Some things, it seems, are too obvious for even a left-wing sociologist to miss. Or so one gathers from Nannyhood and Apple Pie, a review of The Commercialization of Intimate Life by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Dr. Hochschild naturally refers to feminism as a worthy but “stalled” gender revolution, and blames all problems on capitalism (as opposed to what?). Still, she’s noticed the essential point that others have somehow missed: the actual effect of the feminist movement has been to abolish family life for the sake of fully integrating everyone—men, women and children—into a rational universal system of production and consumption in which third-world women are imported to provide whatever remnants of human closeness are found absolutely essential.