LAST week, George Bush suddenly lost his voice. Three days later, Harvard Business Review found fault with its etherized editorial scissors. Here is a tale of two women who took a tumble, landed on their feet, and just can’t stop smiling! Nor loving!

Communication control freak Karen Hughes, 45, the most powerful woman ever in the history of the White House, is leaving Bush, her universe, for another man — make it two: husband, 63, and son, 15. The dysfunctional duo are the odd balls inside Washington DC’s toploftical beltway and want badly to return home to simple Texas.

The editor of Harvard Business Review, Suzy Wetlaufer, 42, falling incurably in love with her interviewee, the then CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, 66, has invited a revolt in her newsroom and a whole editorial in The New York Times. She has finally packed up her career for lover-boy, to shack together and live happily ever after: “he wants to make me the next Mrs Jack Welch,” she gushed to her gossip-guzzling staffers.

Jack, mind you, is a married man, whose foxiness has certainly rubbed off on Jane, his wife of 13 years, who, aware of the steamy romance between hubby and the editor (she would be eavesdropping on another phone line), blew the whistle on Suzy to her employers at Harvard, and later pulled the plug on their marriage and sued for divorce, demanding her share of $480 million alimony. Not bad, eh?

Two things come to mind right away. First, how come old geysers like Jack Welch, Bill Clinton, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, actor (late) Anthony Quinn and millionaire developer Donald Trump discard their wives to take up with younger women? Their marriage — where wives like Senator Hillary Clinton accept the husband’s infidelity, putting it to a lustful libido — reputation, careers and public image remain intact. (Hoary Pakistani males, by the way, may have broken the American record in marrying/mating young pretty things.)

Second, the playing field for women, far from being even, forces them to make tough choices. Unlike men, they can’t have their cake and eat it too. Steely Karen Hughes, White House speech writer, strategist and advisor, says, “I only hear his (Bush’s) voice in my head” and often “we finish each other’s sentences”. She is walking away from power just because she wants to do a proper job as a mother and a wife! Ever heard of a father making such a sacrifice?

Now consider Suzy’s fall from grace. Just one interview with Jack — the dynamo credited with making General Electric the world’s largest manufacturing, technology, and service company, with revenue of over $100 million — and Suzy, 24 years his junior, fell in love with him. With two Harvard degrees and a $277,000-a-year job, who teaches Sunday School every week, and works out five times a week, is Suzy a man-magnate, a homewrecker or a role model?

But wait, here’s more. Suzy has paid a heavy price for mixing pleasure with business. She has alleged that she also had a relationship with a 22-year-old staff member, and alienated her staffers when she tried to get a raise for him who was living in the basement of her home, and was also doing work at the Harvard Business Review. This revelation added to her being sacked by Harvard last week.

“What’s the big deal, this woman has four kids, and she now wants to marry and settle down,” ask many Americans who are these days pushing a theory that home and family come first for these powerhouses! Author Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, comes as somewhat of a cipher for the obsolescent feminists still ramming their heads into the glass ceiling that keeps them from reaching the top.

When it comes to having a high-powered career and a family, the painful truth is that women in the United States don’t “have it all”. At midlife, a third of American successful women — a category that includes high wage earners across a variety of professions — do not have children. For many, this is not a conscious choice: Indeed, most yearn for motherhood. So finds Harvard-trained economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett.

Hewlett shows us that while women get pulled between the demands of ambitious careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and problems conceiving later in life, their counterparts — high-achieving men — continue to “have it all”. Indeed, the more successful the man, the more likely he is to have a spouse and children, the more socially and morally acceptable it is for him to have extra-marital affairs with babes half his age!

Joan Walsh, editor of Salon.com, throws a torch on her own life: “I am a high-achieving professional who did the right thing, according to Hewlett, and got marriage and motherhood out of the way in my late 20s and early 30s. My daughter is the joy of my life. But I am also a divorced Internet vice-president who works too hard, has only one child, and, at 43, lacks the cozy two-or three-kid nuclear family I wanted — and which, according to the fertility and demographic data Hewlett assembles, I will probably never have.”

America often betrays intellectual weightlessness by going overboard about someone like Hewlett, whose data is definitely not rocket science, but an oversimplistic exposure of a crisis of childlessness among successful women. All she’s done is to declare that professional prestige tends to leave women with empty wombs and lonely hearts. She has wangled cover stories in Time and Newsweek, segments on The Today Show and 60 Minutes and numerous mentions in newspapers nationwide. (I suspect mediocre male chauvinists here are promoting Hewlett’s findings to fumigate these hyper-competitive female dragonflies.)

Even my favourite columnist, Maureen Dowd of NYT, has devoted one full column, relating a recent conversation with a male friend who told her he had once considered dating her, but her job made her too intimidating. “Men, he told me, prefer women who seem malleable and overawed,” she wrote on April 10. “He said I would never find a mate, because if there is one thing men fear, it is a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything?” Ms Walsh of Salon.com could not help sniggering: “Instead of telling him to shove it, Maureen Dowd gave him a whole column to share his verdict with the world. Something is wrong here.”

It must be time to scare women into domestic submission again, concurs writer Michelle Goldberg, “as history shows, childless women in America eventually provoke hysteria, and single females are either pitied, mocked or demonized.”

Meanwhile, women disinterested in holing up at home are getting slammed, ‘80s style. Continues Goldberg, “Witness the growth of widely publicized ‘Bully Broads’ workshops for female executives, where companies like Sun and Intel pay up to $18,000 to have ‘overly assertive women’ workers taught techniques including ‘speaking more softly and deliberately and relying on self-deprecating humour’.”

Men and women, bizarrely bipolar? Are we finally agreed? If not, how else do we explain why professional men don’t suffer parenting pangs, guilt from a long absence from home, and succumb to an infertility epidemic the way women do?