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."
Are you married. Would SSN benefits kick in under your husband’s credits?
But even if you could get disability benefits, would they be as much as what you would have received, if they had not taken away your credits?
Just curious.
And prayers also to you in your fight against MS.
I noticed that write-off just this year (since my son is 11 months old). The immediate thought that came to mind was “why can you write off daycare costs, but a mother who stays at home has no write-off?”
My second thought was “how difficult is it to set up my wife as a daycare for my children to get this tax write-off?”
I wish I would accomplish more. This is not about laziness, you can do a lot in your ‘free time’. But ‘time at the office’ is just time you’ve given over to be on salary. You get ‘experience’ and a paycheck. After enough “experience” it doest get you much, and all you’ve got is your take-home, and all you’ve got there after some time is what you saved after expenses. So wouldnt you rather be doing your own thing, if you could get the same paycheck without the “time at the office”? ... the exception may be if you are busy curing cancer or are Steven Speilberg.
Most of us are in more prosaic pursuits.
Time to go home. :-)
I can’t comment on your experience with your 2 younger ones and homeschooling them or the culture, as our duaghter is only in 3rd grade -— but I totally agree with everything else you said.
In September/October of 2005 when she started 2nd grade I was having a huge go around with the “powers that be” at the school district because they did away with a program the principal at our school had implemented for the advanced readers, which included our daughter. One of the bureaueducrats actually went to my daughter’s for help in “getting that woman off my back” to which the teacher asked if she was aware of the background of the parents. The educrat complained I was just a bored housewife who had a problem that her little angel wasn’t being treated specially. The teacher shut her up rather quickly on that opinion by explaining I was neither, I was a former reporter turned lobbyist that worked from home and daddy worked for IBM. The educrat turned pale and left the classroom.
The teacher called me an apologized for what she realized was information I had never provided as well as giving info she had learned from her husband, who happened to be a drinking and trivia player buddy of both my husband and me.
The situation was rather amusing.
If you try that, be sure to let us all know what federal prison you end up in, mmkay?
:)
You’re probably right. She writing her articles at the local coffee shop with a wireless hotspot while the kids are...wherever.
It's always amusing to see uninformed, foolish people ridiculously claim that "at-home-moms" don't WORK!
I was a stay-at-home mom. Enjoyed every minute of it, too.
My sister also happily made the choice to stay at home with her children. Her husband was very supportive. They got married when she was right out of college and had very little work experience. Several years ago he suddenly left her for a gal in her twenties. My sister was devastated because she truly loved the SOB and thought that if she stayed slender and loving this would never happen. She has had a very, very hard struggle financially because she never worked outside the home.
Both of our daughters are looking at this sad situation and thinking carefully. I would not advise my daughter to be a working mother, but I would suggest she keep her hand in something besides diapers. Divorce aside, other things might happen to necessitate that the wife bring in an income—chronic or catastrophic illness, job loss, death, etc.
I would have gotten SS, even if I’d never gone back to work based on my previous earnings when I reached retirement age, and based on my husband’s earnings if I was a widower at that point in time.
But in order to get SSDI (Social Security Disability) you need to have earned 40 credits...20 credits from employment in the last 10 years. When you’re a stay at home mom, you’re often out of the work force for that long. So since I worked full time for 15 years before I quit, I probably had 60 credits, and by dropping out of the workforce for 10 years, I was only allowed to retain 20 of them.
Here’s the exact wording from the SS website:
“SSDI requires a worker to pay FICA taxes for specified lengths of time, called credits. One SSDI credit is one quarter of the year (3 months); four SSDI credits are available in a year (12 months).
The number of work credits needed to qualify for SSDI depends on the age at disability onset. Generally, an individual will need 40 credits (10 years), 20 of which were earned in the last 10 years before they become disabled.”
Now that I’m working again, it will take me about 5 years to get back enough credits. But like I said, I’m working no problem, and will continue to work as long as I’m able (good news for me is my job is computer based, and I telecommute, so even on bad MS mobility days, I still show up for work “in my pajamas,” LOL.)
