Posted on 04/06/2007 2:22:32 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd
NEW YORK — "Something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives," the late Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," her groundbreaking 1963 book attacking the idea that a husband and children were all a woman needed for fulfillment.
That book effectively launched the modern women's movement. But more than four decades later, writer Leslie Bennetts is trying to sound a very similar message. In "The Feminine Mistake" — the title's no accident — she argues that many young mothers have forgotten Friedan's message, embracing a 21st-century version of the 1950s stay-at-home ideal that could imperil their economic future as well as their happiness.
Needless to say, the book isn't going down smoothly with everyone — especially mothers who've chosen to stay home with their children.
"She's stereotyping stay-at-home moms," says an annoyed Debbie Newcomer, mother of a 14-month-old baby in Richmond, Texas. "This is my personal decision. I'm a better mom by staying at home."
Bennetts says she never intended to issue the latest salvo in the "Mommy Wars" — that long-running, angst- and guilt-ridden debate over whether mothers should stay home with their children. And she says she's surprised by the reaction.
"The stay-at-home moms are burning up the blogosphere denouncing me," she mused over coffee this week. "They're saying I must be divorced, childless, bitter, lonely and angry to be writing this." (Bennetts, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine, has two children with her husband, a fellow journalist.) "Clearly, I've struck a nerve."
Bennetts says she merely wanted to present factual evidence that there are great risks involved when a woman gives up economic self-sufficiency — risks she may not be thinking of during those early years of blissful, exhausting parenting.
Divorce. A husband losing his job. A husband dying. All of those, Bennetts warns, could be catastrophic for a woman and her children. And if the woman decides she'll get back to her career later, once the kids are ready? Stop dreaming, Bennetts says — a woman takes a huge salary hit after a relatively short time of being absent from the work force — that is, if she can get back in at all.
The author's arguments ring true to Anita Jevne, a mother in Eau Claire, Wis. A medical technologist who's worked for the past 28 years, Jevne says she's tried to stress to her daughters, now 16 and 19, that they need to be financially independent: "You can't assume a man is going to take care of you."
When Jevne's husband was hurt four years ago at the salvage yard where he'd worked since he was 16, the family had to depend on Anita's income while he recovered and worked toward getting a new job. "If I hadn't gone to school and gotten a degree, if I had stayed home, we would have been in big trouble," she says.
Beyond the financial necessity, Jevne always enjoyed having a world outside the home to be part of. "You're part of a community," she says. "You're giving something." That's the second message Bennetts says she's trying to impart — that there's a crucial sense of self-worth to be gained outside the home.
Some women find her views condescending, saying they deny the value of childcare in the home and assume that stay-at-home mothers haven't put enough thought into their decisions.
"I objected to her saying we haven't thought it out," says Newcomer, the Texas mother who saw Bennetts interviewed on NBC's "Today" this week, but hasn't read the book.
A college graduate and a former financial analyst for a casino, she said she's certainly considered the consequences of staying home with her daughter, and has made contingency financial plans. "And I completely understand that when I go back, it's going to be a lot harder to get a job," she says. "I know I'll have to start from the ground up."
Newcomer doesn't buy Bennetts' contention that because children are young for so short a time, it's foolish to give up an entire career in exchange for, at most, 15 years at home.
"I look at it the other way," says Newcomer. "They're only young once. So, how much time can I spend with them and make them better for society?"
When Cara Boswell watched the "Today" interview along with her husband, they discussed it for a long time afterwards. "I found it kind of insulting," she said.
Boswell, 30, of Lakeland, Fla., was in college when she became pregnant with the first of her four children. "I feel they need me now," she says. But she's optimistic she'll have options in the work force down the road. "I don't feel panicked," she says. "I really feel the author was too bleak."
One point Bennetts illustrates in her book is how money plays a role in the "opt-out" phenomenon (women choosing to leave the work force): some affluent, highly educated women are doing it because, essentially, they can — it's a sign of wealth.
But Bennetts has also been criticized for speaking only about this small percentage of affluent women.
"The author and the writers who cover the book brand at-home moms as a bunch of Pilates-class taking, regular pedicure planning women with nothing else to do but pick out window treatments," wrote Jen Singer on her blog for stay-at-home moms, MommaSaid.
Bennetts says her book is about all women — those who work at McDonald's as well as those with Harvard law degrees. "The benefits of work were really clear at all levels," she says.
She's disappointed by how difficult it is to write anything these days about women's lives. "Women are so defensive about their choices that many seem to have closed their minds entirely," she says.
But Singer, of the MommaSaid blog, acknowledged the book has a point. "Too many at-home moms don't have financial backup," she wrote. "A friend of mine cashed in everything that was in her name to put into a home renovation. So if hubby leaves her, she's got no liquid funds in her name to fall back on."
Yet she added: "Why is there a 'wrong' and a 'right' way to mother in the U.S.? I will pick up the book and read it ... but I'll probably curse a lot."
Imagine if you had a feminist dentist.
A femidentist, if you will.
I was just about to look for that and post it.
Bingo.
Where are the social policies to encourage single income families? Single income families are priced out of housing and crushed economically. Dual income families have depressed wages, facilitated disease-filled daycares, given their kids abandonment issues, and pushed up early sexual activity. All those daily-abandoned homes promote crime as well.
