It may be 30 years since the Sexual Discrimination Act, but just how many options are there for mothers in the workplace.

Congratulations to fashion designer Phoebe Philo. Maybe she'll make motherhood respectable. The 31-year-old British designer has been amazingly successful as creative director of the French fashion label Chloe. She won awards, acclaim, fame. The world is her oyster. But she has resigned, because she wants to spend more time with her baby, nine-month-old Maya.

It's a brave move. Even when you're top of the tree, in the fickle world of fashion you can be forgotten in an instant.

But if someone like Phoebe - with presumably one of the best jobs in the world - can give it all up to be at home, then maybe others will feel able to do the same.

Just when Phoebe was handing in her resignation, a survey showed that mothers are more stressed now than they were in the 1950s. Well, the survey was sponsored by Ovaltine, so... Anyway, so much so, that many working women would love to ditch their full time careers. Half of them said they would like to work part time. A quarter said they would like to be full-time mothers.

So what's stopping them? Money, expectation, the mortgage, ambition, society. The Sex Discrimination Act came into force 30 years ago last month. Of course it's made a lot of things better, but working women are still by and large living in a man's world - lower wages, fewer high flying jobs.

What it also seems to have done is to reduce choice, not increase it. Thirty years ago many mothers worked. Many stayed at home. The choice was theirs.

But in the last 30 years, the emphasis has been increasingly on getting women back to work as soon as possible. Work is seen as more important and worthwhile than raising children. Women who stay at home with their children are seen as somehow not contributing to society. Amazingly we have got to the stage where raising the next generation is seen as less worthwhile than the humblest, most tedious job. Madness.

So now it's the very poor - who don't earn enough to cover child care costs - or the very rich, who can afford to stay at home.

(The other side effect has been that some full-time mothers mother their children so much that the poor kids barely have space to breathe. But that's another problem.)

In a bid to enable more parents to work longer hours, schools are planning to open from 8am to 6pm so children can spend even less time with their families.

Meanwhile, an educational psychologist has told a national conference that children are growing up "emotionally unhealthy" as a result of institutionalised childcare. Depression is growing in children and among adolescents.

There is no easy answer. Some mothers want full-time jobs and careers - what a waste of their education, talents and ambition otherwise. Some want to stay at home. Most want a mixture of both - and in different combinations depending on the age of their children.

The least we can do is make full-time motherhood socially acceptable. Then mothers will once again feel they have a genuine choice.