By Leslie Bennetts
http://personals.yahoo.com/us/static/relationships_home-equity-tango#author
I admit that my husband helps out more than many men, but here’s another news flash: It isn’t because he’s such a fabulously enlightened being. Left to his own devices, he would doubtless park himself in front of the TV like some sitcom male-chauvinist couch potato while I did all the work. The reason Jeremy “helps” as much as he does (an offensive terminology that itself suggests who’s really being held responsible) is simple: He doesn’t have a choice.
FROM THE BEGINNING of our relationship, I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to be any husband’s unpaid servant. If Jeremy wanted to be — and stay — married to me, let alone have kids, he couldn’t stick me with all the boring, mundane stuff nobody wants to do. We were going to share the work, or we were going to forget the whole deal.
Unlike my first husband, who announced after our wedding that he didn’t like the way the French laundry did his shirts and he now expected me, the Wife, to wash and iron all of them, Jeremy recognized both the righteousness of the principle involved and the intransigence of the woman he’d married, and proceeded to pitch in.
~
So how have I accomplished this? By holding my husband’s feet to the fire every single day of our lives, of course.
Yes, dear readers, it’s true: Maintaining some semblance of parity in your marriage requires you to deploy the same kinds of nasty tactics you swore you would never stoop to as a parent but nonetheless found yourself using the minute you actually had a kid. Bribery and punishment work; so do yelling and complaining. Threats are also effective, as long as everyone knows you mean business. With husbands, tender blandishments and nooky are particularly useful, as is the withholding of the aforementioned.
These strategies admittedly take a lot of energy, but not as much as performing all the functions necessary to maintain home and family by yourself. When my husband has lingered too long over the sports section and I’m feeling overwhelmed by the number of errands that must be run, I hand him a list.
“This is what I need you to do today,” I say in a tone of voice that brooks no equivocation. He may moan and groan, but the jobs get done. And while I still have to mastermind the operation — somehow he is never the one who remembers that our son needs new mosquito netting, baseball cleats, and basketball shoes for sleepaway camp — I’m not the only one schlepping around town checking items off the To Do list.
~
The fact that guys, when left to their own devices, rarely rush to offer more toilet-scrubbing and diaper-changing is not in itself surprising. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
~
And while I recognize that gender stereotypes are risky, in my experience husbands are a lot like children. They will get away with whatever they can get away with. When you put your foot down and make it clear that you won’t take no for an answer, somehow the kids’ rooms get cleaned, the groceries bought, the laundry folded. It really does work, I promise.
But you don’t have to trust me on that. Try it. Just make sure they know you mean it.
I can only imagine what a nightmare it would be. I know what a nightmare it was for a friend of mine in Delaware with an at home daycare, that included her own children. She did away with it because the little bit of money she was getting from friends for keeping their kids was not worth the hassles from the state.
She had only bothered with the state licensing at the suggestion of one of the "friends" whose kids she was watching, who suggested it would be a good way to be able to write off certain household expenses. It was actually the "friend" who wanted to write off daycare costs for her babysitter.
Good for you!
My wife is a teacher and is not paying FICA. She - like many other teachers - plans on working until about age 55, then will "retire" and find another job that pays into SS, just for the credits.
It's all about playing the game. And you gotta know the rules if you're gonna play.
I’m just amazed at your story after reading some threads here that your sister isn’t getting a free ride with alimony and/or child support. I thought those practices were put in specifically to discourage men from dropping their wives for a young and dumb model.
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
See my response to dan1123 in post #71.
It can be done legally.
So I see.
I just assumed the IRS would see this as a tax dodge, and prosecute the s-word out of anyone trying it.
But... if done right, maybe it would work.
I just looked it up. They specifically name “your spouse” as someone you can’t pay and write off for child care expenses. I guess technically you could set up a corporation and get it licensed, but that costs more than the tax credit.
This seems like the most obvious way our government discriminates against single income families though. I would like to see it done away with.
I don’t know about taxes causing two parents working,,I think it is television/consumerism. Seems to me people want more and more and it takes two to buy it. Big screen tv, clothes, shoes, cars,,,toys. I think we got along with less stuff when I was growing up, no need for Mom to work until it got close to college time and she worked for that. I don’t think she loved it at all,,she did it as a duty.
LOL
And if I were at the mercy of my husband, I would still be a happy woman! This job, in the end, is just a job. And when I get to be a gramma, well, I may just give it up again.
There is a massive difference between making a living and making a life.
If my wife thought like that, I would have never even dated her.
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