Helping attentive moms.(What Do Women Really Want?)(Book Review)

Neil Gilbert, "What Do Women Really Want?" The Public Interest, Winter 2005 (thepublicinterest.com)

University of California at Berkeley professor Neil Gilbert takes a look at the recent spate of articles indicating that growing numbers of women are "opting out of the rat race" to look after their children. He suggests the data show this to be a real but small phenomenon. The more dramatic trend is working women deferring or opting out of having children.

Gilbert segments women of childbearing age into four different groups. At one end is the "traditionalist," who has three or more children and holds little or no paid employment. At the other end is the "postmodernist," who has no children and devotes herself entirely to her career. In the middle are the "neo-traditionalists," who average two children and place home and family above work, and the "modernists," who typically have a single child and devote considerable time and energy to their career.

These four groups respectively make up 29 percent, 18 percent, 35 percent, and 17 percent of American females age 40 or more. The last three groups have grown considerably at the expense of the first, which represented 59 percent of women as recently as 1976. The modernist group alone has grown 90 percent since that time.

Gilbert reviews the effect of government "family supports" on these four broad ...