Chapter 7 zeros in on women's current state of affairs—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We examine how cultural and demographic shifts in our history restricted women's circumstances and why they needed expanded social and economic options. Yet, in the otherwise noble quest for sexual equality, women now often find themselves aping male behavior in the workplace and denying their innate feminine impulses. Long modern life expectancies and deferred marriage mean today's young woman has been pushed out of the family nest to fend for herself. Almost three-quarters of adult women now work, up from one-third just two generations ago. As a result, today's working woman too often finds herself in a quandary, especially if she decides to have a child. If she has a husband, she then gets to be someone's mother, someone's employee and someone's wife. This difficult juggling act is only too familiar to many of today's sleep-deprived career women.

The chapter sheds further light on some of these issues by looking at the consequences of the coed workplace, the tilt of the legal landscape toward adversarial sexual politics, and the forces leading many women to attempt motherhood alone. We reflect on the casualties of today's fractured intimate partnership. The battle between the sexes now seems to be a zero-sum game that we are all losing. Men are alienated from family, women are on their own, and children are often the silent victims. We conclude with a call for reconciliation between the sexes and a plea to resurrect the feminine potential at society's core. We need to summon the truest in women because, with the dangerous, man-made passages that lie before us, we are going to need the very best in men.