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BETWEEN THE LINES by K. C. Cole

BETWEEN THE LINES

By

Pub Date: May 14th, 1982
Publisher: Doubleday

From the author of the well-received What Only a Mother Can Tell You About Having a Baby: easygoing essays--some from Newsday, The Washington Post, and other sources--on what it means to straddle the liberation fence. ""Few women I know,"" says Cole, ""want to grow up to be carbon copies of either Gloria Steinem or Marabel Morgan. Yet that's exactly the choice we're so often asked to make."" Here she endlessly debates the options--in the categories of marriage, motherhood, and career--and repetitively laments the prevalence of narrowed views among her contemporaries, Feminists and corporate managers, she finds, are united in one thing: they are relentlessly anti-motherhood. But if no proponent of the Superwoman myth, Cole can at least manage child and career--and an occasional rice casserole--with the support of husband and housekeeper. And though she still bristles at the physics professor who asks, ""Well, K.C., what do the women think of Carl Sagan?,"" she also protests loudly that babies have gotten a bad press, and that some locales (Washington, D.C., for instance) offer more in the way of homey surroundings than actual career fulfillment (enter the frustrations of bureaucracy). Most of this is serious in tone with an occasional wry twist; yet the oddities of a book promotion tour and the waywardness of husbands who ruin the laundry predominate over issues such as abortion (on which she pleads for moderation). A nice book for random dipping by middle-of-the-road readers.