At 30 ...

Former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro was a stay-at-home mother. Founder and CEO of Oxygen Media Geraldine Laybourne was working at a public interest think tank for teachers. Political strategist Mary Matalin was a first-year law student-- and about to drop out. And months prior to her thirtieth birthday, financial strategist and best-selling author Suze Orman was working as a waitress, making $400 a month.

Decades later, these Boomer women and many others have reached the pinnacles of their professions. So why do Gen-X/Y women feel such pressure to have the perfect career, body, husband, and kids by the time they are at or around 30? Why has 30 become such a make-or-break moment?

As the generation that came of age after the most visible glass ceilings had been broken, Gen-X/Y women were raised to believe in futures without limitations. Yet, as journalists Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin reveal in their fascinating investigation, many women have distorted the well-intentioned empowerment messages of their youth and are quietly blaming themselves when they fail to overcome the very real obstacles that still exist in our society. Though many Gen-X/Y women are hitting the same roadblocks at the same time, instead of questioning what's wrong with the system-- as Boomer women did in their twenties-- they're questioning their own "choices."

Searching for solutions, Macko and Rubin have enlisted the aid of the New Girls' Club, a group of successful, satisfied women who've lived through their own crossroads moments, earned their battle scars, and now share their stories and strategies. While today's young women may indeed be a generation in the middle of a Midlife Crisis at 30, they now have a dream team of mentors to help guide them through it.

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And it did help. We Gen-X women were brought up to believe that equality had been achieved and if only we work hard enough we could do whatever we want. And when we don't accomplish all of our dreams, we tend to blame ourselves, instead of the system. At the same time, our entire generation is agonizing about spending too much time at work and missing out on a life.

But somewhere in the middle, it became tedious. It took me forever to finish, because I grew tired of reading yet another story about an ultra-successful woman with baby fever. As a woman who loves children but doesn't want any of her own, the book lost me. A few things actually bothered me, like the "Baby Envy" section and a general sense that the only women faced with work/life crises were mothers. There are plenty of women that struggle to find a balance between career and family, even if that family is a husband, siblings, or close friends.

I wish the authors had more analysis of what's causing the pervasive work/life imbalances and how we should stick together to make a change for all of us. When I read the chapter on men's perspectives, I kept thinking, "We shouldn't be concerned about bosses discriminating against parents because they leave work before 6:30, we should be concerned that bosses are expecting any of their employees to work that long in the first place!

There were many insightful observations and perspectives that I hadn't considered before, and for that I'm glad I read the book. I found the first and last two chapters to be the most influential on me. I'm not as enthusiastic as many other reviewers, but I do recommend this book to everyone in Generation X/Y, and to even a few boomers that want to understand why their children are so troubled when they seem to "have it all."

13 of 13 found the following review helpful:

Great book but not for every womanMay 26, 2005
By ReadingTurtle
While this is an excellant book if you are a career woman, the authors make one huge mistake. They write that a woman's life phases follows this order 1.Work 2.Marriage 3.Kids. They never met me, because my life has followed this order. 1.Kid 2.Marriage 3.Work? I write work with a question mark because I am a 29 year old stay-at-home mother who realizes that I should have gone to college and had a career too. I didn't go to college because I got pregnant and married when I was 18 (and had three more children over the years) and have been a homemaker ever since. Now as I approach 30, I find myself yearning for a career, not a baby. I did find the story about Judy Blume inspiring because she was a stay-at-home mom at thirty and later became a writer. I am an aspiring writer as well. But the rest of the book just wasn't what I was looking for.

18 of 20 found the following review helpful:

Good book if baby-making is your main goal in life.Apr 11, 2006
By Cheryl Ferry
This book is for women who have or want to have children. Period. I am 29 years old, and do not hear a biological clock ticking. In fact, the older I get, the less I want children. I knew the book would touch on motherhood, but I was hoping it wasn't the main drive of the book. Instead I read page after page of women whining about how to juggle a career and a family. If that is something you're struggling with, then by all means, get this book. If you're not thinking about motherhood, and especially if you are child-free by choice, don't waste your time.

51 of 66 found the following review helpful:

Good topic, good analysis, well writtenMar 15, 2004
By Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty
It might strike one as rather odd that I, a committed member of the male gender with his feet firmly planted in the category of senior citizen, should be reviewing a book that is more or less intended for the young female member of the present generation whose feet are barely planted on the ground. But sometimes one is asked to do what appears at first to be somewhat strange, which later turns out to be both an interesting and insightful encounter.

Such is the case with this book by two successful and experienced journalists, Lia Macko and Kerry Rubin, about the midlife-crisis problem which seems to affect many professional women at around the age of thirty or so in American society today. I won't pretend for a moment that I can directly and intimately relate to the specific situations they describe, but I can at least glimpse some of its enigmas, frustrations, and ramifications since many of us men go through a similar, albeit not exact, form of personal crisis usually around the age of forty or so. Alas, as with puberty, the females reach this life-challenging singularity before we males do.

The midlife crisis discussed in this book is grounded on the fact that a significant number of the fifty-eight million young women of what is now called Generation X/Y seem to undergo powerful conflicts in their work/life circumstances and at a very early age in their careers. This is occurring even before marriage and children are part of the situation. So, considering this problem as worthy of an investigation, Macko and Rubin set about to use the latest research and census data and, I think more importantly, interviews with more than one hundred college-educated career women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-seven in an attempt to come up with some critical analyses and some plausible resolutions. I think in general that they were successful in accomplishing both tasks.

