"...this book is an indispensable tool for stimulating a serious analysis of the financial and economic penalties imposed on women who must navigate between the modern Scylla and Charybdis of work and family life. This book poses substantive questions about the family, the market, the state, and the gender order, and provides a variety of analytic tools for thinking about them. The American gender order has changed in dramatic ways since the turn of the twentieth century, and to a great extent, it was the marketplace that gave rise to these changes. The family wage associated with union jobs in the industrial has largely disappeared. In the new economy, high-paying careers demand steep investments of education and training, while jobs accessible to those without college and post-graduate training increasingly tend to be McJobs that offer flexibility, but little in the way of high wages, good benefits, stability, or access to a progressive career ladder. In order to pursue the good life, women as well as men now expect to be in the marketplace for much of their adult lives"--Publ. web site