Compared to their counterparts in many European countries, American women get almost no public support in their struggle to combine work and motherhood. Judging from the dispiriting conservative freak-out over health-care reform, that's unlikely to change any time soon -- one can only imagine the type of demagoguery that would attend any attempt to create French-style state-funded crèches. Yet most American women work, and given the contraction of many male-dominated industries and the fact that more women are attending universities than men, they may soon make up a majority of the employed. In some families, this means men will take care of the kids. But for many, it means that nannies will. Indeed, as Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote in the introduction to their 2003 collection, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy , "Strictly speaking, the presence of immigrant nannies does not enable affluent women to enter the workforce; it enables...