The XX Factor

Starred review from August 5, 2013
In this provocative and vital new book, British economist Wolf (Does Education Matter?) addresses the “widening gap” between highly educated professional women and less-educated working women. The consequences of this gap run deep. Education affects whether women have children, how many they have, and at what age they have them; how early they have sex; how likely they are to divorce; and, critically, how much money they earn. The book’s first section addresses women in the workforce and covers higher education and money (including the return of the servant classes, without which “elite women’s employment would splutter and stall”); the second addresses the domestic sphere, including sexual behavior (“With the Pill everything changed”). While the book focuses on British and American women’s lives, Wolf’s cross-cultural view traverses the globe (she discusses China, India, France, Sweden, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, to name a few, but not sub-Saharan Africa); nor are men absent from her analyses. Accessibly written and enlivened with anecdotes and interviews, Wolf’s research is thoroughly documented and features uncommonly informative footnotes and helpful graphs. Her assessment of how things have changed since the time when “marriage was women’s main objective and main career” and the ways in which “the modern workplace detaches our female elites from both history and the rest of female-kind” will yield productive controversy. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.

August 15, 2013
An exploration of the unforeseen consequences attached to women's liberation. For a book about women to start with a Jane Austen anecdote is almost trite. For a book about inter- and intra-gender equality with an economic and educational focus to start with a Jane Austen quote is less expected. It is also a perfect way to illustrate the changes that have occurred in women's lives in the two intervening centuries. Economist Wolf (Public Services Policy and Management/King's Coll., London; Does Education Matter?, 2003) parlays her interest in the intersection of education and employment into a book exploring the effects of that intersection on gender gaps. She argues that the gap between genders has all but disappeared, while the gap between the educated and the less educated within each gender has widened considerably. The book is organized into two distinct sections. In the first part, Wolf focuses on women in the workforce; though it teems with interesting statistics and useful knowledge, the writing is often lackluster. The second part, however, in which the author discusses women at home--their sexual and familial habits and choices--is more compellingly written. Wolf's research is so extensive that general readers are unlikely to be able to follow up on even a small percentage of the materials she uses for support (she includes more than 800 notes at the end of the book). Though there is plenty to process, Wolf makes most of the information easily digestible. Some sections read like a textbook, with repetitive assertions and conclusions, but others are remarkably conversational. "The shore of Utopia is a hard place to reach; but today's educated women, in developing and developed countries, are surely much closer to it than the overwhelming majority of their female ancestors," she writes. Solid research and intriguing patterns make for a worthy, if sometimes difficult read.

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October 1, 2013

Wolf (Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management, King's Coll., London) observes that in the West, well-educated men marry well-educated women, that these women have fewer children than did women of earlier generations, and that these elite families buy domestic labor. Elite women now work for wages, and, therefore, "old-style female altruism is a fading memory." But Wolf tells readers little that's new, and she fails to explain how to rectify the inequalities she observes. She asserts that midcentury feminists ("who burned bras," she writes, dismissively, repeating a false characterization) failed to achieve their goals of full equality and that "contemporary female manifestos [focus] almost entirely on elite women, not the...millions who staff nursing homes" and work at other low-wage jobs. Wolf's point is that the rise of elite, empowered women has caused a two-caste society. Yet her own book examines elite women, and she has obviously not acquainted herself with the burgeoning literature on low-wage women workers. Nor has Wolf done much historical research. For example, she states, "Premarital sex used to be rare and seriously risky." To the contrary, premarital sex was historically common, and as many as one-third of brides in some 19th-century communities in America and Great Britain were pregnant. VERDICT This title may appeal to the elite women about whom the author writes.--Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DC

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