Even late marriage and childbirth didn't seem to deter this new young population of women from continuing to hold down paid jobs.

Something untoward was happening to middle-class American women, an undercurrent of i change was seeping through heir ideas about duties and obligations as mothers, eroding their desire to conform to madonna-like models of unconditional devotion to the young child to adapt a more managerial concept of mother as coordinator and motivator of her child's activities and interests.

Determination, the benign cousin of defiance, drove Lucy to continue enlarging her family to compensate for her lost children.

Motherhood, as our nation, has always know it, was being practiced in a bold new way, preempted by the priority of the regular paycheck.