Woman on a seesaw: the ups and downs of making it.

• Author: Fallows, Deborah

Hilary Cosell grew up thinking she had her life all figured out. She subscribed to the simple feminist position that success in the workplace equals success in life. Then, after a college degree, an M.A. in journalism, and five years under her belt as a television producer, Cosell became confused. Like a case study from Betty Friedan's The Second Stage, Cosell found that it was not enough to be professionally successful. Pushing 30, Cosell wanted a husband, probably children, and the stability and commitment that a family brings.

Cosell's thesis is that women have somehow been caught seesawing between the professional and personal ends of their lives--it's all of one or all of the other--and are unable to balance in the Middle. Women's lot, as she describes it, sounds quite depressing: single working women are afraid of getting married (for the compromises it will demand in time or energy) and of not getting married (for the "completion" they'll never have). Mothers without jobs are secretly envied for enjoying the richness of family, but at the same time are sneered at for having dropped out of the big-time world of professions, presumably because they couldn't cut it there. Even the superwoman with both families and careers are really "stuporwomen," argues Cosell. They're frazzled, wrung out, and unable to enjoy the fruits of either kind of labor.

In large part, Cosell correctly blames feminism for leaving women in these binds. The most important fact about the women's movement, of course, is that it has done women a lot of good by offering them opportunities in the professional world they never before dared strive for. But the movement has also done women a lot of bad by endorsing the traditional male idea that work alone means success and that life outside work barely counts.

Cosell may have started out with a good idea--to explore how the imbalance between work and families in women's lives causes joy and anguish, fulfillment and emptiness. But it's a good idea with poor...