What does a retired feminist philosopher do? I was lying in bed watching “Sex and the City” one night in 2002, and Charlotte, the WASP Princess, was scheming to get her wedding announcement into The New York Times "Sunday Styles" section. Eureka! (I love that word) I had my next book: whatever happened to the couples who announced their marriages in the Sunday New York Times, say ten years ago? What kind of marriages did couples make, forty years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique?

Turns out, at least the couples from the Sunday Styles mostly make utterly conventional ones. The Feminine Mystique author Betty Friedan might as well have stayed in Westchester County, for all the difference feminism made in the lives of these well-educated wives, 50 percent home full time with their babies and 35 percent more home part of the time. None of the men were home at all. And the women said they chose it.

What does this mean? Why did it happen? What is to be done? Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World is the answer to those questions. Get to Work paints a picture of the new stay at home moms, from the elite Brides of the Times to the most modest bloggermom to the anonymous women in the U.S. census. It traces the history of a movement that failed to address the most important question of the family and how the unchanged family prevents women from gaining access to social and economic power. It shows how the unjust family prevents women from getting to work.

Most importantly, Get to Work shows why getting to work matters in a full, flourishing life, according to any standard of flourishing Western philosophy has produced so far. It offers a Plan to Get To Work, through education, strategic planning and sensible family bargaining. When I first went public with these ideas, the internet went ballistic, and the media have been covering it nonstop ever since. Great change is afoot.

Enough of this: let’s get to work!