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A few women abandon the work force completely, some for a year or two, others permanently. After twelve years in a successful, high-powered career as an attorney, Catherine Stevens, wife of Senator Ted Stevens, has "retired," to raise her daughter. "Now we have some life experiences behind us. I had enough years of being an attorney," she says. "It doesn't bother me, and I can go back if I want to."
New fathers are affected by the change as well. Actor Richard Thomas, 30, John-Boy of TV's The Waltons, became the father of triplets in January. He shares feedings and diaperings with his wife Alma, 35. Says Thomas: "This household is a wonderful thing." Poet-Novelist James Dickey (Deliverance), 59, recently became a father. Poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, Dickey has two children and an eleven-year-old grandson by a previous marriage. Says he: "Being a father at this age is a great affirmation. You have a feeling of being in the great chain of being. Passing it on and going with the whole life force. I'm glad to find out that I'm not a mule. At least not yet."
Advancing age and flagging energy can worry new and expectant mothers in their 30s and 40s. One woman fears that she might not "be around" to see her infant daughter graduate from college. Some aging parents have been embarrassed to have been mistaken for grandparents. But most older mothers have the breezy attitude of Eden Ross Lipson, 39, an editor of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Being the mother of a 13-month-old baby girl and stepmother of two older daughters is just the right mix for Lipson. "We have friends who have children in college. We have friends who are having babies. We know children in high school and grammar school. I find a richness in life dramatically different from the age segregation that defined the suburbs where we grew up."
Those suburbs are the not-so-fond memories of a generation that returned to the cities their parents had fled to give their burgeoning families a better life. Back then, everyone seemed to be pregnant. In the 1950s morning sickness was a national malady, and diapers were the white flags of a lost innocence. Unplanned and unwanted maternity could be avoided after the development of a successful birth-control pill in 1960. For the first time in history, women were able to assert their right to have no children at all. The decade that brought the Pill also delivered ideological handmaidens or, more properly, handpersons: women's rights, feminism both strident and liberating, and new openings for women in the work force. In those years pregnancy seemed a counterculture condition suffered mainly by women who wore sandals, smelled of rye flour and were "into" natural foods. In the '70s the battle lines calcified. On New York's East Side each morning, young women executives in their gray worsted suits hailed taxis and disappeared toward the shining towers of midtown Manhattan. By 1979, 51% of American women were working.