There should be societal encouragement for single income families once parents have kids. Maybe an increase in the child tax credit for single income families, or such.
You wrote... Where are the social policies to encourage single income families?
Shoot. I’d even settle for programs that encourage married familes. But, of course, Big Brother would lose it’s control over more Americans if they remained married and financially solvent.
>> Not one person ... has found themselves on their
>> deathbed, said ... “I wish I’d spent more time at work.”
>
> I understand that’s a classic line that is often quoted,
> but I think it’s poppy-cock.
A general statement about people always carries a certain amount of danger, just because there are so many varieties of people.
I can say with certainty that of all the people I’ve known who were approaching or near death (admittedly, a fairly small sample), a less than stellarly developed work ethic was way, way, way down on the list of things that mattered to them. So far down that it has never once been mentioned.
> Of course work is not the be-all and end-all of
> existence, but life without work is a life of frivolity,
> vanities, and is, ultimately, meaningless.
Meaning can be found in a wide array of activities. Raising children and interacting with your family, neighbors and community are, I’d say, many times more valuable than most work at that task.
Good Grief - of course we're defensive - no matter what we choose to do one side or the other is going to attack us.
If we stay at home the looney left attacks us and if we work the righteous right attacks us.
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I'm trying to recreate the "OLD" and create a new updated "Mom's ping list" ......... Please let me know if you are interested in being on or off such a list.
I quit working as a Software Engineer when my first was a baby. I don’t regret it one instance. I worked for 10 years before I had kids. I have no desire to go back to that job.
I’m trying to figure out what I can do now. I have time to work, but only part-time. I want to be home in the summers and after school. I want it to be that way until my kids are in college.
One thing I’m doing with my daughters is encouraging them to look at jobs that they can do part-time or that don’t impact family life as much: teaching, nursing and other medical professions like physical therapy , accounting.
I would not encourage them to go into engineering. It’s just not a good career to have with kids. My parents pushed me into it because I was smart. However, they didn’t think about what I would do when I had kids.
I want my daughters to be able to have a career and take care of things if they have to, but also be able to be home with their children.
I also have no problem with dads being stay-at-home dads. My brother was one while his wife became an executive at her company. He died young (48) from cancer, and him being an at home dad worked for their family.
I have listened to this garbage since I was in my early 20's.
Get a career! No, stay home with your kids! Your kids will be ashamed if you don't get a career! Your kids won't bond with you if you are working! What does your husband think about someone who doesn't bring home any money? What does your husband think about someone who isn't there with home-cooked meals?
ENOUGH.
There are a fair number of social commentary authors who play to one side of the debate or the other, always stirring the pot to get women to arguing about their life choices and making quite a few feel guilty.
Work/family arrangements are personal and individual decisions. I think it should be left at that.
So if hubby leaves her, she’s got no liquid funds in her name to fall back on.”
Women I knew from previous generations used to stash a small percentage of the grocery money (cash) in coffee cans. It was called the “rainy day fund”. Don’t worry Ms. Bennett, women are pretty resourceful.
the origins all of which are a hatred for GOD and God’s place for wimmens....nothing more
“For the last 6 years, I have had a corporate job making GREAT money.”
Yoe have exposed one of favorite canards of the feminists, to wit: That after twenty years of homemaking you will be unemployable and have a head full of mush, and be utterly at the mercy of your husband and the world.
I enjoy being home. My husband enjoys me being home. My kids enjoy me being home. If someone wants to work or needs to work, I would never condemn them or say they were making a bad decision. It’s hilarious when a writer wants to claim that we are lazy or have made a stupid choice.
No angst nor guilt here. I stayed home to be a wife and mother and have no regrets.
Don’t count out the feminism movement when looking for destroyers of the family.
There generally is a free market, and with taxes being harsh, but generally even, people will pay what they can for the basic necessities such as food, transportation, and shelter. Since shelter tends to be the biggest, and least flexible chunk (long mortgage, slow to build, long to buy), it is the most socially manipulable.
Consider:
All families will get the best that the bank allows them to afford. Let’s say that you have a population where all families are 1x or single income, but one is 2x or both parents work thanks to feminist propaganda. This 2x family will outbid a 1x family for a house. Since housing supply is fairly static, the prices are what move.
So now to afford the same house, the 1x family has to make 10% more money. So what do they do? They become a 2x family too! But that further increases the housing prices. Pretty soon, the 1x families can no longer afford a house at all.
I keep re-reading your post. You’ve nailed it.
I’m trying to find the facts that - because of taxation - what used to take a father some 40 hours a week (back in the 1950’s) to support a family now takes a mother and a father working some 60-70 hours plus each week just to maintain the same economic level.
Why is it a necessity that moms go to work? Uncle Sam wants it that way as he keeps taking and taking and....
At home mom’s should do what they feel, but just know the risks, but life is a risk so throw the dice and live.
It’s pathetic the damage that Betty Friedan and her clan have caused our children, marriage, morals; our country and it’s future.
Good point. It looks like we’re sliding into “Brave New World”. Once we get the technology to grow people in jars, the last necessity of family will be gone. I’d almost prefer the U.S. to turn into “1984”, at least there were families around for the government to manipulate.
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