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This approach tries to combine the best of both worlds. It recognizes that a full-time job is not the most important thing in the world, but moms are also interested in things outside the home. So instead, you can combine various parts of a fulfilling life by having your children and spending time with them while you (and they) are young, then bringing them along during your ride through the career world.

Will everything go perfectly? Probably not. If motherhood means anything, it’s accepting a certain messiness. This philosophy also relies on enlightened men who want their wives to have it all too, and who are willing to indulge less in the cult of the career themselves to make that happen. Fortunately, the culture seems to be moving that way. One of my favorite Baby Blues cartoons shows husband Darryl MacPherson watching a 1950’s TV sitcom, wondering why it’s inherently funny that the father has to take care of the kids for a weekend while mom is out of town. What is he, incompetent?—MacPherson asks. I once interviewed a molecular biology student on a biotech research track who informed me she planned to have a fight with her husband over what they both saw as a privilege—“which one of us gets to stay home with the kids.”

HP’s research raised a million other questions—such as what companies can do to help valuable employees who happen to be moms. Probably a lot. It’s always amazed me how few corporations offer emergency day care for parents when something goes awry, even though the current solution—parents taking “sick days”—probably costs the company more.

But the most important idea to take away from HP’s book is that if you want both kids and a career, you can make it happen, as long as you don’t buy completely into either cult mentality. You may have to make adjustments on both fronts. One profile of Mark-Jusbasche, for instance, noted that she felt bad about missing some aspects of her boys’ growing up, and ultimately she scaled back her career to spend more time with them (just in time, it turned out, to miss the worst of the Enron mess).

But you can do both if you define your priorities, and find a way to make it happen. Said Hewlett herself on the Today show, “In the end, it’s in the hands, I think, of the individual woman.” And no individual woman’s life needs to be all one way or the other.

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A Tale of Two Cults

The problem is that the mommy wars portray women’s life choices as conforming to one of two mutually exclusive, weighty ideas: the cult of the career and cult of domesticity. Combative rhetoric propagates the idea that once you’ve chosen the latter you are forever bound to it, and if you’ve chosen the former, you’re obligated to devote yourself slavishly to that cult through your younger years until you are completely established.

The career cult mentality leads to some odd prioritizing. Reading through the profiles of childless women in articles about Hewlett’s research, I was struck by the choices some women had made after being sucked in by the cult of the career. For instance, one woman billed herself as “director of marketing at a luxury hotel.” She could have had children in her thirties, but instead of making that happen, she devoted herself primarily to work, and once she reached her forties, realized having children might no longer be possible. The cult of the career misses a fundamental point: Work exists to pay the bills. It can also be challenging and interesting, but everyone’s primary goal should be a fulfilling life—not climbing the corporate hierarchy just because it’s there.

But we also make a mistake in billing domesticity as a cult you can never leave. Out of financial necessity, working class women have always found ways to combine the care of small children and work outside the home. So high-achieving, wealthier women can do the same—through freelancing, telecommuting, part-time work, and husbands who share equal childcare responsibilities. The cult of domesticity implies that once women have children, they lose all interests outside the home, except for cute ones like charity boards and bridge clubs. This is a demeaning picture that’s never been true.

Sequencing to a Complete Life

So how about the more modern notion of “sequencing”—women shifting back and forth between different stages of their lives? One sequencing support group, “Mothers & More” (which my sister- in-law participates in) defines this as moving in and out of paid employment and opting for a variety of flexible work arrangements in order to balance work and family. It could work like this: Go to school or work for a while (my sister-in-law has a Ph.D. in chemistry); raise kids for a while, perhaps while freelancing or consulting part-time to maintain outside interests; then incorporate work back into your life in a way that meets your own and your family’s needs.

to be continued…