Not to be missed: This whine by best-selling author Judith Warner on the New York Times op-ed page about her oppressed-housewife life in Washington, D.C.’s most expensive neighborhood. It’s priceless. Ms. Warner, by the way, is a regular blogger for the Times (you’ve got to pay $$$ to read her, so I’m not bothering with a link), and her book “Pefect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” was featured on the cover of Newsweek last year. She also lives in Cleveland Park, the plushes part of Washington, D.C. But according to Warner, her life, and that of her Cleveland Park friends, is as oppressed (by those male chauvinist pigs, their own husbands, who pay the freight) and miserable as it was when Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique”:


“The outside world has changed enormously for women in these past 40 years. But home life? Think about it. Who routinely unloads the dishwasher, puts away the laundry and picks up the socks in your house? Who earns the largest share of the money? Who calls the shots?


“The answer, for a great many families, is the same as it was 50 years ago.


“The fact is, no matter how time- or sleep-deprived they are, working women today do upwards of 70 percent of household chores for their families. The gender caste system is still alive and well in most of our households. After all, no one really wants to do the scrubbing and folding and chauffeuring and mopping and shopping and dry-cleaner runs. (I’m leaving child-minding out of this; in a happily balanced life, it doesn’t feel like a chore.) Once the money for outsourcing runs dry, it’s the lower-status member of the household who does these things. It is the lower-status member of the household who is called a ‘nag’ when she repeatedly tries to get other members of the household to share in doing them.”


Gee, boo-hoo! As the “lower-status member” of my own household, I ask Warner: Doesn’t all of this have something to do with the fact that maybe women care more about whether the laundry gets folded and the floors are clean? But nooo, says Warner; it’s all society’s fault:


“[T]he enduring failure of our social institutions to realize the larger promises of the women’s movement is something we can address, straightforwardly and comparatively easily.”


Yes, let’s pass some federal laws requiring men to do 50 percent of the housework and allowing no man to earn more than any woman.


I’m with John Podhoretz, who alerted me to Warner’s column on National Review Online:


“Good God. Don’t people like Judith Warner know how they sound?”