What's Wrong with Day Care: Freeing Parents to Raise Their Own Children.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

What's Wrong with Day Care: Freeing Parents to Raise Their Own Children by Charles Siegel Teachers College Press. 168 pages, $19.95 (paper).

Women of my generation born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were tremendously fortunate to be raised at the same time feminist consciousness was transforming American society. We grew up believing we could be anything we wanted to be. Title IV, feminism, the full integration of women into previously all-male colleges, and a generation of pioneers setting an example in every conceivable profession have made our sense of our own possibilities exponentially bigger and more ambitious than our mothers'.

How strange, then, to suddenly encounter an enormous hurdle to our personal and professional fulfillment: What happens when we have children?

It's amazing how hard it is for women my age to deal with this question. Since the United States has no formal system of maternity leave and quality child care, couples find themselves struggling to come up with individual answers, as if each of us were the first to ever consider balancing work and family.

No one sums up the problem better than Ann Crittenden. In her brilliant new book, the former New York Times economics reporter shows the tremendous strain on mothers. She quotes a 1995 United Nations report demonstrating that women worldwide receive a disproportionately small share of the world's resources, considering the massive amount of work they do in and out of the regular economy. "If women's work were accurately reflected in national statistics, it would shatter the myth that men are the main breadwinners of the world," the study's author wrote.

Women around the world are penalized economically, legally, professionally, and personally for having children. In this country, while we're inundated with images of Ally McBeals competing in the workplace side-by-side with male colleagues, circumstances for mothers are radically different from those of the single TV heroines. The wage gap between mothers and childless women is greater than that between women and men, Crittenden points out. The mommy gap, not the glass ceiling, turns out to be the significant factor keeping us from achieving pay equity.

Despite all the positive messages about women's ostensible equality, it turns out that it's still women who worry most about balancing work and family, and for good reason. We still do the vast majority of childrearing and housework, no matter how professionally successful we may be. While 80 percent of male CEOs have stay-at-home wives and 84 percent have children, fewer than half of female CEOs have children, and almost none have a spouse to look after things at home.

This is not just a "choice," as...