Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest For Children (Hardcover)

~ Sylvia Hewlett (Author) "THERE IS A SECRET OUT THERE, A painful, well-kept secret: At mid-life, between a third and half of all high-achieving women in America do not..." (more)
Key Phrases: paid parenting leave, breakthrough generation, achieving women, United States, United Kingdom, Wendy Wasserstein (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Between a third and a half of all high-achieving women in America do not have children" and "the vast majority yearn" for them, says Hewlett, founder of the National Parenting Association. In this study of baby lust, Hewlett portrays the anguished hand-wringing by middle-aged women who were career-obsessed throughout their 20s and 30s, only to wake up single at 40, biological clocks all petered out. Infertility treatment is not a solution, she says; it's expensive, dangerous to women's health and unlikely to produce a pregnancy, much less a live, healthy baby. Moms and potential moms from playwright Wendy Wasserstein to a 46-year-old single woman who traveled to China to adopt illustrate Hewlett's thesis that "some of the most heartfelt struggles of the breakthrough generation have centered on the attempt to snatch a child from the jaws of menopause. A few succeed; most do not." Hewlett attests that "if high-altitude careers inevitably exact a price, it's profoundly unfair that the highest prices... are paid by women." "Self-indulgent" women might try to have a child and a career by hiring a nanny, but for Hewlett, it's more "courageous" for a woman to forgo childbearing if a career is her real goal. Hewlett's advice to young women is strangely retro: get married you'll be happier and healthier. She counsels them to give "urgent priority" to finding a marriage partner fast, "have your first baby before 35" and look for work at a family-friendly corporation. Though ardently argued, her case is unconvincing.

From Booklist

Founder of the National Parenting Association, Hewlett reports on new data showing nearly half of the most successful women in corporate America are childless, mostly contrary to their heartfelt desires. Hewlett begins with interviews of high-powered women--lawyers, journalists, scholars, doctors, businesswomen--who wanted children but ran out of time to begin their families. She reviews recent data on career women and their odds of marrying and raising a family, noting that despite promising medical technology, most women over the age of 40 aren't able to conceive and deliver healthy babies. According to the author, "most of the heartfelt struggles of the breakthrough generation have centered on the attempt to snatch a child from the jaws of menopause." Finally, she presents strategies on how young women can avoid the fate of the previous generation and what corporations can do to support women who want both careers and families. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Miramax; 1 edition (April 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786867663
• ISBN-13: 978-0786867660
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (72 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #867,545 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't dismiss this book out of hand...., April 21, 2002

By A Customer

....because you think Hewlett has an anti-feminist agenda! I am one of the "high achieving" women that Hewlett describes in her book. I make in excess of $200K, have a demanding professional career....and I desperately want to be a mom too. Luckily, I am married, and I'm only 31. Unluckily, we're in the midst of expensive and emotionally/physically taxing infertility treatments. It happens more than young women may think. I certainly never expected to have trouble. Now I see all these women just like me, struggling to have children. Many people don't see this, because infertility is a very isolating, and painfully personal tragedy. Who wants to go public with being infertile? From my seat in the clinic waiting room, in chat rooms, in discussions with female co-workers, it looks like a silent epidemic. I do not regret waiting until my 30s to start a family -- putting aside my job, I was not emotionally ready to do that. But after reading Hewlett's book, I know that if I want a family (and I do), I was right to start now -- she is dead on when she talks about how the ART industry and the media lull women into a false sense of security about their fertility. There *is* a biological clock, and it should be factored into the choices we make -- not ignored wholesale.

I find the controversy over this book very sad and funny at the same time. Wasn't feminism all about giving women all the information they need to make reasoned choices? The whole idea that feminism is about steering young women into go-go professional careers is as short-sighted and uni-dimensional as the way we deal with the threat of eating disorders (that it's not OK to tell kids to exercise and lose weight because they might develop an eating disorder -- meanwhile most of the country is now overweight).

