Sexes: Motherhood Vs. Sisterhood

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Betty Friedan has dubbed it a "deceptive, backlash book." Erica Jong has called it the kind of work that "could start a revolution" and "serve as blueprint for a new era of feminist activism." Those heated reactions were only a small part of a new controversy slowly beginning to churn in U.S. feminist circles. Its focus: a newly published 461-page study that examines why, despite the furor of the feminist revolution in the '60s and '70s, women in the U.S. labor force remain substantially poorer than their West European counterparts. The book's most startling claim: the feminist movement itself may be responsible for some of that discrepancy.

Author Sylvia Ann Hewlett, 40, pursues that analysis with a wealth of fact, interviews and occasional personal reflections, in A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America (Morrow; $17.95). The book is the product of three years of research by the author, an economist and director of the Economic Policy Council, a Manhattan-based think tank. Hewlett was increasingly struck by the income disparity between European and American women, a plight she illustrates with cold statistics. As of August 1985, Census Bureau figures show that women in the U.S. earn 64 cents for each dollar earned by males, up only 1 cents since 1939. European women, by contrast, have been gaining on men much more rapidly. In Sweden, for example, women now average 81% of male annual earnings, up from 71% in 1970. In France, women's wages are 78% of men's, and in Italy, the figure is 86%.

America's divorce rate, one of the highest in the world, holds down female earning power, says Hewlett, and so does discrimination against women workers. But she thinks the major factor holding women back is their continuing burden in the home, particularly the responsibility of child rearing. Hewlett writes: "Ninety percent of women have children, and . . . it is precisely during the childbearing years that women fail to make the grade in the career struggle."

Particularly striking in the U.S., she says, is the absence of social legislation and universal social support for working mothers. No fewer than 117 nations guarantee maternity leave, and the U.S. is the only advanced democracy not on the list. Though women employed by major American corporations are mostly protected, she observes, more than 60% of U.S. working mothers have no right to take maternity time off. "American superwomen are meant to have children on the side, on their own time, and the less said about it the better," says Hewlett. "In this country there is little appreciation of the fact that having children is a societal imperative as well as a private choice, that children are a nation's collective future."

The British-born Hewlett, mother of four children, gained some of her knowledge about that problem the hard way. Part of the inspiration for Lesser Life grew out of her own agonies in juggling career and motherhood while teaching economics at Barnard College in the 1970s. Barnard granted no maternity leave at the time, and Hewlett claims that her inability to get time off during a difficult pregnancy contributed to her miscarriage of twins. Hewlett also relates that her department chairman warned that she might not gain tenure if she got pregnant again. Eventually she was refused tenure.