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LEAD: BETTY TURNER, THE FIRST WOMAN to serve as Mayor of Corpus Christi, Tex., is munching Gulf shrimp and having a minor disagreement with her husband, Jack. She says he feels left out when she sits on the dais at major dinners. He says he doesn't mind, because for years she did the same whenever he received an award for his work as an architect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LEAD: LEONARD A. LAUDER, president and chief executive officer of the Estee Lauder cosmetics empire, is barreling through a Bullock's department store in Southern California, an entourage of a dozen trying to keep pace. It is the sixth store he has visited today to critique the way his products are displayed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LEAD: FOR THE LONGEST TIME, THE ''60 Minutes'' regular Ed Bradley would not eat shrimp. In fact, he could barely stand to look at the stuff, an aversion that lingered from the time he spent peeling the tiny creatures in his father's Detroit restaurant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LEAD: HALSTON, THE LEGENDARY fashion designer, sits in the two-story living room of his multimillion-dollar town house, his face slicked with bronzing gel. He wears a black turtleneck, black slacks and red blazer, the outfit that was his signature when he was America's foremost fashion designer. A fire fills the fireplace, white orchids fill the entry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TESSIE FLORENCE HAS BECOME an international matchmaker. Each month, working from her airy four-bedroom house in Santa Maria, Calif., the 42-year-old woman selects 224 photographs from the thousands she receives from Asian women looking for American husbands. In a home office complete with a photocopier and typesetter, she compiles a catalogue of those women and sends it, for a fee, to thousands of men in the United States and Europe who are seeking Asian brides. It is a system that Mrs. Florence can personally endorse: she came to America as a mail-order bride. Like a majority of the women who permit their photographs to appear in marriage-agency catalogues, she grew up in the Philippines, surrounded by the poverty that helped fuel the recent popular uprising that overthrew President Ferdinand E. Marcos. Faced with the prospect of marrying a man chosen for her by her mother, she decided instead to answer an ad placed in a local newspaper by Lou Florence, an American engineer who was looking for a pen pal who was ''sincere, honest, faithful and marriage-minded.'' They exchanged letters daily, tapes twice a week, and were married in Las Vegas in 1980. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AT THE START OF THIS DECADE, three perfumers took a look at the American woman and decided who she was and what new scent would best suit her. None of the visions were the same. Calvin Klein's cosmetics group saw a sexy, bewitching woman, one who leaves a trail of men behind her. Chanel saw a sophisticated yet sensual woman, with a sense of humor about herself. Estee Lauder, in turn, saw a romantic, feminine woman, who wanted to return to a more old-fashioned time. In comment on the chameleonlike abilities of each woman or, perhaps, the melting-pot qualities of women as a group, each seems to be right; the different perfumes created by the three, which were introduced last year, are selling well. Obsession by Calvin Klein is an aggressive, earthy fragrance; Coco by Chanel is a refined, woodier one, and Beautiful by Estee Lauder is light and floral, with a touch of citrus and spice. The stories of the selling of these fragrances form a textbook lesson in the marketing of a new perfume, which, in essence, is the marketing of the ephemeral. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CORRECTION APPENDED O.K., then, I say, almost begging at this point, almost to the point of tears, is there anyone I can talk to who might see what I've been through and understand? And here's where I say: ''Do you know what Twitter is? Because I have over a million followers on Twitter. If I say something about my terrible experience on Twitter, do you think someone will help me?'' And she says in the most condescending tone and hiss ever uttered: ''Yes, I know what Twitter is. And no, that will not matter.'' AUG. 28, 2009, Dooce.com The washing machine at Heather Armstrong's Salt Lake City home -- as millions of her followers already know -- is a Maytag. To be specific, it's a Performance series 4.4-cubic-foot-I.E.C.-capacity front-load steam washer that retailed for $1,599 and that she and her husband, Jon, bought on sale for $1,300, plus the 10-year warranty. They made the purchase near the end of her second pregnancy, a pre-emptive strike against the mountain of soiled onesies that accumulate when a newborn joins the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remember Maslow's Hierarchyof Needs? You learned about it in your intro psych course: a neat and tidy pyramid, with fulfillment of ''physiological needs'' at its base, then things like ''safety,'' ''love,'' ''belonging'' and ''esteem'' stacked on top, all capped by ''self-actualization.'' A group of academic psychologists have redesigned the nearly 70-year-old triangle. Most notably they have knocked ''self-actualization'' off the pinnacle and replaced it with ''parenting.'' Right below, they have added ''mate retention'' and ''mate acquisition.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CORRECTION APPENDED Everywhere of late, people are saying they are sorry. