Scenes from the Feminist Struggle on the Upper West Side

"For mothers who can afford full-time baby nurses and $20,000-a-year private schools? Who would no sooner partake of universal day care ('Women, unite! Universal day care!') than they would of their corner brown-skinned public elementary, where their nanny's children go? I don't think so. (Wealthy, powerful left-leaning women will never be able to admit that they have much more in common with wealthy, powerful men than they do with their poor, disenfranchised pseudo-sisters.) I do, however, like Cheever's notion that 'working and stay-at-home moms today are like the famous psychology experiment in which too many rats are put in a cage with too little food.' Although I think the cage is the three square miles around 76th and Broadway, and the problem is too much food (if not actually Barney Greengrass eastern Gaspé smoked salmon)."

In The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh reviews Mommy Wars, edited by Leslie Morgan Steiner.