Although these women may feel liberated, what they are actually doing is shifting their obligations onto the rest of us. As an example, I used to enjoy visiting the local library, but some years ago I noticed it was always full of screaming kids. I asked the librarian what was going on, and she told me that the mothers leave their kids at the library and then go do as they please for a few hours, coming back to pick them up later. The librarians had become de facto daycare providers. I actually asked a guy who was rather high up in the Seattle library administration what they intended to do about this problem, and he said they were working on it.
Eventually, they came up with a compromise. Now, there are still kids in the library, but they are mainly playing free video games on the computers, so they aren’t underfoot quite so much. Additionally, for those of us who like quiet libraries, there are a couple small “study rooms” where one can close the door to shut out the babbling. I saw a librarian tell a teenage girl to stop playing her ipod at a high volume once, and the girl refused and threatened to give the librarian a beating. The librarian was a small woman, so she couldn’t do anything about it. The compromise was obviously a failure. I don’t go to libraries much any longer.
When the new Cupertino Library was built, many of these features were introduced -- there is a rather large study room for teenagers. I do remember a librarian expelling some students from the library for being noisy in other areas of the library, though.
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