You will be hard pressed to read a drearier tale of woe about the fate of women, and specifically unemployed women, than in this account. (Wait, isn’t unemployment around 5.5%? Actually the rate for women is only 4.7%.) The basis of the beef: women are leaving the workforce “on a par with men.” What?! On a par with men, no better and no worse? The outrage of it! Is this what the women’s movement was all about–to have economic performance and employment on a par with men? Oh, it was. I thought.

Here is the nub of it all:

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years.

And on it goes. The examples are equally puzzling. There is the woman who left the workforce and is now home schooling her kids. Hmm. Is this a good or bad thing? (Unclear, but she sure does sound like the gas tax holiday would be a winner with her.) Then there is the woman who left work, moved closer to her sister, got part-time work and is volunteering with the hope of a paying job. Are these really the best horror stories they could come up with?

Still, with unemployment for women below 5% I suppose you have to think up an angle that combines the savagery of the George W. Bush economy with the subjugation of women. Lacking decent facts to tell that story they came up with this one: the unfairness of equality. Listen, there are lots of economic stories to be told, and one wonders why, in an economy supposedly as bad as the Great Depression, the New York Times would have to go to such great lengths to inflate something as innocuous as this into a front page story. Don’t they have better things to do, like rewrite Republicans’ op-eds?