Column: Retire mommy wars

Recently, in the waiting room of a doctor's office, I picked up a women's magazine and, to my astonishment, discovered the existence of an apparently well-known phenomenon called "the mommy wars:" the mutual disrespect the two sides--moms who do market, or "working moms," versus non-market work, or "stay-at-home moms"--hold for each other's choices. In a nutshell, moms who work outside the home think moms who stay home lack ambition; moms who stay at home think moms who do market work selfishly pursue careers at the expense of their families' well-being.

Among my peers and former co-workers, the negative attitude toward the ambitionless, stay-at-home mom prevails. My college classmates held disdain for peers who wanted to stay at home with their future children. After college, my female colleagues routinely expressed disgust with women who did nothing all day but stay home with the kids.

Women of my generation have been brought up with the expectation that we'll pursue meaningful careers. I prefer the expectation that I earn my own living to the assumption that I can't, but I thought the idea was for women to have a choice. A recent segment on National Public Radio noted differential rates of depression between stay-at-home moms who choose to stay at home (they would have satisfying market work if they wanted) and those who stay home because they lack training, skills or support to work outside the home. The difference is between those with a choice and those without.

This segment included a contribution from an academic OB/GYN whose research indicated that women's fertility begins to drop in their late twenties, far earlier than most women our age realize, and far before most high-ambition women think about starting families.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett writes about related findings in her book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children. On a 60 Minutes segment with an interview with Hewlett, reporters interviewed young women in Harvard's MBA program as well as women in their 40's and 50's with great careers and no children. The business school students planned to work like demons until they were 40, then slow down to have children. The career women had expected to do exactly that and found they couldn't get pregnant when they were 40.

The National Organization for Women, NOW, had predictably suppressed the dissemination of the physician's findings. Does NOW really think women will retreat en masse to ironing boards and soap operas if they choose for themselves, even though it means risking some women will make divergent choices from the organization's political agenda? Surely no one can argue women are better off choosing a career and then heartbreak when 40 rather than making an educated choice while they are young enough to have a choice. We are not going to undo 40 years of progress by allowing women to understand the consequences of their decisions.

Critics of Hewlett have found her numbers misleading, attributing her conclusions to unobserved heterogeneity, such as differential marriage rates between "high-ambition" and "regular" working mothers as well as male-factor infertility.

Hewlett's message, however, is not to tell young women to forget about their MBA, Ph.D., M.D. or J.D., as NOW seems to fear. It's to tell them that in some cases, they might need to re-think their timetables, especially women whose mothers went through menopause relatively early.