Hewlett is not saying that women like me should have chucked the idea of getting a professional degree, and that I should have been barefoot and pregnant at home by 22. She's just trying to share another side of the story. Knowledge is such a powerful thing. I used to look at women above me and assume that they had chosen to be alone and childless. Now (both from personal experience and from the stories in Hewlett's book), I know that the truth is likely more complicated. Why is it wrong to reveal the regrets that powerful and successful women have about remaining childless? Shouldn't we celebrate ALL the things that women are capable of, including child-bearing? Why ignore that? What is wrong with letting young women know that there are temporal limitations to "having it all" and that one should plan accordingly? Better to know what the potential pitfalls are now, than to find out when it's too late.

As a book, I thought that it was a little too surface-y in its discussions. The book is mostly a collection of quotes and stories (deeply moving stories) from successful women, interspersed with results from her survey. It's not a scholarly treatise, and is a quick read. But it is a book worth reading because it raises issues and questions that should not be dismissed lightly.

92 of 117 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not the life of anyone I know...., May 2, 2002

By A Customer

I am a 52-year-old man who married at 19, had 5 children by the age of 33, and am now facing the last stages of aplastic anemia. In other words, I think I'm a good deal more qualified to comment on family life than is Ms. Hewlett. I will be honest: Although we both hold masters' degrees, my wife makes twice the income I do, and when we were younger, we split shifts to make BOTH our careers work and enjoy parenting. My wife and I have an income well over six figures, which certainly puts us in Hewlett's "high-acheiving" category. Yet, we could only find a few "caricatures" (since that's exactly what they are) in this book that resembled anyone we knew. We DO have a daughter struggling with infertility--who married at 22, has two advanced degrees, and is 29 and married to an equally accomplished man. Her infertility obviously isn't age-related. (I was so terrified she'd find this book that I returned it to the bookstore.) Nor do I think that men are somehow dumping "accomplished" women in droves. In my professional life as a public interest lawyer, I knew few men who were not married to women who were at least their intellectual equals. Some of them, it's true, did have difficulties having children and careers simultaneously, along with their wives. Was it that they and their spouses "put themselves first?" No--it's a much simpler reason, and as a former economist, Hewlett is a fool for not mentioning it: It's the economy. While the "simple living" movement made a nice dent in this, the fact is that materialistic tomes emnating from places like Manhattan make it difficult for couples to survive on one income. At one point Hewlett writes that she didn't have to "maximize her earnings" during the several cutting-edge infertility she went through at 51. Maximize? Uh, right.

There's a solution to this--it's not scaring little girls into having babies at 19, nor whipping "career women" who have to wait. It has more to do with raising wages, affordable housing, marital stability, better health care (much infertility is caused by untreated STDs), and teaching people about when it's realistic to be parents (I wasn't at 20, some aren't at 35, and some aren't ever, especially if the baby is just another "accomplishment." My mother had six children, spoke only Spanish, and could not read or write in any language. She had her last child at 49--not by choice, either. My father was no more educated, nor did he make a "living wage" for eight people. It bothers me that as I get ready to leave this earth, we haven't come much further than Brownsville, Texas in the 1950s. In Hewlett's view, a woman must have an accomplished husband, children, and high-track career. My mother had few choices--now it appears that my daughters don't, either. What a waste, to promulgate this do-as-I-do "feminism."

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opener for Thirty-Something Professional Women, December 28, 2002

By A Customer

This book was very insightful and based on real-life research. I am thirty-one and have spent the last ten years focused solely on my career as a professional. This book opened my eyes to the fact that I really don't have forever to start a family. The book follows several successful women in a variety of fields and discusses the challenges they face with finding a spouse and starting a family as they get older. These women tell their tales of how they basically woke up one day and realized they were forty and single. Many of them faced personal challenges as they drained all options to get pregnant and were unsuccessful. This book is definitely an interesting read.