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for one, after talking ill of his commander in chief. Or the BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, apologizing for the destruction caused by his company's oil well. Or Representative Joe Barton apologizing to Hayward and then apologizing for that apology. And these were but the most recent mea culpas (or, at least, culpas, some with very little mea). There was also the pope's, for the pain caused to Irish parishioners by pedophile priests; Prime Minister David Cameron's, for the murder by British soldiers of Irish protesters on Bloody Sunday 38 years ago; a Major League umpire for calling a runner safe when he should have been out in the ninth inning, thus depriving a pitcher of a perfect game; a parade of athletes and politicians for using steroids or breaking their marriage vows; and the occasional carmaker for not acting quickly enough to repair faulty systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My mother has a sly way of backing into major announcements. ''I'm renovating my kitchen'' was her way of introducing the fact that she and her beau were moving in together several years after my father died. A year or so later she said, ''I'm spending the morning finishing paperwork, so this afternoon we can go ring shopping,'' which was her way of warning that a sapphire solitaire would soon grace her ring finger. But about one thing she is most direct. ''We are not getting married,'' declares the woman who chose a teaching career over law school back in the 1950s because her mother warned that a new bride would be too busy to become a lawyer -- and who was none too pleased when I briefly lived with a boyfriend when I was in college. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the years, as a parade of powerful male figures (mostly politicians, with the exception of one particular golfer whom we treat like a world leader) have been caught with women who were usually younger and always less powerful than they, the question has often been raised: Why don't women gamble their political and personal futures like this? Is it because powerful women don't cheat? Or is it just that they don't get caught? Is it because the May-December equation sizzles only when he's December? Or because there are not yet enough women out there yet with real clout? It is tempting, on this day of love and lust, to think we've found some answers in the tale of Iris Robinson -- yes, Mrs. Robinson -- the 60-year-old member of Parliament whose husband is the first minister of Northern Ireland. Last month the BBC revealed her affair with a 19-year-old. Her lover was the son of her local butcher, whose deathbed wish was that she ''look after'' the boy, and so she did, financing his small cafe during their seven-month liaison with $80,000 supplied by local developers and supposedly taking an $8,000 kickback. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Back before theOprah interview and the resignation as governor of Alaska, before Tina Fey's impersonation and the announcement of Bristol's pregnancy, way back to the day John McCain named his running mate, Lisa Copeland was a Sarah Palin fan. ''When she gave her convention speech, I sat in my living room and wept,'' says Copeland, a lifelong Republican and Texas native, who is a founder of a nonprofit group, the Project 19 Foundation, to move more women into political and professional leadership roles. ''She was my age, she looks like me. I really thought she would save the party.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has been apparent for a while now that we live in child-centric times. We approach parenting with a single-mindedness that baffles our own parents, and certainly their parents, who thought children should be seen and not heard. We think it's just fine to put our kids ahead of our careers, our relationships, our social lives, and even if we aren't doing so, everyone around us seems to be. We demand that public policy -- on health care, or education, or stimulus money -- consider the needs of children as surely as it does the needs of doctors, teachers and businesses. (I am not saying that public policy makers always respond, mind you, but ''what about the children?'' is certainly a rallying cry.) We devour research on how to build our children's self-esteem, to keep them from being bullied and to expand their intellects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Corrections Appended At first blush, the history of women in the workplace seems a trajectory of success. From the assumption that they would be secretaries to the expectation that they can be C.E.O.'s, they have crashed through ceilings (though not enough of them), made workplaces more flexible (not completely, but significantly) and transformed the face of work. They have gone from holding 34.9 percent of all jobs 40 years ago to 49.8 percent today. They are on track to hold more than half of them any moment now; it might have happened while you were reading this. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Remember the concept of ''sisterhood''? That quaint relic of an idea that women owed it to other women to crash through ceilings and navigate a male world? It just might be taking new root in a most unexpected place -- among women with money. There are more women controlling more wealth in the U.S. than ever before. (Of those in the wealthiest tier of the country -- defined by the I.R.S. as individuals with assets of at least $1.5 million -- 43 percent are women.) And unlike the women who preceded them -- old-school patrons who gave to the museum and the symphony and their dead husbands' alma maters -- these givers are more likely to use their wealth deliberately and systematically to aid women in need. To appreciate the magnitude of this change, go back 150 years or so to the women's suffrage movement. Back to when one of its leaders, Matilda Joslyn Gage, lamented: ''We have yet to hear of a woman of wealth who has left anything for the enfranchisement of her sex. Almost every daily paper heralds the fact of some large bequest to colleges, churches and charities by rich women, but it is proverbial that they never remember the woman suffrage movement that underlies in importance all others.