Hewlett claims that studies show married women are happier than single women, but the studies she quotes lump divorcees in with the latter. That means that even if her numbers are accurate, they don't prove that getting married promotes peace of mind. And while she's right that marriage is often good for women financially, that's true only if it lasts, which it often doesn't. A woman who marries young, has children and then divorces is more likely than a single, childless woman to end up in poverty.

Nevertheless, Hewlett has little time for matrimony's skeptics. A young MBA working at a high-tech company tells Hewlett she's leery of marriage because of her parents' wrenching divorce, and Hewlett brands her views "hostile" and "knee-jerk." Meanwhile, she applauds the "obvious logic" of a young surgical resident who "leaned over backwards to be supportive and nonthreatening" to her boyfriend, which meant helping him to co-host business dinners four nights a week after she had finished 36-hour shifts.

Yet is a man who expects his wife to entertain after a grueling day and a half of doctoring really such a catch? How about the guy at Goldman Sachs who Hewlett quotes denigrating his female colleagues and longing for a stay-at-home wife? Who's missing out, his "real aggressive" co-workers or the meek creature who finally lands him? Hewlett, who calls him "empathetic," seems to believe it's the former.

Such thinking makes the book weirdly bifurcated between serious, feminist-minded policy recommendations and reactionary personal advice. Among the government changes she argues for are increased parenting leave and the expansion of the Fair Labor Standards Act to include professional and managerial workers, which would stop companies from squeezing 60-hour weeks out of employees. Cutting back on America's workaholism would do more than just help parents and children -- it would improve the whole country's quality of life.

Also trenchant is Hewlett's suggestion that women need more than just equality if they hope to be both effective workers and mothers. After all, in America the workplace vs. family debate always runs smack up against women's immutable biological differences. Women are far less likely than men to have partners devoted to homemaking or to be happy seeing their children for a mere hour or two a day. Hewlett points out that European social policy takes this into account with programs like public preschools and six-hour workdays until a child's 8th birthday.

"Equal rights and family supports are needed if women are to improve their earning power -- and their life choices," she writes. Few feminists would disagree -- though Hewlett does herself no favors by dismissing those who do as simply resentful over their own childlessness.

Unfortunately, a splashy new book isn't about to convert a government hostile to workers rights to a Scandinavian-style welfare state. What the book will influence is the public conversation about women, about what constitutes their success and accounts for their alleged dissatisfaction. As Hewlett says, "The most important insights and strategies in these chapters focus on the individual." Thus as the buzz around the book snowballs, we're likely to hear less about paid family leave and more about women's failure to mate and procreate properly.

Yet just as Hewlett fails to prove her thesis that most childless women had no choice in the matter, she also doesn't show that women are bereft by a paucity of husbands. The evidence she does marshal is extremely anecdotal -- there's a description of a woman in her 30s covertly skimming relationship guidebooks in a Harvard bookstore and five pages devoted to a Manhattan marriage seminar.

Indeed, the women in their 20s she talked to about marriage reveal "very little sense of urgency." Of course, to Hewlett that's precisely the problem, because she claims that by the time they hit their mid-30s, they "may well have missed the boat."

To back this up, she resurrects the famously discredited study by Neil Bennett and David Bloom that claimed 40-year-old women were more likely to be shot by terrorists than tie the knot. Hewlett writes, "The Bennett and Bloom data stirred up a furious debate -- and inspired a slew of new studies. When the dust settled, it turned out that although the odds were not nearly as dismal as first advertised, Bennett and Bloom were quite correct in their conclusion: The older she gets, the harder it is for a college-educated woman to find a husband."

Quite correct? Bennett and Bloom initially said that at 30, a woman had a 20 percent chance of marrying, which dropped to a minuscule 1.3 percent chance a decade later. Yet as Susan Faludi reported in "Backlash," when a demographer in the U.S. Census Bureau's Marriage and Family Statistics branch did her own study drawing on 13.4 million households, she found that, as Faludi says, "At thirty, never-married college-educated women have a 58 to 66 percent chance at marriage. At forty, the odds were from 17 to 23 percent." In other words, Bennett and Bloom said women over 40 had a one in a hundred chance of finding a mate. The more accurate number -- which Hewlett doesn't bother citing -- is one in five.

The above isn't the only instance in which Hewlett echoes the backlash rhetoric Faludi exposed. In fact, reading the two books together is astonishing, so consistently does Hewlett spew '80s platitudes. As Faludi described the messages of that decade, "Professional women are suffering 'burnout' and succumbing to an 'infertility epidemic.' Single women are grieving from a 'man shortage.' The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason."

Once all this retrograde rhetoric had done its work, it was years before the culture acknowledged that single women weren't just sterile failures. That's why "Sex and the City" was such a big deal in the first place. It's utterly depressing that we're entering this cycle again. Despite her book's strong points, in the end all Hewlett is really creating is déjà vu.

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