Taking Science Seriously.

• Author: Stewart, Gloria M.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Cathy Young's "Taking Science Seriously" (August/September) should be required reading for doctrinaire conservatives and radical feminists. As usual, Young cuts through half-truths and pseudoscience as well as camouflaged political agendas.

Something about the conservative view of working women has long troubled me: They claim that women who work outside the home for pay when they have children of school age deprive their children of their presence and companionship and abdicate parental responsibility to others. Is this not also true of women whose children go to boarding schools? Is this not also true of women who have live-in nannies and housekeepers and fill their days with social activities?

I was raised in the '50s--the Holy Grotto for conservatives--in an upper-middle-class community where live-in housekeepers were the norm. As a rule, children did not come home to their mothers; they came home to their...