WOMEN's lives have changed more in the past generation than during the previous 2000 years. Today women have choice in their personal lives, their reproductive lives and in careers never before available to them.
But the breadth of the choices now available to them has caused many women to find themselves in genuine state of flux over some of the most important life and lifestyle issues, such as sex, work, love and parenthood.
US feminist Peggy Orenstein is a perfect example of the modern women in a quandary. At 34, already an award-winning writer and speaker on women's issues, she found herself faced with a series of dilemmas she realised were shared by many women of her generation.
She wondered why, at a time when women seemed to have so many choices, she suddenly felt she had none, so she decided to go to the source of the problem, to women themselves. After talking to more than 200 women aged between 25 and 45, Peggy blended their voices into a compelling book called, most appropriately, Flux.
Through these women's voices she looks carefully at what it means to be a woman at the beginning of this new century.
She delves deep into women's lives and choices other women are faced with these days, discussing power and ambition, sex and love, the meaning of motherhood, what it means to be single and childless, and how these things influence the way women make the major decisions in their lives.
SHE also looks at the problems women have as they struggle to live full lives, and try to find a balance between the personal and professional.
This balancing act, says Peggy, is one of the great problems being faced by women today."Sometimes, after weeks of 12-hour days, I'd wonder if I'd made a mistake. Was this the life I wanted to live? I began to question whether my focus on career would keep me from finding lasting love," she said.
This was just the time of the famous Harvard Marriage Study, which said women who were not wed by 30 were doomed to be married only to their work, was released.
The study hit directly at 27-year-old Peggy's secret fears. "I was supporting myself, had plenty of friends, a thriving career. But I felt untethered. Old friends were pairing off. Positive images of single women -- the Mary Richardses (as in the Mary Tyler Moore Show) of my youth who had flourished without husbands -- had disappeared to be replaced by the bunny-boiling harridan from Fatal Attraction," she said.
Then, just as she decided to give relationships a rest for a while, Peggy met her partner Steven and got married, but four years later she found herself at another crossroads: The question of parenthood. "I wanted the richness of motherhood in my life but worried over its costs," she said. So, four years ago, she embarked on interviewing the 200 women to work out what were the key pressures they faced.
Flux is the result of these interviews, a fascinating exploration of the limits women still face at the beginning of the 21st century.
Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World by Peggy Orenstein, Hodder Australia, $21.95.
