When I read the Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, it was a punch in the gut -- what Friedan wrote about, was the reason for my mother's suicide.

Bright, but from a depression-blighted family and a woman, so college was out of the question, my mother scored so high on federal exams that she became the head of the local employment office.

And then the men came back from World War II, she married my father (not so fresh from shell shock) and my mother was relegated to a lonely kitchen, as a baby machine.