I am so mad.

I just got off the phone with my oldest daughter. She is in her late 20s and she is home with an 18-month-old son, and since she was 18 months old herself, nothing has changed.

She is bored. She is lonely. She is working from home, trying to type with one hand while holding a sick, whiny baby with the other. She thinks little Felix would really like day care; he is a sociable person and he’s kind of bored himself.

But day care is hard to find and expensive. There aren’t any jobs out there at the moment that would pay her enough to make it feasible.

She was telling me about a book she recently read, called “Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life” by a woman named Faulkner Fox. It’s about a young, intelligent woman trying to cope with the isolation, boredom and loss of respect that (still!) comes with that first baby. All of a sudden, her husband’s work is more important than hers. All of a sudden, it’s her job to keep the house clean, keep the baby happy, keep the family fed.

All of a sudden, she’s listening to a man say “I don’t know what you do all day” and “I wish I could trade places with you.” All of a sudden, she’s a walking cliche.

Wasn’t my generation supposed to solve this problem? Where did we go wrong?

Let me count the ways.

First of all, with all the talk of budget cutting in the air today, it seems almost quaint, doesn’t it, to be talking about day care? Which of us would have thought, back there in the 1970s, that 30 years down the line we’d be trying to save Social Security?

In a book published nearly 20 years ago, British author Sylvia Ann Hewlett argued that American feminists got it wrong from the get-go. While European women fought for workplace rights and social services (and won), their American sisters emphasized equal rights, sexual liberation and symbolic gestures like the right to the honorific “Ms.”

The result, Hewlett argued, was that European women’s lives changed dramatically, as they won equal pay, state-supported child care and generous family leave. I didn’t agree with everything in her book at the time, but she had a point — and still does.

American women got snookered by American individualism. Rather than pursuing communal goals, they went for careers and self-actualization. Sometimes the careers materialized, sometimes not, and sometimes halfway (remember the glass ceiling?) Neither of those things helped much once they started having babies.

Isn’t it amazing that as more and more of us attend college and graduate and professional schools, we still lag far behind Europeans in representation in high political offices? Here’s an irony for you: The new constitutions of both Afghanistan and Iraq contain provisions aiming to place women in at least 25 percent of the seats in their legislative bodies. Guess what that figure is here in the Congress of the U.S.A? A big, fat 14 percent.

We rank 57th among 119 countries for the percentage of women in lower houses of parliament, way, way behind all the Scandinavian countries, Spain, Belgium and Costa Rica. And while the gap between women’s and men’s incomes narrowed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that was partly because men’s real incomes fell by 5 percent between 1989 and 1996, while women’s rose by the same rate.

Hewlett also argues that in other industrialized countries, women used the labor movement to better their lot, demanding equal representation and more female-friendly policies in unions. Here, practically the whole workforce bailed out of the union movement entirely.

So here I sit in my office, a mixture of sympathy and outrage, listening to my daughter tell a tale of woe I could have spoken myself nearly 30 years ago.

I swallow hard. “Have you ever come across a book called ‘The Women’s Room’?” I ask her.

No, she says. Never heard of it.