Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

In fact, the family as an institution is both oppressive and protective and, depending on the issue, is experienced sometimes one way, sometimes the other - often in some mix of the two - by most people who live in families.

In our minds lives the madonna image--the all-embracing, all- giving tranquil mother of a Raphael painting, one child at her breast, another at her feet; a woman fulfilled, one who asks nothing more than to nurture and nourish. This creature of fantasy, this myth, is the model--the unattainable ideal against which women measure, not only their performance, but their feelings about being mothers.

Women find ways to give sense and meaning to daily life--ways to be useful in the community, to keep mind active and soul growingeven while they change diapers and cook vegetables.

How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

We are a society that values a man for what he does in the world, a woman for how she looks.

From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.