I was never a big book club kind of person, but this year I've joined a really great group of women, and we've been knocking back some classics like The Sun Also Rises, Lady Chatterly's Lover and, just this past week, The Feminine Mystique.

It's been an interesting combination: the 20th-century guys are all writing about male impotence in the face of female independence, and Betty's writing about female impotence in the the face of a male dominant culture.

It's a no win situation. The Kobayashi Maru of gender relations. Someone has to be on top, and the other one has to suffer for it down to the core (or the corset).

Shakespeare realized this, of course, more than four hundred years ago.

Emilia gives an eloquent defense of wives when she's talking to Desdemona about her rights:

"Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is't frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so." (5.1.91-102)

Not that this stopped Emilia from putting the needs of her good-for-nothing husband Iago over Desdemona's protection.

Which goes to show that Shakespeare also understood the problem of women not supporting each other--of perpetuating systems that keep each other down.

We had a great talk last night about how it's other moms who police us--who keep track of the sporting events we miss because of work, or who find a way to critique our parenting while advertising their children's successes.

The consensus was that the feminine mystique is alive and well in the middle-class suburbs. And that we can be our own worst enemies what with the guilt and the perfectionism. The problem with parenting is that it's a job that you can seemingly always improve on. Unlike the jobs we report to outside the home, this one has no boundaries and no clear path to success. What is success anyway? It's like we're all a bunch of those pigeons in that Psych 101 experiment where you get intermittent rewards for pecking at a spot, and then you end up pecking yourselves to death trying to get another one and another one.

Our husbands are all involved fathers, but they aren't sweating the work-family balance in the same way. After all, if they show up for one pick-up, they're seen as gods by the other mothers; if we're five minutes late for one of the 100 we do, we're pariah.

So let's all lighten up on each other, ladies, shall we? Life really is too short.