If you actually do want the love of a good man and many children, that is considered déclassé. When books that celebrate these traditional ideals are made into movies, the remnants of the ancien regime are carefully expunged, down the memory hole. When the movie version of Little Women came out in 1994, I rushed to see it. I waited for Marmee's line -- "To be loved by a good man is the best and sweetest thing which can happen to a woman; and I sincerely hope my girls may know this beautiful experience"~but it never came. Now Marmee, played by Susan Sarandon, complained about "restrictive corsets" and "our confining young girls to the house, bent over their needlework." Someone had felt it necessary to "update" Marmee because the old Marmee had been oppressed, but was she really as oppressed as we imagine?

Working mothers with small children now say they work "because I have to." Why do so many women say that? If we have been freed from oppression and are supposed to be liberated, then how has it come to pass that so many women are forced to do what they do not want? We have come very close to Simone de Beauvoir's ideal, where "no woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different.

Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." In a different age we were forced to stay home, and now that men are no longer paid a family wage and no-fault divorce is an ever-present reality, we are just as often forced to have careers. Which is better? Perhaps there is always going to be social pressure for people to do one thing rather than another, and so why shouldn't it be directed at organizing one's life around the most meaningful things? Maybe our grandmothers weren't as stupid as we thought. The family, volunteer work, religion, shaping the hearts and minds of the next generation--maybe that all can't be reduced to just "shining floors and wiping noses," as Myriam Miedzian describes the lives of mothers who don't have careers.

Now that our mothers have pursued careers, have succeeded in them, we have learned that yes, indeed, women can work full time, but also that maybe that's not the most important thing, after all.

Brenda Barnes, president and CEO of North America operations at Pepsi-Cola, decided to step down in late September of 1997, pledging to devote herself "100 percent" to her husband and children. She changed her mind when her kids -- ages seven, eight, and ten--kept pleading with her "to promise to be home for all of our birthdays." Around the same time, Elizabeth Perle McKenna, a young mother who gave up a six-figure salary as vice president of publishing for Hearst Book Group, came out with When Work Doesn't Work Anymore: Women, Work and Identity, which surveyed 1,000 women who felt similarly disaffected with corporate culture. All are now reshuffling their priorities.

On Mother's Day of the same year, Susan Jonas and Marilyn Nissenson published Friends for Life: Enriching the Bond Between Mothers and Their Adult Daughters, which reported that the biggest "undermining thing" in today's mother-daughter relationships was the fact that daughters are choosing to be more traditional wives. Self magazine remarks on this new trend, "It's interesting that most mothers feared their daughters were heading toward too much tradition."

But which, really, is the more misogynist view: the view that for all of world history women have been idiots, or the view that gives women more credit, and thinks we have only gone overboard in the blip of the past thirty years?

Those of our parents' generation tell us that we're too young and "optimistic," that we don't understand, that we just can't take back the sexual and motherhood revolutions. Well, why not? Do you have a monopoly on revolutions? Maybe you do, because we are finding that the price of this one is so high and the quality of what we are getting so poor. But maybe all you need is a little healthy competition. Maybe someone had to censor the best lines in Little Women because she has staked so much in her kind of life and now she is afraid that the competing view might be true. That it is too beautiful, resonates too well, and that if given the chance, young women would want to take it all back. So why not just hide the alternative from us?

Sorry, you can't fool us that easily. Even 11-month-olds know that an object continues to exist even after it disappears from view. It's called object permanence, and we don't have to read Piaget to know that just because we can't see something, that doesn't mean it isn't there, that it isn't beautiful and true. We have our own lives to lead, and one by one we are making our own choices.