One of the things that made the reading of this book enjoyable for me was that I was familiar with many of the women whom the authors interviewed and whose contributions ended up being presented in the book, such as former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, whom I didn't vote for but have admired for many years for her astute political analysis, and Rikki Klieman, a brilliant trial attorney whom I've watched many times hosting a program on Court-TV. There are others whose personal stories are interesting and enlightening, and with whom I'm acquainted, including the prominent Republican strategist Mary Matalin, CNN host Paula Zahn, and novelist Judy Blume, one of whose books (dare I admit it?) I read some years ago to uncover what all the fuss was about regarding some books she wrote for young girls.

There is one conclusion I have come to after reading this book. While contemporary women may be having their midlife crisis earlier than men do, and there are some significant differences in the way they experience it from the way men do, it is surprising that many of the questions they are asking themselves are similar to the questions men ask themselves when they experience their own midlife crisis. Unfortunately, men going through their crisis tend to do so silently and in secret, while the women are intelligent and clever enough to be more open and conversant. Men should take a cue from this. They might suffer less.

Of course, there is one really big consideration in the female's midlife crisis that men do not have to directly deal with and that is motherhood and children and how to integrate that into one's career as a professional woman. Macko and Rubin include some interesting insights into that situation. Men, after all, don't get pregnant and have to figure out how to wrestle with that situation in the workplace (I suspect that if men did have to go through a pregnancy, whether in the workplace or not, the human race would shortly cease to exist!).

There are many questions raised in this book which are familiar to those of us who have a philosophical bent and they are not really new questions, just old questions asked within a contemporary context. For instance, questions about happiness, and fulfillment, and perfection. Can I have it all -- career and family and a rewarding personal relationship? Or, if not, why not? If I can't have it all, what can I settle for and be happy with? What really is the good life, especially for me? What are my priorities and, in light of my desires, what am I willing to compromise or ask someone else to compromise? Heady stuff, that, with roots that go back into antiquity.

All right, one can get carried away here, so I'll cease and desist. I'll just simply say that this book is very well written and deserves a wide audience especially among those young women coming of age who are thinking about both career and family and how to integrate their roles within both enterprises. I think this book will provide some insight and much food for thought and self-reflection. I won't hesitate to recommend this book to the male reader either, since, being the progressive-minded senior citizen that I am, and having come of age in a far more restrictive generation when it comes to career women, I think it's high-time for us members of the opposite gender to try to understand just what it is that our partners-in-living are going through when they experience their midlife crisis. "Audiatur et altera pars."

9 of 10 found the following review helpful:

My life is forever changedMay 10, 2004

As the help wanted ads glared at me from across the bed while I stared at the ceiling for the third morning in a row, the TV beckoned me -- and when I turned on CNN, there was Lia Macko describing...ME!!! I rushed out to buy this book, hopeful but cautious that I would find it too trite or too light. I was overjoyed to not notice how quickly I had read to page 21, nodding my head and smiling all the way. I spent the rest of the day finishing the entire book, reading every single word -- at the pizza parlor, in the bubble bath. I have e-mailed or called anyone close to me to tell them about the book -- to help them or to help them understand me. For a person with a graduate degree in English literature, to find a self-help book of such substance is no small feat. This book ranks at the top of books that have helped me ever and is exactly what I have needed to help me change my life. I don't think anything or anyone else could have helped me the way this book has -- from the frighteningly and sometimes funnily perfect descriptions of our generation to the real, not "blowing sunshine up your a__" testimonials of diverse yet relevant, interesting, unique women to the effectively validating rather than advice-giving approach.
The main point I have gleaned and needed as I face life's daunting choices and transitions might sound cliche but is profoundly simple, and too often lost or contradicted in society today, and that is: be yourself. The book proves that with the very real phenomena of today's thirtysomething women carrying pain and pressure from our individual and shared pasts as well as uncertainty and unhappiness about tomorrow, the best way to make decisions for today, for every day, is to be yourself. This mantra will be my compass and guiding light in the coming days and for the rest of my life, as I know this will not be the last time I feel this way. But as the book so accurately attests, for many of us, 30 is the big turning point, not necessarily the first time we have known about these feelings, difficulties and challenges but the first time we know we must face them head on and deal with them so we can make the rest of our lives more fulfilling. The book does not offer lame false hope that things will be so much more fun or easier if only we chart the right course, but rather, it acknowledges that we will need all the tools from our toolbox: patience, hard work, humor, friendship, commitment, flexibility, determination, luck, acceptance. Without allowing us to curl up in victim balls, it validates our experience that hard work does not necessarily pay off, that the world can be cruel, unjust and unfair, and that sometimes our expectations are unrealistic. Perhaps most important, the book is couched in the context of a social movement -- we're not crazy or in this alone -- and creates a very real construct, the New Girls Club, for bringing women together through and for shared experience to truly help themselves and each other rather than for yet another meaningless, self-serving rubber chicken awards luncheon. This is the personal-political manifesto our generation of women has needed to create the groundswell of grassroots change that will truly make a difference while so-called women's organizations (including the ones I have worked or volunteered for or donated to) mainly pay lip service to us and so-called helping professionals like therapists often just seem to make us feel worse. And finally, the book speaks to the average, "normal" American woman while managing to engage a range of female voices, and it leaves room for the individual reader to fit her unique personal experiences into a broader trend while also respecting women of previous and future generations. I hope to host a book party for this book and to see these women on Oprah -- if she has ever or never had a self-help book on her Book Club list, this is the book to put there this year. This is the best "self-help" book I have ever read and mostly because it was written by and for women just like me.

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