I have a friend who jokes that she has become, at 40, everything that her ambitious 20-year-old self would have considered her worst nightmare. She is married with three children, lives in a big house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and drives an SUV.

She's no Martha Stewart, however. Stop by on a weekday afternoon and you won't see her brandishing a glue gun or rearranging her furniture. More likely, she's lounging in her garden with a book and a glass of Chardonnay while her youngest climbs a play set. Not so long ago, this woman's life would have provoked shudders among her friends. Today, she is on the cutting edge. Almost four decades after Betty Friedan helped to launch the modern women's movement with The Feminine Mystique, a strange reversal is taking place. Everywhere you turn, the old-fashioned, full-time mother at home is being celebrated -- as fashion icon, as status symbol, as sex symbol.

Those luscious mums of Wisteria Lane in the television show Desperate Housewives are the most recent and glamorous examples of a trend among American women. The percentage of mothers in the workforce with children under one fell for the first time in 25 years in 2000, and those whose participation in the labour force dropped fastest were well-educated, well-paid women.

This trend has provoked the usual amount of media handwringing. A reporter recently called me to discuss the "serious problem'' of women "not getting enough "me-time.' "

But the dirty secret is, for all the noise about the stress of being "trapped'' with children, more women are choosing to be at home and are happier for it. Perhaps that's why Darla Shine's new book, Happy Housewives, is so refreshing. She gives voice to the secretly growing consensus that being a housewife is a potentially fulfilling lifestyle.

To be fair, every generation of women faces its own set of issues, and the modern-day ones relate more to peculiar, psychological stresses than, say, the physical stress of a woman beating her own laundry and living in a cabin. The laundry beater was not plagued with worry about whether she was a "good'' mother. She was yelling at her kids to churn the butter faster, and praying that they would not drop dead from catching cold.

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