Thus, to be a feminist is to be defiant and strong, to have great confidence as an individual, and to be dependent of their gender counterparts, e.g. Madonna. In today's materialistic society, where traditions are casually discarded from everyday life, marriage is not as highly valued nor children as greatly desired as they were two generations ago. Then, the vast majority of American marriages really did last a lifetime - almost all children were born to two married parents. Today, demographers estimate that about half of all marriages will end in divorce , and about a third of all babies are born to unwed mothers. For working-women, motherhood is reduced to little more than a coffee break. Our culture has spoon-fed us a specific set of values concerning the roles of women. To question these values is considered not merely dissent but madness. If a Yale graduate, for example, turned down an executive position at Morgan & Stanley so that she could marry young, have five kids, and spend the rest of her life dedicated fulltime to her home and family, she would be regarded by most of her peers as an imprudent and misguided fool. She would be an unlucky aberration: a squanderer of her talents, her education, and her life. On a personal level, she would be accepted, but in the minds of many she would be a futile and fruitless commodity, a hypocrite to the feminist movement.
Out in the real world, however, conservative notions of femininity are beginning to make a comeback. Danielle Crittenden, a 35-year-old wife and mother, has written "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman" and F. Carolyn Graglia, who was a lawyer and is now a homemaker, came out in October with "Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism" (3). These books strike at the very heart of feminist ideology, contending that women are, by nature, more suited to raising children and steering the life of the home than to pursuing careers.