Ronda Kaysen: The Sunday Times of London ran a story called "Having It All Is a Myth Girls, So Just Make Sure Your Daughters Marry Rich Men." Excuse me while I go pull my hair out now.

Given the choice, most working mothers would not want their daughters to follow in their footsteps, according to the author's unscientific poll of the working moms she knows. Instead, they'd like to see their girls marry rich men and maybe do a little charity work, if the mood strikes.

The reason working moms today are harried, stressed, and stretched too thin has nothing to do with staggering wages, a lack of reasonable child care options, pathetic family leave policies, or a general absence of support. No, working moms are stressed out because we wrongly assumed that equality would make our lives better, and it never occurred to us to marry someone with a trust fund. Author India Knight seems to think that the pool of very rich men is a renewable resource that anyone could tap, if they so choose.

Knight insists that mothers work because they're trying to be equal to men, not because they have bills to pay and the cost of living generally exceeds a single middle-class salary.

Stay-at-home moms, don't think you're off the hook. Your set isn't faring much better in her book, either. Stay-at-home moms lie awake at night panicking about the state of their careers. Basically, we're all just a mess, and we can blame the woman's movement for our troubles.

"This grim picture isn't terribly surprising," Knight writes. "The model we are desperately trying to adhere to -- the old 'you can have it all' chestnut -- is fundamentally broken and, it increasingly seems, always has been. The great plan for 'equality' didn't work because it never took motherhood and its practical and emotional ramifications properly into account. It is therefore ironic -- and possibly quite stupid -- that we should still be chasing after it."

Knight doesn't offer what her rosy alternative would be -- except that we should marry rich men. I hate to burst her bubble, but in case she missed the latest economic news flash, rich men aren't exactly a surplus these days.

She also seems to be under the impression that moms are working solely to make some sort of feminist argument. She entirely disregards the notion that many moms work because they actually enjoy the intellectual stimulation they derive from the career they've spent years building.
 
She interviews Erin Pizzey, a feminist who founded the first women's shelter in the United Kingdom, to get her take on the issue. Lucky for Knight, she found a feminist willing to back her up. "There has been a subterranean war between men and women which has largely been won by women, who don't understand what they've lost," said Pizzey. "The traditional family has been going for thousands of years and it works.... What I see now is men disenfranchised from their roles and women who are lost because they have to work full-time. They don't have a choice: there's no proper provision for children."

Knight conveniently ignores Pizzey's key point: there's no proper provision for children. Women and men are working long hours to keep their families above water. College tuition is astronomical, child care costs a fortune, medical bills are outrageous. There are no provisions for families. So, everyone's getting squeezed. It has nothing to do with equality.

Not to mention, poor and working-class women have been working for a lot longer than the feminist movement has been around. People work because they need to work. And some work because they're lucky enough to have careers they find fulfilling.

I don't know what mothers Knight found in her Rolodex for this story, but the working (and stay-at-home) moms I know seem to have a more complicated explanation for their own lives. And the end goal does not involve their daughters marrying millionaires to save them from this miserable life we're all living.

Ronda Kaysen is a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, BusinessWeek.com, Architectural Record, Huffington Post, New York Observer and AM New York. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.