Reviews of Steiner's "Mommy Wars"

From Publishers Weekly
Most of the women here, famous and otherwise, express a familiar guilt along with pride at how they make peace with their choices juggling motherhood and career. Some, like Harvard MBA Ann Misiaszek Sarnoff, have pursued a high-octane job while raising two kids; others have scaled back work or work at home in order to be with their kids all day. These mommies (most are upper-middle-class white mothers who've made careers out of writing in some form) almost without exception have solid, provider husbands, and nannies or full-time babysitters. Moms in similar situations stand to gain the most from the collection and will relish such gems as novelist Jane Smiley's "Feminism Meets the Free Market," where she notes, "Home was the refuge when the workplace drove us out," and PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson's revelation, in "Working Mother, Not Guilty," that her career gives her 10-year-old "a sense that there's a whole world outside of our little family." Washington Post advertising director Steiner offers a valuable opportunity for discussing women's "inner catfight." In lieu of mud-slinging, she presents a reasonable and low-key forum for mutual understanding and respect.
(Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Steiner has set out to resolve the "cat fight" between women who stay at home to raise children and women who pursue careers while raising children. She addresses the infighting that goes on between women who often have no real idea what life is like for those on the other side of what has been called the Mommy Wars. This collection of essays by 26 writers--both stay-at-home and working moms--explores how and why women make their choices between family and career. Steiner precedes each essay with a short biography of the contributor and how she came to make her choice. Contributors include Terri Minsky, creator of Lizzie McGuire; Susan Cheever, New York Newsday columnist; and Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley. Steiner maintains that working moms should appreciate the efforts that stay-at-home moms put into volunteerism, which helps all children, and stay-at-home moms should appreciate the fact that working moms continue to expand opportunities for all women.
Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Elle Magazine
AWWF-sanctioned smack-down is promised by the title of Mommy Wars : Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families(Random House), a collection of 26 essays gathered and introduced by writer and editor Leslie Morgan Steiner. But the book doesn't deliver--and that's a good thing, because only clownish culture warriors can possibly believe anymore that One Best Way exists for America's mothers to arrange their lives. Indeed, though written by a cozy coven of well-to-do, even celebrated media types, these nuanced self-analyses yield a rich variety of lives against which women can gauge their own struggle to find that elusive dynamic equilibrium between work and family. On the evidence here, fairly few end up where they expected or intended. A bad run at work or a child with special needs may be a doorway to unlooked-for domestic tranquillity; more often, the ebb and flow of family circumstance dictates a converse lightening or renewal of career commitments. But the backgrounding of husbands in most of these renderings of home life suggest that women will win real equality only when men come to interrogate themselves, and the culture, about how to achieve a similar balance in their own lives. --Ben Dickinson