PERFECT MADNESS Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety.
By Judith Warner.
327 pp. Riverhead
Books. $23.95.Manifestoes blast their way into the popular consciousness on two kinds of fuel: recognition (we see ourselves in them) and rage (we can no longer tolerate the injustice they describe). Judith Warner’s ”Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” brims with both. She clearly means for her denunciation of American-style mothering to do for overstressed 21st-century upper-middle-class American women what Betty Friedan’s ”Feminine Mystique” did for underemployed 20th-century ones. ”Perfect Madness” is not half as good as ”The Feminine Mystique” — not as painfully accurate or cleverly argued — but, like Friedan, Warner channels a big, explosive feeling, which she identifies as frustration at ”the mommy mystique” or, more resonantly, ”this mess.’ MORE
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