, though, a real choice can't be made. Hewlett provides this information, as well as sad analysis of what happens when people aren't aware of, or ignore, nature's truths.
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