The XX Factor: What women really think.

"She Would Have Made a Fantastic Anything"

In the excerpt of his memoir that ran in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Christopher Buckley says of his mother:

She would have made a fantastic spy. Really, she would have made a fantastic anything. She was beautiful, theatrical, bright as a diamond, the wittiest woman I have ever known...She could have done anything; instead, she devoted herself, heart, soul and body, to being Mrs. William F. Buckley Jr. (A full-time job.)

Christopher the son doesn't link his mother's roads not taken to her "serial misbehavior," as he calls her bitter upbraiding of dinner guests and anyone else who stumbled into her lair at the wrong moment. But to me, the connection makes itself. We all know women of Pat Buckley's generation—she had Christopher in the 1950s—who poured themselves into their marriages instead of their careers. And who were ever frustrated, on some level, as a result. Because despite that reassuring "A full-time job," was it really, in a satisfying way?

And does that whole debate belong to the past, or will we see a similar pattern, in decades to come, from educated women my age (thirtysomethings) who opt out of work to raise their kids? (Without entering into the fight about whether their numbers are growing or shrinking or in any way represent a revolution, I'm stipulating that there are some.) If you're a full-time Mrs. today, you are choosing from among a set of alternatives that Pat Buckley didn't really have? Maybe that changes the calculus in the future as well as the present. Or maybe not. Thoughts?