The whole of Marcia Angell’s review of Alison Wolf’s The XX Factor is worth careful reading. It’s a detailed sketch of the lives of upper-middle-class working women and the effect their entrance into the workplace has had on marriage and family.

Some of those effects are ironic. Among the points Angell highlights is the theme of Wolf’s subtitle: “How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World.” Angell writes that upper middle class women marry men like themselves, well-educated and successful. This “assortative mating . . . greatly increases the family income, and exacerbates the inequality that plagues the US.” 

Later in the review, she adds, “As men and women in the upper-middle class attain something very close to equality both in their work and at home, they pull away, Wolf writes, from the bottom 80 to 85 percent, where men and women remain segregated at work—in part because of the changes in the upper-middle class. Since upper-middle-class women are working long hours outside the home, someone has to care for their children and clean their houses, and those people are almost always other women. This is what Wolf refers to as the ‘return of the servant classes.’ When I visit my daughter in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in northwest Washington, D.C., I can look out the window early in the morning and watch the nannies arrive while the homeowners leave for work.”