I hate to mention it on Mother’s Day, but America’s bookshelves have lately been filling up with a spate of decidedly unfilial tomes. Baby Love, Rebecca Walker’s recent account of pregnancy and childbirth, includes a stinging criticism of her own mother, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer and feminist Alice Walker, for assorted maternal crimes. To Hell with All That, Caitlin Flanagan’s retro ode to the joys of housewifery, features a melancholy description of how “miserable” and “frightening” her mother’s decision to go back to work was: Ms Flanagan, the youngest in the family, was 12 years old at the time. A pioneer of this genre, Danielle Crittenden, perfectly captured its cri de guerre with the title of her 1999 book What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us.

These daughters of the Gloria Steinem generation (the latter is, in fact, Rebecca Walker’s godmother) are vocally ambivalent about their mothers’ pioneering fight to establish a place for women outside the home. From the left, Walker complains that “mine is the first generation of women to grow up thinking of children as optional”. From the right, Flanagan, Crittenden and a bevy of bloggers are dismayed that when women do opt to have kids, the 1970s feminist ideal of combining them with a job turns out to be really tough to achieve.