Allison Pearson

The software program for motherhood is impossible to fully download into the male brain. You give them two tasks and they're like, 'I have to change the baby and get the dry cleaning?' ”

Working mothers' laughter comes hardest when our double life is revealed for what it is: a juggling act in which the balls can drop at any time, invariably on our own head. ”

Women now influence the majority of consumer purchases. It is women's votes that will secure victory at the next election, hence the altogether delicious spectacle of Messrs Brown and Cameron vying to tell stories about broken nights and childcare as men once boasted of goals scored or pheasants bagged. ”

I am a passionate devotee of the Howard Hawks' screwball comedies of the 1930s and the 1940s, where I think that the relations between men and women were at their civilized height in terms of banter and exchange of wit and equality. ”

It is customary for the writer to sneer that Hollywood has traduced their book. Well, I adore my film. ”

My child was one of Nature's Tories pitted against a mother who was one of nurture's Lefties: it was no contest. ”

Women run the small country called Home, millions of us do it in our spare time, and no one who doesn't run that small country really knows what it feels like in the dead of night when task lists jitter like tickertape through your seething brain. ”

When we talk about women's struggle to balance their lives, certain men growl, 'If you can't stand the heat, get back to the kitchen.' Men who have never changed a nappy, mainly, and couldn't pick their child's teacher out in a police line-up. ”

I speak as the journalist who, on the first day back at work for 'The Daily Telegraph' after the birth of my daughter, went to interview Tom Hanks with an epaulette of banana sick on my jacket. ”

My ideals told me that men and women could both go out to work and be truly equal. My children told me something more complicated, something I really didn't want to hear. Their need for me was like the need for water or light: it had a devastating simplicity to it. ”