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As my blogging time comes to an end, I'm going to tell you a secret: I love Martha Stewart Living. June just came, and I put aside my New York Review of Books without a moment's hesitation. "Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain" is just going to have to wait while I read the stuffed tomato article. Dinner guests next week will have the strawberry shortcake, if I can only find the star shaped cutouts and then have them delivered in time so the fruit peeks out the top in a patriotic design. I have the great big mixing machine that probably could make cement if necessary.

At least I don't do the craft projects. Making your own lacy luminario bags I think is this month's temptation for the hard core Marthas. Although the feature on the center pieces had me going for a bit. I do love to set the table. It's like making a collage.

Surprised? If you are, it just means you've been drinking the Kool Aid the right so liberally, pun intended, dished out about feminism all these years. Mother and stepmother of three, happily married for almost twenty years, and even my ex-husband remarried to a feminist, I used to love to read the stay at home mommybloggers' speculations on my wizened, sexless, childless life, until the word leaked out.

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Stay at home moms and working moms: I am worried about our daughters.

In "Get to Work," I speculated that, with the Census Bureau reporting a dropoff in the number of educated mothers working, "It is only a matter of time until people figure out that women aren't a good bet for education and opportunity. Conservatives are already asking why society should spend resources educating women with only a 50 percent return rate on their stated goals."

Mommybloggers responded with a storm of postings denying that they had any responsibility to other women in the society and asking why they should care about anyone other than their husbands and children. Other critics told me employers would never do anything that violated the Civil Rights Act and I should just hush my mouth lest I give them ideas.

Well, even if you care only about your own biological family, news bulletin -- girls are children too. And here, as surely as if I could see the future, just what I worried about has started to surface.

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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").

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Linda Hirshman offers us insight on her book Get to Work during the week of June 11th.

Make sure to add the Penguin Group (USA) blog to your RSS feed list and read her up close and personal posts. Here is some brief information about Get to Work:

Does changing a toddler 's diapers count as a fulfilling job? Is the glass ceiling that keeps women from advancing in their careers actually located in the home? In Get to Work, a book that instantly ignited a firestorm of debate, Hirshman cogently argues that "opting out" of the workplace is a form of self-betrayal. Combining a hard-hitting critique of traditional feminism with practical advice to help stay-at-home moms find satisfying, well-paying work, this book will be as era-defining as The Feminine Mystique.