Feminists have always had a hard time with Hewlett, but it's hard to find the feminist high ground in this debate. Hewlett says she's a feminist; certainly I'm a feminist, and I disagree with both Hewlett and some of the feminists who've trashed her books. I hated her first book, "A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation," but over time I found myself increasingly sympathetic to her indictment of American social policy for failing to provide the social supports European women take for granted, and of American feminism for failing to agitate for them.

Hewlett's passion for her topic was animated by personal hurt: Already the mother of one, she miscarried twins when she was teaching at Barnard College, and later didn't get tenure because, she was told, she had allowed "motherhood to dilute her focus." And Barnard's women faculty, she felt, were among the least sensitive to her plight. A straw-woman approach to feminism marred "A Lesser Life," but Hewlett was right about the ambivalence about children at the heart of American feminism: Most of the leading thinkers and agitators were childless women in flight from the claustrophobic domestic sphere, and feminism came to be all about independence. By emphasizing abortion more prominently than child care, the Equal Rights Amendment over the Family and Medical Leave Act, major feminist groups missed a chance to make a crucial social difference for the majority of women who will choose to be wives and mothers.

I found Hewlett's analysis even more compelling after I had a baby, and felt feminism had left me high and dry. I knew how to be separate, not engaged. I was great at independence, yet motherhood makes you dependent on a partner, at least for a time, and then forever interdependent -- even, I found, after divorce. Feminism had lots of advice for thinking about me, but none for thinking about "we," the bewildering realm of family, husband and children -- except not to think about it at all.

That's where "Creating a Life" picks up from "A Lesser Life": the realization that educated, ambitious career women are being blindsided by the compromises to identity and independence that marriage and motherhood require. But again, Hewlett's reasonable observations are distorted by her own psyche: The woman is obsessed with mothering. She spills it all in the book -- haranguing her long-suffering husband to have one last late-in-life baby, when their children were all but grown; then, after winning that argument, she loses the battle against time, and finds she can't conceive. Four years of expensive infertility treatments later -- she speculates that Wendy Wasserstein spent $130,000 but doesn't tell us the cost of her own -- she gave birth to miracle baby Emma, at 51. Now she's 55, mothering a preschooler and dispensing advice to the rest of us about how to arrange our lives.

My response has to be, "No thanks."

Since Hewlett holds up 50-ish childless professionals as sad bogeywomen to their scared younger sisters, let me say I'd be afraid of being like Hewlett: 50-something and unable to give up mothering small children. Given that she judges other women's choices, I think it's fair to suggest that hers represent a failure to reckon with growing older, with the end of fecundity, which sadly but inevitably corresponds with a decline in our attractiveness to men, hard-wired as they supposedly are to chase women who will give them babies (babies they then may not want or support, of course). She clearly can't imagine that many, if not most, of the childless women in her survey group have made peace with the loss of their capacity to become mothers, because she has been unable to do that.

And yet, just as she did in "A Lesser Life," Hewlett has identified a real social dilemma: the difficulty many ambitious career women have finding a partner with whom they can raise a family. Much of the hype about the book has focused on her alarming if anecdotal finding: Well-educated, accomplished, ambitious women are having trouble finding mates, because while they may be alluring to their male peers, they may not be marriage material, since many of those men are looking for a wife who will put her career second and put him first.

To be fair to her, Hewlett can't control what the media does with her book. She talks as much about the shortcomings of American family policy as she does about the shortage of marriageable men for professional women, but it's the Man Shortage that gets most of the headlines. And this is the part of the book that has the least science behind it: a few studies, some anecdotes from sad and angry women and the voice of exactly one man -- a Goldman Sachs project manager who says he expects his wife to put her career on hold to raise his kids, and that he's looking for a woman less successful than he is who'll appreciate the life he can give her. "I don't have much to offer one of these women," he told Hewlett, with disarming honesty, talking about high-earning professionals. "They have everything already. I mean, I want my success in the world and my earning power to matter -- and to be appreciated."

While her science may be sketchy, Hewlett's man crisis is getting attention because it feels true: We all know these women, we all know that man, and even the normally skeptical Maureen Dowd thought it struck a nerve, relating a recent conversation with a male friend who told her he'd once considered dating her, but her job made her too intimidating. "Men, he told me, prefer women who seem malleable and overawed," she wrote April 10. "He said I would never find a mate, because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything?"

Instead of telling him to shove it, Dowd gave him a whole column to share his verdict with the world. Something's wrong here.

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