What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman » (1 TOUCHSTO)

Danielle Crittenden has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Ladies' Home Journal, among other publications. She is the founder of The Women's Quarterly, published by the Independent Women's Forum. She has appeared on NBC's Today show and is a frequent commentator on many national television and radio programs. She lives with her husband and two children in Washington, D.C.

The anxiety-riddled character Ally McBeal has certainly tapped into something simmering beneath the surface of today's professional, "successful" women. It's called misery. Worse, it's called misery without a comprehensible origin. It is this odd, pervasive unhappiness that Danielle Crittenden confronts in her fascinating, enlightening book What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us.

The New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Gleick

...Crittenden correctly homes in on some naggting questions....but the author would like to have things both ways....[T]he book's greatest flaw is that Crittenden virtually ignores the ...the changing nature of work itself....perhaps the problem is...the relatively recent notion that "happiness" is within our grasp, that we can everything we want, when we want it, without making sacrifices.