Our Little Women Problem

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/18/opinion/18schiff.html?th&emc=th

June 18, 2005
Our Little Women Problem
By STACY SCHIFF

As it seems to be the way things are done around here, I asked my spouse's opinion. Could this working mother thing ever be mastered? "On two conditions," he said, but the rest of the sentence was drowned out by a wail from the other room, where the youngest had raced out of bed so fast that she had collided with her door.

She was also in the mood for poached eggs, which - my husband helpfully pointed out - Robert Novak was presumably not making this morning. If he was, I wonder if he too was under strict instructions to keep the yolks runny, and to position the eggs in the precise center of each slice of toast. The 5-year-old is a gourmand and a tyrant, equally exacting in her menus as she is stern in her conviction that mothers do not go to their offices on weekends.

This is especially galling as the little tyrant is named for a feminist icon, in a novel I clearly should have read more closely. Jo March represented many of our first encounters with a capable, independent-minded heroine. She stands alone in a field crowded with submissive women.

She isn't sitting around with dwarfs or sweeping floors. She is waiting neither for a fairy godmother nor a handsome prince. She makes choices - and seemingly perverse ones, too. Perhaps most significantly, she is the first girl in literature with a room of her own........

[cap]

1. 75% of Execs have non-working wives...

they dont want to change the system that has gotten them out of housework and permitted them to devote full time to their careers...


It helps, though. "First of all," resumed my husband, swabbing the counter, "two parents have to know how to make breakfast." Yes, and 75 percent of male executives have non-working wives. Seventy-four percent of female executives have working husbands. Guess who's making breakfast? "And," he continued, "the women who manage well will be the ones whose fathers listened to them."