"You've got a job to do, and you do it well," Paul McCartney croons over the title sequence for the James Bond adventure Live and Let Die. That open "you" is a rare cameo for the James Bond audience. Like us, James Bond has a job to do. After forty-odd years he's still a toiler with no family or hobbies, just endless errands for a boss who barely thanks him for saving the world.... The Bond series is less an escape from work than a mask for it.

Fifty years after one of the most dramatic changes in the economics of the 20th century, the increase in the number and kinds of women in the workplace, Hollywood is still ambivalent and culturally unready to let go of old myths.... Today's mainstream movies don't involve present-day choices, but throwback fantasies, when women had to choose between economic power and relationships.

The only thing keeping me going is the faith I have that something will happen for me, and I will get a job, temporary or permanent, before I no longer have any income. I refuse to believe that I have lived to be 46 years old, only to end up as an unemployed homeless person, with a 19-year-old cat who has been with me all her life.