Sandra Tsing Loh writes a scathing review of Mommy Wars, a new book by Leslie Morgan Steiner. I know nothing about Steiner, except for one random blog post I caught in which she praises her children for being so blessedly independent, unlike the coddled children of full time parents. In real life, I don’t see any women bitching each other out like that, and I make proclamations like “mommy wars are a media myth.” Then I read this stuff. I guess Steiner is making a buck by all the mommy war crap and needs to fuel the fire. Maybe that blog post wasn’t representative, but that’s what I caught.

I love that there is actually a war about whether or not there is a war.

Loh’s biggest gripe about the book is that the authors in this edited book are all loaded. These wealthy women have only choices and no forces pushing them one way or another. Yet, they still moan and whine.

… it’s a given today, in non-zine, non-blog, hardcover-anthology women’s writing, that “Everymother” implicitly means “every mother from the well-defined e-mail list of people like us” — media professionals who have now become their own class and tribe. A female member of the mediacracy can now seize the bully pulpit for all women without needing to give even lip service to those women whose lives, unglamorously enough, are more blue collar than blue state.

Loh mentions the many women who have to work to put food on the table. Their job choices are unglamorous and monotonous and underpaid. Job moves are understood to be a sacrifice for the family, rather than a him versus her struggle.

Not only is there is no reflection about other non-rich moms or some effort to find a commonalities amongst all women, but there is shameless recitations of material possessions. Label dropping that would make Bret Easton Ellis proud.

But what gets Loh the most is the weird pairing of feminism with professional success, ala Hirshman.

But Steiner goes further, arguing that although stay-at-home moms do, in their own intimate way, add value to their communities, “without the money, the power, and the loudspeaker successful careers bring, women will never have the collective bargaining power to make the world better for ourselves, our children, and all the women who can’t leave abusive husbands, the ones who wear veils, the moms who earn less than minimum wage cleaning houses and don’t have choices about birth control or prenatal care or any other kind of care.”

Again, to slow down and unpack (although it’s almost enough just to note the delicious, vaguely hand-waving phrase “the ones who wear veils”): Steiner’s enumeration of “money, power, loudspeaker” suggests that little good can ever be done by women suffering any combination of poverty, obscurity, or — most horrific of all — lack of media access.

Leaving that aside, the question remains: Once they have the proverbial loudspeaker, how much social good do affluent, successful, powerful women really do (other than treating their wonderful full-time nannies like members of the family)? I didn’t notice any successful career women in the book mentioning specific campaigns they’re waging on behalf of the less fortunate, nor did I catch to what women’s or children’s charities proceeds from the book will be given. (I would love to know the inner dynamics of this collective-bargaining arrangement of which Steiner speaks, whereby a turbo woman’s pursuit of a glamorous career somehow makes the world better for her minimum-wage sisters.) These days, I suppose, it is feminist enough an action to edit a women’s anthology, get on Oprah, sell a million copies, and make a pile of cash, all of which you keep, presumably so that your investment-banker husband can’t move the family again.

You know what? That’s so good that I’m going to end this here.