America: Motherhood may be as American as apple pie but these are difficult times for American mothers, hectored from all sides about the mistakes they are making in raising their children.
Friends in Washington describe the dread they feel as they approach the playground, not on account of crack addicts or criminals but because of the competitive mothers waiting to boast about their infants' achievements and to pour scorn or pity on less fanatical parents.
Two-year-olds who can scarcely say their name are enrolled in Chinese classes and every minute of the well brought-up baby's day is accounted for.
If the postings on the anonymous website UrbanBaby.com are anything to go by, the pressure is driving many American mothers around the bend.
Complaining that her baby woke up at 5am and her husband refused to get up, one mother wrote: "He gets to do whatever he wants whenever he wants. Me? Never. And going back to work wouldn't change a thing. It would be me rushing home to relieve nanny and it would still be me at the weekend."
Conservative commentators denounce working mothers as neglectful of their children as "post-feminists" urge women to forget about professional success and seek fulfilment in the home.
Some of America's brightest women are heeding these siren calls and, although 40 per cent of US law graduates are female, only 16 per cent of partners in major law firms are women.
A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates from the classes of 1981, 1986 and 1991 found that only 38 per cent of female MBAs with children were in full-time work.
Philosopher Linda Hirshman has had enough of this retreat from the workplace and has struck back against the post-feminist orthodoxy with Get to Work - a manifesto for the women of the world.
For Hirshman, feminism didn't fail because it was too radical but because it was not radical enough, and she dismisses "choice feminism" as a movement that, because it stands for everything, ultimately stands for nothing.
"Bounding home is not good for women and it's not good for the society. The women aren't using their capacities fully; their so-called free choice makes them unfree dependants on their husbands.
"Whether they leave the workplace altogether or just cut back their commitment, their talent and education are lost from the public world to the private world of laundry and kissing boo-boos," she writes.
Hirshman believes that America's return to the hyper-domesticated family reflects the convergence of two trends - from the left, the idea that work is too burdensome in the market economy, and from the right, the notion that responsibility to the family trumps any duty to society.
"But even if men and women hate working in the market economy and men and women don't give a damn about their public schools, that still leaves the question: why is it that it's always the women - not the men - who wind up doing most of the work at home?" she writes.
Hirshman focuses on the elite of educated women with the potential to be high achievers because she argues that their choices will have a disproportionate impact on the fate of other women and on society. She offers a five-point strategic plan to ensure that these women go to work and stay there.
"1. Don't study art. Use your education to prepare for a lifetime of work.
2. Never quit a job unless you have another one. Take work seriously.
3. Never know when you're out of milk. Bargain relentlessly for a just household.
4. Consider a reproductive strike.
5. Get the government you deserve. Stop electing governments that punish women's work."
Hirshman's book has annoyed critics on left and right and her rules may be too tough and inflexible for most women to follow.
Perhaps her biggest mistake is to blame women for feminism's stalled progress and the plight of America's mothers when the greatest obstacle to women's fulfilment is the same as it ever was - men.
