Recently we've been hearing a lot about women "having it all." Myself, I think that is not really an accurate description of female lives today. It seems to me that what we have been up to is DOING it all.

The decision to have a child is both a private and a public decision, for children are our collective future.

Women of my age in America are at the mercy of two powerful and antagonistic traditions. The first is the ultradomestic fifties with its powerful cult of motherhood; the other is the strident feminism of the seventies with its attempt to clone the male competitive model.... Only in America are these ideologies pushed to extremes.

There are three pillars, regardless of your work culture, whether you're in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street: how you look, how you speak, and how you behave. It's all three things, and nailing them makes you a contender.

If you show up without makeup or looking sloppy, no matter how impressive your ideas are, no one is going to pay attention to you. People take you more seriously if you look polished.

The feedback women are getting at work is amazingly ineffective or vague. You need to signal to your boss or senior colleagues that you want honest feedback, and that you promise not to take it too personally.

The degree to which the child-rearing professionals continue to be out of touch with reality is astounding. For example, a widely read manual on breast-feeding, devotes fewer than two pages to the working mother.