Has anyone read 'I Don't Know How She Does It' or 'The Rise and Fall of a Yummy Mummy'?

actually I could see a lot of sense in Anna's advice, I gave up my job 9 yrs ago to bring up my kids and now I want to return to something interesting and well paid I realise I'm totally in the wrong proffession (retail)

wish I'd thought a bit more when I was younger and got a bit of advice like Anna's

Anna - the careers advice you are suggesting would be the most appallingly sexist drivel I have ever heard!

Fancy women going to a careers advisor and being told not to 'bother' doing an MBA as you need to think about your future responsibilities as a mother and therefore go and tether yourself now to an organisation who will look after you once you have your family!

And of course they give the same advice to men too[pmsl]

God forbid that women should want to have an interesting career after having children!

Honestly Anna you are being rather ridiculous!

So he had a problem with working wives? In that case he should be sent for compulsory re-reducation in sexism rather than divorcing and marrying a housewife.

But my more interesting question was why should people with a partner think people who are single like me are unhappy? There's been a tradition in the UK that batchelor - male means great fun life and spinster women means sad lonely life which is incredibly sexist. I may not be saying "women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle" but why an assumption people need a partner at all or separately children to lead happy and fulfilling lives?

Message withdrawn

Cristina - I was working when I met my partner.

All my partners have been totally different from one another - no two physical types, no two nationalities, no two careers, even religions...

Anna - this is going on a tangent now, but I'm sure there are lots of men and women attracted to a certain "type", be it blond/e, ambitious, musical, artistic, whatever. If you had been working, do you think your DH wouldn't have chosen you? I doubt that the working status would have made all the difference in your personality. I don't know.

Cristina - actually, I'm not against working mothers at all. Don't know where you got that idea. Lots of my friends are mothers and work.

But I am dead against people (men or women) putting SAHMs down.

Cristina - I was just retaliating (read the thread before you judge who is attacking whom).

Cristina - no, I just AM completely different, of course, and always have been. Why, after all, would anyone choose a partner who was the same as their previous partner when they made them unhappy?

I probably wasn't clear enough - advice to women starting out on their career would be to work in a company with an excellent record for retaining women with children, have your children only when you had an accomplished track record and NOT LEAVE until you had completed your family.

MBAs are useful for people who want to be able to move between companies/countries easily and who want high-flying careers in consulting and finance (all of which are generally pretty incompatible with family life).

My sister has an MBA. In fact that's how she met her DH, he was a fellow-colleague. They have two daughters now. I think she shouldn't have bothered with an MBA when after all that people management and whatever they teach them she couldn't even hire nannies she'd get on with.

Anna - I just thought your attack on Xenia's personal life was below the belt. Do you think you're so against working mothers because you want to be totally different to your DH's ex?

Bink - it is a well-recognised issue in B-school, and one of the major reasons why there is an imbalance of men and women applying for MBAs (and, therefore, graduating with MBAs).

Two of my former classmates who do careers counselling with MBAs did a survey about a year ago to collect data from female MBAs on their career record and the advice they would give with the benefit of hindsight to MBA participants. Unfortunately, one of the major insights was 'don't bother with the MBA'.

Cristina - takes two to play... Major issue in my partner's first marriage was definitely that his ex wanted to work all the time, couldn't bear to be with the children... she still can't.

I remember the editor of Vogue reviewing 'I don't know' and just saying, 'why doesn't she get a live-in nanny'. Think Squiffy is probably bang-on in saying Kate Reddy is a journalist, (dithering, neurotic, self-doubting, questioning, emotional, sentimental) dressed up as a city hot shot (decisive, confident, dynamic, unsentimental, pragmatic) which makes the whole story unconvincing.
Couldn't be arsed to read anything with 'yummy mummy' in the title. Loathe chick-lit.
I like books with murders in!
I did hear Rachel Cusk's book serialised on Radio 4 and thought it was the most appalling load of old rubbish ever. So melodramatic and self-regarding. Blimey, if Xenia thinks that is what life is like at home with kids no wonder she's never tried it! It's simply ridiculous grand guignol. Actually I suspect she was having some kind of severe PND or breakdown as becoming a mother obviously conflicted with her high-faluting ideas about herself.

Great post Squiffy.

Oh, this combination of English literature and City career is too tempting for me to pass by!

I've read IDKHSDI and it annoyed the hell out of me. I fall squarely in her "situation" remit - as do a number of other people on this thread - and agree that it is "a City high flyer" as interpreted by a journalist, as Squiffy so rightly pointed out, and it doesn't ring true at all.

I attended an evening function that Allison Pearson was at and she did an after dinner talk about the "Kate Reddy" effect. I thought she was tripe, tbh. She said that she had done a lot of research and talked to a lot of women who sobbed when they talked to her about glass ceilings and how they never see their children. But I looked around and saw a large number of happy succesful City women who were cheerfully and reolutely going about their jobs mostly untroubled by this bilge.

The clear reason for Kate Reddy's problems was that her husband was not pulling his weight and that she had turned all the "support" she should be receiving into the problem not the solution - none of her husband, nanny or cleaner were actually assisting her or relieving her of any responsibility, while she was assuming all the responsibility of being major bread-winner and major child care provider. Of course something has to give in that scenario - but most people don't put themselves in that scenario.

Ditto re the mince pies. Actually our mince pies for the Christmas play were hand made by DH because - shock horror - not all husbands are useless gender stereo-types. Otherwise our nanny would have made them with the children. Or we would have ordered them in the weekly on-line shop and sent them in in their packet. That's what real people do.

There is an interesting angle here about who writes these books and what market they are aiming at. Allison Pearson clearly is saying - girls, you can't make it, however hard you try (there is not, as far as I can recall, a single succesful, happy sorted woman in it). Definitely a whiff of the Daily Mail about it.

Anna & Xenia, take it outside?

But actually Anna, many of the people I was thinking about when writing below have degrees from your shop, but 15+ years down the line rather than 10. So maybe it's just a matter of timing, or generation, or gestalt, or something. As I am scratching my head to find the same big imbalance between the mothers & the not-mothers that you describe - ie, I think I can't.

Like Caligula I too wondered how long it would take to turn this into WOHM vs SAHM.

Anna - going by that your DH must have been pretty poor at the playing bit or he'd have stayed together with his first wife. Is that the best you can do?

Methinks Xenia is subconsciously frightfully jealous of women who decided that life doesn't have to be a fearful competition to keep men down and who therefore have more time have fun.

All work and no play makes Jack (Jill) a dull boy (girl).

Couples who play together stay together.

Xenia - I am talking about women I know very well and who I know for a fact wanted other things for their life.

Once again, don't speculate about other people's feelings that you don't have any data about.

Plenty of working woemn have lovely marriages and happy careers, Anna as I'm sure you know. "It's pretty sad to see how many of the women with "great careers" don't have partners or children."

Also why do you think it's sad? Many people are lesbian. Some prefer to be single. Lots absolutely hate children. Are you saying women need men to be happy or need children? They probably pity you your dependent housewife status.

the ending of i don't know how she does it , seems to me to lend itself to a sequel...Kate is left feeling unfulfilled as the sahm she craved to be and so starts to get embroiled in rescuing her sister's job by putting together a rescue bid to save the factory/business, i keep expecting a " what kate did next " follow up.