In the March 2004 issue of The Atlantic (which does not yet have any articles or a table of contents online; although there is a preview) is an article by Caitlin Flanagan about the women's movement and nannies.#

The article looks at the ways that job opportunities as nannies and housekeepers has helped and hurt the "women's movement." Example: Professional women can get nannies to watch their kids, work more (or have less stress,) and this also provides a job for the nannies.

It is very interesting and it covers many ends of the issue: Whether it's good to be separate from your children; whether housekeeping is a "good job"; etc.

While talking about A Mother's Place: Choosing Work and Family Without Guilt or Blame, by Susan Chira, Caitlin writes:

Why would Chira write such things? Because her book isn't really for or about the working-class mother. Look at the subtitle: "Choosing Work and Family Without Guilt or BLame." It's for women like herself, who have chosen to separate themselves from their children for long hours of the day, and who feel a clawing, ceaseless anxiety about this. Conflating the hardships of the working-poor mother with the insecurities of the professional-class mother ennobles the richer woman's struggles (entirely self-inflicted). Describing how even poor mothers are "working and thriving," and extolling the benefits of passing a child around among family members while her mother is gone for hour after hour, makes the richer woman's choices look not like what they are--a series of decisions often based entirely on providing herself with maximum happiness--but, rather, like the empirically proven superior way to raise children. Once read in this new light, the book--couched in the know-it-all, smarty-pants tone one expects from the one-two punch of Andover and Harvard, with a little New York Times pomposity through in for good measure--becomes as silly as a Bazooka Joe comic. All that blather about having your child's telephone calls "put through"--to the factory floor? to the sweatshop? ("Sorry to interrupt, Ms. Deng, but I've got Johnny on line two.") [pg. 120]

And another interesting note:

So here we have the crux of the problem: ask an upper-middle-class woman why she is exploiting another woman for child care, and she will cry that she has to do it because there's no universal day care. But get a bunch of professional-class mothers together, and they will freely admit that day care sucks; get a nanny. This was a truth that Naomi Wolf--feminist, Yali, Rhodes scholar, big think--learned the hard way after giving birth to her first child. [pg. 126]