This section of her article is startling, to say the least. Like Hirshman, I must admit that I am surprised by her data. Nevertheless, the fact that so many talented, highly educated, and promising young women were giving themselves to motherhood is a source of genuine hope and encouragement.

Hirshman went on to describe additional findings in her research. "Ninety percent of the brides I found had had babies. Of the 30 with babies, five were still working full time. Twenty-five, or 85 percent, were not working full time. Of those not working full time, 10 were working part time but often a long way from their prior career paths. And half the married women with children were not working at all."

Beyond Hirshman's data, research indicates that far more women than men drop out of the workforce to take care of their children. In addition to this, recent research indicates that women with graduate or professional degrees are only slightly more likely to remain in the workforce after having children than women with only one year of college. "When their children are infants (under a year), 54 percent of females with graduate or professional degrees are not working full time (18 percent are working part time and 36 percent are not working at all). Even among those who have children who are not infants, 41 percent are not working full time (18 percent are working part time and 23 percent are not working at all)."

From Hirshman's perspective, it only gets worse. "This isn't only about daycare," she admits. "Half my Times brides quit before the first baby came. In interviews, at least half of them expressed a hope never to work again. None had realistic plans to work. More importantly, when they quit, they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work."

The very fact that these women turned their back on promising careers seems virtually inconceivable to Linda Hirshman. When a female MBA expressed her lack of connection with the men at her previous workplace who got so excited about making deals, Hirshman observes all this with incredulity.

In Hirshman's view, all this simply proves that the feminist revolution was not revolutionary enough. In other words, the revolution that opened the workplace to women did nothing, in her view, to fundamentally reshape marriage and the family power structure. "Why did this happen? The answer I discovered--an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face--is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home."

Thus, the problem of "the unreconstructed family" is the concern of Hirshman and many of her fellow feminists. Hirshman, retired as a distinguished visiting professor at Brandeis University, had previously taught academic courses on subjects such as "sexual bargaining." Infused with the ideology of radical feminism, she now argues that the entire pattern of gender relations must be revolutionized.