Vanity Fair writer [Leslie Bennetts] is clearly evoking [BETTY Friedan], but she argues for a role for women as rigid as that which Friedan rejected.

While this mitigates the financial and professional stagnation that can come with the "mommy track," it also reduces women's access to pension matching, health coverage, and many other work-related benefits of great financial value.

A woman in a bad marriage to a multimillionaire, for instance, laments a loophole in common property law: "The husband can make a gift of $10 million to Harvard without asking the wife... he can build a new museum, and there go all of the spouse's and children's assets."