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Female emancipation may be the one great achievement of the Baby Boomers. All sorts of kooky notions on the protest generation's agenda, from communal living to extolling "mind-expanding" drug use, have mercifully become memories. But women's liberation, minus its early stridency, has become the status quo. "We were the pioneers," says Reich, "to take seriously the notion that women are equal. That's the social change that's lasted." In TIME's poll of 30- to 40-year-olds, the legacy of the late '60s and '70s that earns the highest approval rating (82%) is simply "changes in the role of women."
But the women's revolution has hardly been won without cost. The clash of children and career can force a painful choice. When Los Angeles Lawyer Kimberly Shaller, 29, had her second baby, her "leave of absence turned into retirement. I used to think I could have both, but now I feel sort of misled." Yet many women cannot afford to quit. "Wives have been working because their families need the money," says University of Wisconsin Business School Professor Dowell Myers. "Most women are still working pink collar. They're not in a career. They're in it because they need the bucks."
For many working supermoms, a psychic guilt tax is deducted from the paycheck. After visiting the day-care-center manager who would look after her newborn child, UCLA's Burnam lamented, "I was really depressed to think that this woman would spend more time with my child than I would." After putting in the kinds of long hours required to succeed in almost any profession, working mothers return home wondering how they will muster enough energy to give their children more than just a good-night kiss. It helps that more men are willing to lend a hand with housework and child rearing. Even so, men are far more likely than women to have it both ways, both flat-out career and kids. Anthropologist Patricia McBroom, who teaches women's studies at Rutgers, cites research that shows that 60% of executive women have no children, vs. only 3% of their male counterparts.
The men who do juggle a child in one hand and a career in the other can hardly be blamed for feeling a touch of envy toward their fathers, whose role as sole breadwinner entitled them to dinner on the table and uninterrupted sleep at night. "We can't be pioneers without looking wistfully over our shoulders at jobs that seemed easier, when career paths were clear, when women were subservient, when men could commandeer the heights of established power," says Reich with a wry grin. "There is some real tension in our generation over this phenomenon."
Whether by choice or from economic necessity, the Baby Boomers produced in the late 1970s a baby bust. In 1976, when the first Baby Boomers hit 30, the total fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to a historic low of 1.7 children per married woman, less than half that posted by their parents. Furthermore, as many as half the generation's children will wind up in broken homes. As Boomers married in the 1970s, the national divorce rate doubled. For the youngest age group, the divorce rate tripled in a decade. Many women--up to 10% of all female Baby Boomers--are choosing never to marry at all. Indeed, the word spinster has lost its stigma and largely vanished from the vocabulary.