Danielle Crittenden doesn't like being labeled, nor does she like being put in a political or ideological box based on her children or career – or lack of either. As a stay-at-home mother with a successful writing career, Crittenden has taken on the task of exploring the difficult choices faced by modern women, which she has done through fiction.

Her book, Amanda Bright@home (Warner Books, 2003), originally serialized by the Wall Street Journal, is a snapshot of a year in the life of a college-educated woman, Amanda Bright, who has left the workforce to take care of her children. Her decision was prompted by the same type of guilt every mother who ever dropped her child off at daycare has experienced. Unfortunately, with Amanda's husband, Bob Clark, in a low-paying position at the Justice Department, the financial squeeze put on them by trying to live on one paycheck comes with its own load of guilt.

Crittenden uses Bright's situation to take a look at many of the issues that face families of young children today, not only financial, but social. It's sure to be a polarizing book for advocates on both sides of the daycare versus parental care debate.

An Unwitting Activist
This is not the first time Crittenden has stirred up debate on this subject. When she was 24 she wrote a controversial magazine article that challenged feminist notions about what, ideologically, made a woman a feminist. She was alarmed by the ongoing idea that a woman, in order to be a "real" feminist, also had to be a liberal.

"The women's movement was becoming highly politicized and I couldn't identify with it at all," says Crittenden. "I felt that the movement was not recognizing all women, and I basically just wrote a very straightforward article with that theme. I would have taken great issue even if the problem was an extreme right wing agenda."

Challenging this political stereotyping was Crittenden's introduction into a public examination of women's issues; it was only later, after she married journalist David Frum and gave birth to her first child, Miranda, that she entered into the classic work/baby/motherhood dilemma.

"After I had a child, I realized that [dilemma] was the center of everything," says Crittenden. "I tried to look at it as an outsider and tried to look at the truth. That often means challenging what has been the feminist status quo."

Gaining an Audience
Crittenden went on to explore the subject much more thoroughly in 1999 in her book What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman (Simon & Schuster, 1999; Touchstone, 2000). It was a polarizing work, challenging, as it did, the idea that career equals happiness for everyone.

The book sparked a heated debate. Feminists assailed it as an assault on feminism and the gains feminism has made in career and social equality. Others defended the book as taking a realistic look at how women who focus on career early in their lives can often look up in their 30s or 40s and realize that some family choices are now closed to them.

However, Crittenden says, the debate is not over family versus career, it's about finding a balance and being able to talk about it beyond politics and ideology. To underscore the difficulty of finding this balance, Crittenden decided that creating a fictional protagonist who actually faced this issue would bring the issue to a wider audience of women. In doing so, she follows in the footsteps of some of the earliest feminist theorists who disseminated the debate over the place of women and motherhood in society via the genre of fiction.

Finding the Balance
In Amanda Bright@home, Crittenden takes an unsparing look at the difficulties of both being a stay-at-home mother and of choosing a career. While a career is fulfilling in its own way, what mother has not felt as if her heart is being torn out when she drops off a tearful child at daycare at 7 in the morning? The alternative, however, can be mind numbing, as the character of Amanda illustrates after the millionth repetition of Itsy Bitsy Spider with her son.

"Growing up, women of my generation were taught that if you weren't working you were nothing," says Crittenden. "The younger generation, however, doesn't think working is glamorous, nor is it the new frontier. They all know they have to work, so it's becoming more important to find a balance between career and raising children. We've been so constrained by the idea that our mothers and grandmothers fought for this 'right' that we feel guilty no matter what we do."

In Crittenden's case, she did have a mother who could do it all without guilt. Divorced when her children were very young, Yvonne Crittenden went back to work as a journalist. Taking summers off to be with her children, Yvonne made real economic sacrifices, but never sacrificed her obligation to be there when her children needed her.

"My mother has always been someone for me that could do it all well," says Crittenden. "While she always had a struggle for balance, she enjoyed her work and it wasn't just something she did for money. She always managed to satisfy herself and be there for us and she's set the model for me."

Crittenden, too, has managed to have both children and career. However, like her mother, Crittenden is a writer and journalist, and this is a job that, traditionally, allows more flexibility than many careers. More common are women like the fictional Amanda Bright whose careers don't allow them the flexibility to work from home.

In Crittenden's case, she tries to arrange her days to work at least three to four hours a day. Although she is able to do so from home, she still tries to look at the issues from a journalist's point of view. She considers herself an "inadvertent activist," but there's no doubt that she's trying to take an honest look at the extremely difficult choices women have to make.

She likes the way she addressed the issue through the mind and mouth of one of her best characters in Amanda Bright@home, Liz, Amanda's earth mother friend. Liz says that motherhood is not a phase to be got through – you have to learn to accept it and value what we do as mothers.

Working out these new households is the key to balancing social equality with our obligation toward our children. While there are no easy answers, as long as people like Crittenden continue to ask the hard questions, we will be a step closer to finding that important balance.