Written by Michael Noer, a senior editor with Forbes.com, it began: “Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”

He went on: “While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.”

Noer’s article was a particularly brutal and highly selective way of summarising recent research, which has revived the long-tarnished concept of the “happy housewife”.

To many readers it was infuriating that a respected magazine that features female leaders of industry and finance on its covers could publish such “retro-nonsense”. Michelle Peluso, chief executive of Travelocity, America’s fifth largest travel agency, said: “This article feels like one that would have been behind the times were it published in 1950, never mind 2006.”

Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist who famously worked as a bunny girl to expose sexism in the 1960s, rallied anew to the cause in Salon.com, where she praised Forbes sarcastically for “saving many women the trouble of dealing with men who can’t tolerate equal partnerships, take care of their own health, clean up after themselves or have the sexual confidence to survive”.

The glamorous Steinem, however, did not marry until she was 66 and does not have children. Struggles over issues such as childlessness and fertility, the “mommy wars” between stay-at-home mothers and working women and the alleged misery of wives who try to juggle home and career have become publishing staples, squarely aimed at the women’s market.

In the tabloids the topic is equally hotly debated. If celebrity magazines are to be believed, the marriage of Hollywood stars Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt foundered partly over Aniston’s desire to pursue a film career before babies. Meanwhile, Britney Spears’s marriage to the dancer Kevin Federline is under scrutiny because she wears the trousers.

So had Noer provoked a tidal wave of anger by telling a few home truths? And was his chief crime the fact that a man was saying it? It did not help his cause that Noer had previously earned his credentials as a male chauvinist pig with an article on the “economics of prostitution” in which he posed the question, “Wife or Whore? The choice is that simple”.

Under pressure from staff and readers, Forbes showed a distinct lack of confidence in Noer’s latest thesis, which was entitled Don’t Marry a Career Woman, by removing the juiciest bits from its website.

A section headlined In Pictures, Nine Reasons to Steer Clear — which included the warning “She is more likely to cheat on you” accompanied by a photograph of a scantily clad woman lying across a man’s lap — was speedily replaced with a riposte by Elizabeth Corcoran, a Forbes executive, wife and mother-of-two. It was headlined: Don’t Marry a Lazy Man.

Gone too was a photo and caption for the claim that “she’ll be unhappy if she makes more than you”, taken from a report by two sociology professors, What’s Love Got to Do with It, published this year in the journal Social Forces. Noer failed to mention that other research suggested “increases in married women’s income may indirectly lower the risk of divorce by increasing women’s marital happiness”.

The much-pilloried Noer has been forbidden by Forbes to give interviews. Yet some of his most controversial assertions, including “You are much less likely to have kids”, had already been made by women. Noer cites research by Sylvia Hewlett in her much-discussed book Baby Hunger, which claims that only 51% of high-achieving women earning more than $100,000 a year have had children by the age of 40.

He might equally have referred to the bestselling book The Bitch in The House, edited by Cathi Hanauer — a collection of essays by career women who write of their rage at dealing with the kids, cleaning up after working husbands and coping with do-nothing men.

There is also To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Your Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, which Virago is bringing out in Britain next month.

In her book Flanagan compares the so-called epidemic of sexless marriages today with the “repressed and much pitied 1950s wives” who were “apparently getting a lot more action”.

“Nowadays, American parents of a certain social class seem squeaky clean, high-achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow — how to pinpoint this? — undersexed,” she writes.

Inevitably much of the debate comes down to personal experience. Molly Jong-Fast, a 27-year-old writer, surprised her friends by getting married in white three years ago and giving birth to a son.

“My experience with stay-at-home moms is that they are more depressed, more lonely, more obsessed with their kids, more unhealthy, more likely to be left by their husbands and more likely to be divorced,” Jong-Fast said. “They are dependent on their husbands for money, and that power balance is the kiss of death. I have my own life and it makes me more desirable to my husband.”

As Noer has found, when men join in the conversation they sound horribly sexist. Yet with women now making up 48% of the American workforce, men are going to have to live with career women, like it or not.

Salon.com suggested last week that the article might just as well have been called, If You Are Really Self-Loathing and Weak, Try to Find Someone Who Doesn’t Work and Will Consent to Live With You Out of Financial Desperation For the Rest of Her Life.

THE RESEARCH

SHE’LL CHEAT ON YOU

A woman is more likely to have an affair if she is better educated than her husband. Work provides chances to meet new lovers

– Adrian J Blow, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2005

SHE’LL DESERT YOU

Marriage to a career women is more likely to end in tears. Women who work longer hours are more prone to divorce, while men’s working hours have no effect

– Dr John H Johnson of Nera Economic Consulting, 2004

SHE WON’T BEAR YOU CHILDREN

A high-flying woman is less likely to have children. Only half of women earning more than £52,000 a year have had childen by the age of 40, compared with 81% of comparable men

– Sylvia Hewlett, author and economist, 2002

KIDS WOULD MAKE HER UNHAPPY

Wealthier couples with children suffer a drop in marital satisfaction three times as great as their less affluent peers. Researchers believe this is because wealthier women are used to “a professional life, a fun, active, entertaining life”

Twenge, Campbell and Foster, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2003

YOUR HOUSE WILL BE DIRTY

A wife earning more than £16,000 a year does 1.9 hours less housework per week. This can be remedied if the husband picks up the vacuum cleaner

– Achen and Stafford, University of Michigan, 2005

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