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"I'm going to stay home and raise babies," one of my female students announced in my philosophy class in sexual bargaining at Brandeis. As part of our unit about applying negotiations theory in marriage, I had been asking the class about their plans after college.

Well, you could have knocked me down with an eraser (we still had erasers in those days). Here she was, one of the brightest in the class cross listed as Women's Studies no less. Upon close Socratic examination, she revealed that the attraction was the delicious way they smelled after a bath. For a long time, I thought she was just a weird outlier in the generation of young women for whom Sixties feminism had opened the world.

But of course she was not. As I report in "Get to Work," the work force participation of married mothers with children has been going down since 1997 or ‘98. Educated ones leaving at the fastest rate. When I did the interviews for the book, a lot of the women, mostly in their 30's and 40's, revealed that they had held the opt-out dream as early as college. One of the "rules" for women in my book is to use college to prepare for a lifetime of work (the infamous "don't study art").