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Read between the lines of a recent study out of Australia and you can see hints of a coming shift in the gender conversation. Researchers at the University of Queensland found that children born to older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads. Data they analyzed from more than 33,000 American children showed that the older the man when a child is conceived, the lower a child's score is likely to be on tests of concentration, memory, reasoning and reading skills, at least through age 7. It was a small difference -- just a few I.Q. points separated a child born to a 20-year-old and a child born to a 50-year-old. But it adds weight to a new consensus-in-the-making: there is no fountain of youth for sperm, no ''get out of aging free'' card. The little swimmers, scientists are finding, one study at a time, get older and less dependable along with every other cell in the male body. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ours is a generation of parents obsessed with parenting -- devouring books about it, blogging about it, turning it into a competitive sport. So it's not surprising that President Obama's time in the White House looks like some kind of public experiment in child-rearing. We are intrigued by the first family not only because their children are adorable and so excited about getting a puppy and meeting the Jonas Brothers but also because our president seems to be such a good father -- loving but not a pushover, thrilled that he now has a job where he can be with the girls for breakfast and dinner, strict about their chores, slightly cranky when their school is canceled ''because of what? Some ice?'' He seems like such a good father, in fact, that many of us began expecting him to be our parent, too. What is good governing if not good parenting -- what with providing a moral compass, negotiating bickering between red and blue siblings and making sure the spinach gets eaten before we indulge in dessert? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Outside Philadelphia, a lawyer named Whitney Hoffman is wrestling with her resume. She barely worked a full year as a lawyer after graduating from Penn State 14 years ago, taking what she calls a ''mom sabbatical'' to raise her sons, who are now 10 and 13. Not that she sat around eating bonbons during those years. She researched a book on public-assembly-facility law being written by a local attorney, served on the board of a local public-service organization, helped run the community education program for her son's school, created a biweekly podcast on learning disabilities and organized a number of conferences, called PodCamp, to teach new-media skills. ''It's not that I don't have experience,'' she says, ''but I worry that I'll sit across the desk at an interview, and they'll say, 'What are you experienced for?' '' Now let's move 100 miles north, to Manhattan, where another lawyer, somewhat older and decidedly wealthier, has also been looking to land a new job. A graduate of Columbia Law School, she never really practiced, either but wrote a number of books, on privacy law and the Constitution. She has served on boards -- those of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation -- where those who worked with her agree that she was hands-on and not just window decoration. And she helped turn around fund-raising for New York City's schools, raising $70 million for cutting-edge programs. She did all this while also being on ''mom sabbatical'' to raise her three children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nearly five years ago, my husband was offered a prestigious, challenging plum of a job in another country. At the time, my father was dying, and my older son, suffering from debilitating migraines, was struggling in school. Sometimes parents decide that what is tempting, even perfect, for them is just not right for their family. My husband turned down the job. I didn't talk much about the decision at the time. I felt guilty that my husband had to give up something he would have loved in part because I couldn't handle it, and I carried a vague shame that other families could have toughed this out but that ours was too fragile. It's hard to talk about what you are not proud of. None of this fit with my view of who I thought I should be -- an unflappable, charge-ahead type, able to roll with whatever life delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On her first day back to work after a four-month maternity leave, Amy Vachon woke at dawn to nurse her daughter, Maia. Then she fixed herself a healthful breakfast, pumped a bottle of breast milk for the baby to drink later in the day, kissed the little girl goodbye and headed for the door. But before she left, there was one more thing. She reached over to her husband, Marc, who would not be going to work that day in order to be home with Maia, and handed him the List. That's what they call it now, when they revisit this moment, which they do fairly often. The List. It was nothing extraordinary -- in fact it would be familiar to many new moms. A large yellow Post-it on which she had scribbled the ''how much,'' ''how long'' and ''when'' of Maia's napping and eating. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]