My own mother, a beautiful, uneducated woman from a working-class New York family, and my father, a young southern man from a poor sharecropping family who entered the Marines at the age of 17, represented far more to each other than just romance.

FORBES: What to do when the transformative moment arrives

One woman I encountered in my research, Amanda, faced this problem when she began a new job as a vice president at a Manhattan ad agency.

WSJ: The Tyranny of the Queen Bee