No apple pie

The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still The Least Valued. By Ann Crittenden. Metropolitan Books; 323 pages; $25

NO AMERICAN woman in her right mind would want to become a mother. Having achieved a notional equality with men—at least if she is young, educated and working in a professional job—she will lose it again at a stroke. Instead, she faces a range of highly unattractive options. If she decides to “have it all”—career, lifestyle, baby, the lot—she will have to go back to work full-time almost immediately after the birth. She will get no paid maternity leave and she will have to convince her bosses that she is still committed to the job. She will then find herself working twice as hard as before: putting in a full day at work and then a “second shift” (in the memorable phrase of Arlie Hochschild, an American sociologist) with the baby.

If she wants to switch to an easier work schedule, she will probably be put on a “mommy track”—boring tasks, less responsibility, no promotion prospects and much less money. If she wants to take a break while her child is young, she will lose all credibility in the labour market and become a kept woman. And if her marriage goes to pieces (and half of them do), she and her child will end up on the breadline because she can expect little or no support from her husband. It seems an appalling deal, yet astonishingly millions sign up for it. Are they complete fools?

Ann Crittenden exaggerates, which is a pity, because she is making an important point. Being a working mother in America is no cookie bake. In matters of maternity leave, taxation, child care and legal rights, European women do much better. Perhaps even more serious (although Ms Crittenden does not make much of this), Americans of either sex, whether parents or not, generally work far longer hours and get far shorter holidays than Europeans, which makes it that much harder to combine job and children. Enlightened self-interest alone suggests that some of these obstacles be removed: America would suffer a dire labour shortage if its women did not go out to work, but it is also as worried as the next rich country about its ageing population.

Yet even if working mothers do get more recognition and help, as they do in many European countries, they still find it hard to combine children with a high-powered career. The share of women in the top echelons of business, the professions and academia is tiny on either side of the Atlantic. Childlessness among highly successful women is much more common than among the rest. And many women (as well as quite a few men) feel that the rewards for reaching the top do not justify the effort. There are no easy solutions, in America or anywhere else.

The answer to Ms Crittenden's more specific question—why is it that motherhood is so systematically undervalued—seems rather less difficult. The author herself blames a series of interlocking conspiracies—by government, by business, but most of all by men everywhere—that make it impossible for mothers to get proper recognition for enhancing the country's human capital. But is not the more obvious answer that almost anyone can have children, and most people do? Many, perhaps most, make a fair or even wonderful job of it. But others don't, and short of gross abuse there is no quality control to stop them making a mess of it.