Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
not very good, 18 Jul 1999
By A Customer
It would be easier, as a stay at home mother, to take this book seriously if I thought the author followed her own advice. If she wrote a book and edits a paper she is working full time. I also thought the way she rips apart women throughout her book is appauling. She consistently bashes the movement (the work of those old women in the park) that provided her the opportunities she now has as a writer. The feminist movement happened so women could choose what they needed to do as individuals and be valued for it. I choose to mother full time and the author obviously does not. Without the feminist movement I would be the only one feeling fulfilled in her occupation.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A sea-change in ideology, thank God, 22 Jun 1999
By A Customer
This book, as well as Wendy Shalit's _A Return to Modesty_ instigated an intense period of self-reflection and a decision to re-prioritize my life. I no longer pretend that my career is my identity, and I no longer apologize or attempt to hide my new standard for men. All those emasculated, wishy-washy, committment-phobic, so-called "liberated" guys need not apply. : ) I am 29 and fervently wish that these two books (Crittenden's and Shalit's) had been written 10 years ago. Perhaps I would have stopped being a lemming then, marching to the beat of the feminist agenda and thinking it "normal" and "healthy". The classic feminist ideology caters to an extremely narrow way of life for women -- in essense, it throws the baby out with the bathwater. I'm glad there are viable alternatives for women today -- we can choose careers AFTER the children are older and avoid the guilt,paradox, and fallout of being a "working mother". Now if only the leftist feminists would jump on this bandwagon too, we could all take them a little more seriously.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
This is a must-read book, 3 Jun 1999
By A Customer
As a woman in my late 20's, I grew up convinced by our culture that the desire to be a wife and mother, and to stay home with children was less meaningful than, inferior to, having a career. I have secretly felt like an aberration for desiring those things above the pursuit of a career, even as I completed a graduate degree and joined the work force. Similarly, many of my female friends have gotten PhD's, gone through arduous years in medical school, put in long hours at law firms, traveled like maniacs for consulting firms- all to hit their 30th birthdays with an overwhelmingly difficult dilemna and sense of disappointment: "Now I have made strives in my career and I just want to get married and have children. How in the heck do I make this all happen?! Are my years of law school all for naught? Is it wrong to want children- am I "selling out"?" Worse, many of them wonder where all the eligible single men have suddenly disappeared to. In my opinion, it is the love of a partner, children and family that sustains and inspires us more than anything else. When I look back over my life as an older woman, I would like my memories to be filled with the joy of loved ones who needed and cherished me. This is not an unworthy goal! Crittenden reaffirms this in her book and liberates women who have felt oppressed by those who would tell them that the only way to make a significant mark in this world is to throw on a suit/uniform and join the workforce. All of the striving that women have done is not in vain- it is wonderful that American women can choose to enter any field of work they could wish for themselves: that we can vote, own property, obtain a divorce, control our bodies to a much higher degree, travel freely by ourselves, sit on the Supreme Court, and remain unmarried without the public stigma of "spinster". But Crittenden identifies and articulates the deep longing women have to be mothers and wives, roles that have been repressed and diminished within the past 20+ years. Why should we be ashamed to feel something so natural? Why is being a mother no longer good enough? Perhaps that is where the feminist movement failed us- by trashing the entire system without perserving the fundamentally good and necessary aspects within it. Many of Crittenden's critics seem to be hung up on the fact that she married a wealthy man. That is irrelevent; I believe a lot more women could choose to stay home if they lowered their very high expectations for material "needs". Guess what? A family can live on one salary if they make sacrifices- a more modest home, one car, fewer vacations, fewer possessions in general. I realize that there are many, many families in which one income is simply not enough to make ends meet and that the woman is financially forced against her will to enter the workforce. (As a society we need to address this overwhelming problem) But when I hear a woman say, "We don't feel financially stable enough for me to stop working yet," and I know that her partner makes a significant income, I can't help thinking that our culture has a distorted sense of living standards. Crittenden's book is a painful reality; for those people who say "This is just an elitist writer telling other women to return to the 1950's and a lot of neoconverative bunk", I would like to respond that I have had conversations with many smart, with-it women who, like myself, are starting to realize that careers are great, but not enough. We want husbands and children, we want them to be our priority, and we want to live in a society which celebrates that priority with us!
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