My review of Megan Basham’s Beside Every Successful Man ran at the American’s website the other day under the title “What Women Want.”

An excerpt: “Basham’s advice to women reveals a blind spot. She praises women who bake cookies for their husbands’ clients, women who do their husbands’ accounting or write their reports, and women who take everything off their husbands’ plates at home so these men can devote themselves fully to achieving professional success. Yet she also devotes a full chapter to lamenting the “work-worship in America these days,” including the rise of the extreme worker, “people characterized by seventy-hour-or-more workweeks, constant availability to address work issues, and little downtime.”

“It never seems to occur to her that one of the reasons corporations demand so much of their workers is that the men who run their offices often have stay-at-home wives clearing their schedules to maximize productivity, in Basham’s words. Because these executives are available 24/7 for work, they expect their people to be available, too. Studies have found that a big reason professional women drop out of the workforce is not that they don’t want to work, but rather that there is insufficient flexibility in their jobs—partly because their male colleagues and bosses have such “supportive” wives that they don’t need flexibility. In other words, the two-people-one-paycheck model Basham extols makes life harder, not only on working moms, but also on men who want to have a balanced life and spend more time with their children.”