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Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche is superwoman. A multimillionaire former executive, she was named one of Fortune magazine’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business. She also raised twin boys while building her career, taking them as toddlers to Harvard Business School with her, then bringing them along on the corporate jet when she could. Granted, not everything went perfectly. She didn’t make every swim meet, and her career, as a wheeler-dealer at the now-bankrupt Enron, is probably over.

But I had this woman’s story in mind as I read about the furor caused by the newest book from Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children. Hewlett interviewed dozens of highly successful women of the post-feminist revolution “breakthrough generation.” She studied a thousand more who spent their twenties and thirties nurturing high-wattage careers. But then, she noted, these women faced a cruel reality: They had achieved everything else, but when they finally decided they were ready to have children, their bodies were no longer capable.

Predictably the controversy, like so much of the ongoing Mommy wars, split along ideological lines. The Right mustered a certain “I told you so,” attitude and called for a return to the traditional family—dads who work and moms who don’t. Richard Lowry of National Review, for instance, has been on a crusade in recent years, writing, “Working moms are at the very center of a variety of cultural ills. Maybe a little stigma is what they deserve.” Those on the Left have been equally apoplectic. “There is an antifeminist agenda that says we should go back to the 1950′s,” Caryl Rivers, a professor at Boston University, told Time magazine. “The subliminal message is ‘Don’t get too educated; don’t get too successful or too ambitious.’”

The numbers are depressing. According to Hewlett’s research, 49% of women earning over $100,000 a year are childless at age 40, meaning they will probably never have children. Any society where that high a percentage of the most intelligent, ambitious women don’t reproduce faces a troubled future.

But missing in all the hubbub are the tales of women such as Mark-Jusbasche. Over half of the high-achieving women Hewlett studied did indeed have it all—kids and a successful career. So despite dire warnings (including a headline in USA Today intoning: “Young women must choose”), the mommy-track and career-track don’t have to be at odds. The 51% of these $100,000 women who also have kids can serve as an inspiration for younger women who want to travel both roads.

to be continue…

In Howdentown as I have heard ‘em tell
Once there was a white hare, she used to there to dwell
She’s been hunted by the greyhounds and the beagle-dogs did fare
And there’s not a one amongst’em could keep up with that white hare
She’s faster than the black, and she’s bonnier than the brown
And there’s not a dog in England as’ll ever bring her down
So says Jimmy The Bold Huntsman to Tom The Whipper-In
‘Go look in yonder fernside and see if she lies in’
And with that she gave a jump, boys, as fast away she ran
And its yonder that she’s going as fast as ere she can
When they came unto the place where this white hare did lie
The beagles they uncoupled, they began to try
Then the crafty greyhounds did beat the bush around around
And there never was a white hare in that field to be found
By horse and foot they did then unto this place draw neigh
All thinking that the white hare was going for to die
But she slipped out of the bush, boys, and over Howden Hill
And the beagles and the greyhounds there was one shot in the kill.