But here, where? Here, in this crammed school kitchen, standing under an overhead rack loaded with pots and pans, surrounded by bags of Wonder Bread and industrial size bottles of ketchup. Next to her several other women are scraping the very last bit of price tag off the bottom of plastic punch bowls ($10, Party Warehouse), sweating every last domestic detail:
Two doilies on the cookie tray or three?
Judith Warner signs copies of her book at Washington's private Sheridan School. Many of the women she interviewed live in Washington's upscale neighborhoods.
(Photos Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)
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Coffee urns plugged in now or later?
White tablecloths or blue?
Tulips in two vases or one?
Eighty cups or 100?
Over the past century the type -- the privileged suburban mother, looking perfect but feeling hollow -- has emerged every generation or so asking for understanding, for what she's lost, for all the work she does. This is Mrs. Dalloway, and the wives lurking in John Cheever's novels. This is Gloria Steinem's woman matching slipcover materials, chauffeuring Cub Scouts and Brownies, "afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?' " This is the TV housewife "cleaning the fridge or the stove or the sink with a lighthearted smile and a friendly wink," in Carol Channing's mocking voice. Or more recently, Lynette, the ex-career woman raising four brats on "Desperate Housewives."
They want to break free, or feel whole, or at least feel a little less misunderstood. But then a generation later they cycle back, feeling just as empty or raging, evoking only a fleeting sympathy, if any at all. History, it seems, is doomed to repeat itself and women are powerless to resist.
"There are just these things you find yourself doing," says Susan Kaplan, one of the mothers in the kitchen. "You hear the art camp sign-up starts at 9, so you make sure you get there by 8. I mean, why do we care so much about the stupid art camp? Why? Why? Why?"
"What did they used to say?" adds Stone. "Just say no! But we just can't seem . . ." and she trails off.
"What else can we do?" some newcomers ask. "Well, the chairs in the gym are kind of icky," says Miller. "You want to squirt and spray?" So she ships them off with a rag and a bottle of Formula 409 to spend the next half-hour wiping down nearly 200 perfectly clean chairs.
In a certain slice of Washington it's nearly impossible to avoid a conversation about Warner's book these days. The book is based on interviews with women all over the country, but the heart of the book is drawn from conversations with groups of women she gathered together in Washington, mostly in that rarefied strip off Connecticut Avenue running from Cleveland Park up to Chevy Chase, where Warner lives. "Here in Washington," she writes, "I have seen much of America at its worst: at its most competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralizing and just plain mad."
To research the book she contacted women she knew from Murch Elementary, a public school her daughter attended for a short time, or Sheridan, or local preschools, and asked them about their frustrations. These were forums in which women could "vent," she says, and get some relief from seeing their own struggles echoed, and placed in a larger context -- akin to the "consciousness-raising groups" from the '60s and '70s.
In the book she urges women to band together and resist "buying into the media-stoked Mommy Wars," since, she argues, working and non-working mothers are subject to the same insane drive to perfection. In life, however, the book seems to have stoked its own mommy wars in this tight little circle, only with the categories more precisely and bitingly defined.
