I wasn’t going to write about this, out of fear of polarizing my readers, but I can’t stop thinking about it. The Feminine Mistake, by Leslie Bennetts, has changed my life. This piece is a good summary, if you want to go read that first and come back. Please know that I am not sitting in judgment of other people’s life choices. I am writing this because the book had an impact on me and I want to talk about it.
I feel the need to start by saying that there is much not to like about this book: The author is, on many occasions, disrespectful in her descriptions of women who don’t work. She describes too many jobs as fascinating (really– how many jobs are?) and she believes that any stay-at-home moms who say they are happy are lying, pretty much. I also found it amusing that she made the hashed over statement that stay-at-home moms bore their husbands because they have nothing to talk about. That is so stupid to me, because the absolute last thing A wants to talk about is my job, and the subject we discuss most frequently and happily is the minute details of Gatito’s life. And by the way… couldn’t a stay-at-home mom (with kids beyond the infant/toddler stage) simply read the newspaper daily for a ready supply of discussion topics? Ms. Bennett also has this gratuitously nasty passage where she makes fun of stay-at-home moms who spend too much time cleaning their homes and making every detail perfect, while she lets her daughter keep her room messy and believes it inspires her creativity. Then there are a few ridiculous anecdotes like one about the grown kids of a mother who did not work being too lazy to work themselves because they are following her example. I believe that some of these things are pure distractions that suck the power away from her main message.
Nevertheless, there were many aspects that really hit home with me, and enabled me to change the way I think about my life and my work:
- I think I have written here before about my feeling that the burden of supporting a family is too much for one person to have to shoulder. Ms. Bennetts points out that when both people work, it often enables them to work more reasonable hours, rather than having one person kill themselves trying to advance and earn more money. It made me realize that it is in part because we both work that we are both able to be home between 5:30 and 6:00 every night. Neither of us are exactly shooting to the top, but we’re both doing pretty well, slowly advancing our careers. Knowing A, I can definitely see that if he was the only one working, it would be a lot crazier hours as he would feel compelled to work harder and advance faster. My working has enabled us to both make that tradeoff and enjoy a reasonable work/life balance.
- Ms. Bennetts thinks that men respect their wives more when they work. What I have seen in my community is that men like to know that their wives are home with the kids when they are little and that they get that it’s hard work and are grateful that they don’t have to do it. But when the kids get to be school-aged, they start to wonder what their wives are doing all day, and they start to resent it. I know one banker from the Wall St. firm that just collapsed who is pressuring his wife to go back to work. She is resisting under the argument that she didn’t choose their lavish lifestyle (apparently she would have been happy living a more modest life), but since he chose it, she is neither willing to relinquish her luxuries nor work to help support them. And last weekend, I overheard another woman complaining that her daughter’s husband (my generation) is demanding that his wife get at least a part-time job, accusing her of spending their children’s future. I never had the chance to play this scenario out, but I do think that it’s likely A would have become resentful of bearing all the financial responsibility for the family if I didn’t work, particularly as kids got older. As it is, I think he’s proud and respectful of my accomplishments in the office.
- She writes a lot about women who think their husbands could never ever leave them, even though it has happened to others they know. Stories like Alyssa wrote about here. I actually got through most of the book thinking how silly it is for women to believe that their marriages couldn’t possibly break up before I realized that that was what I still believed about my own marriage! I have thought that A could fall ill or die (I have morbid freakouts about car accidents every time I send him on an errand, for instance) or simply lose his job, but I never even considered the possibility that we could get divorced, even as I was reading about other women who couldn’t believe it could happen to them.
- I also realized how unusual it is to have a husband that is an equal participant in child-rearing. Even Ms. Bennetts’ husband had to be trained and harassed a little into taking on household responsibilities and she still has more than half of these. Meanwhile, A does at least half– probably more– of the stuff around the house, from taking out the garbage to cleaning the kitchen nightly and straightening the house (we pay someone to clean once/week– a real sanity saver) whereas I pretty much just do weekend laundry (Tata does weekday laundry). And since A is Gatito’s parent of choice more often than not, A ends up taking on more parenting responsibility than I do, too. (I have been telling A how much I appreciate him and he has been refusing to believe that anything he does is out of the ordinary, which is probably for the best.)
- I thought it was interesting to consider the length of a career. From college graduation through retirement, I am likely to spend about 45 years of my life working. Assuming a four-year age difference between Gatito and a potential sibling, and assuming the most needy years (from a time-intensive perspective) of a child are through age 12 (I picked this age fairly arbitrarily), that is 16 years of a juggling act– just a third of a whole career.
- The author writes about women who don’t work because the cost of childcare eats up a substantial portion (sometimes all) of their earnings. But she points out that when viewed in the context of a decades-long career, these years of breaking even should actually be seen as an investment in future earnings potential. When I first went back to work after having Gatito, over half of my take-home pay went to his nanny. But with my new job, which I wouldn’t have gotten without the experience of my prior job, it now amounts to… egads, I just did the math… it is still 45% of my take-home salary. I thought I was doing better than that. Never mind, moving on. But seriously, eventually I won’t need a full-time nanny, so say in another six years (assuming I am able to have a second child in the next year) this figure could drop to 25% or even less if I continue to advance.
- Ms. Bennetts also points out that many women hit one bump in the road in their career and use motherhood as an excuse to opt out. E.g., they work a crazy job with a terrible boss or they just don’t like what they do and rather than looking for a way to address the situation or find a new job, as a man would have to do, they drop out. This is interesting to me because I have to admit, in addition to wanting more time with Gatito, the idea of not having to deal with the hassles of work is appealing. But I’ve realized that finding a path through various obstacles is important and is good for me.
Unfortunately, I think the author’s aggressive style makes it hard for someone who has made a different choice to read. In the article I linked to above, she writes:
Equally encouraging [sarcasm] was the woman who, after being introduced to me at a cocktail party, made a horrible face when the hostess told her about The Feminine Mistake. “I don’t think I want to read it,” she said, pursing her lips as if she’d just sucked a lemon. “The last thing I need is a whole book telling me why I should feel even more guilty about my life than I already do.”
I can certainly understand how that woman feels, because I think the tone of the book comes off as very judgmental and one-sided. There are just too many distractions in there that take away from the main message that “a man is not a financial plan.” I will freely admit that there is no way in hell you’d catch me reading a book that will criticize my working and add to my guilt about leaving my child, so I can easily understand why stay-at-home moms wouldn’t want to read this.
Ultimately, though, as I said, this book changed my life: I have spent the 2.5 years since Gatito was born fantasizing about not having to work, or about starting some kind of consulting thing that would allow me to work part-time and mentally treating my job as a necessary evil. In addition to validating my choice/reality, The Feminine Mistake has allowed me to feel at peace with and even inspired by my career. If you are a working mom looking for a little validation/ encouragement/ inspiration or you are about to be a mom and are struggling with the work/stay home decision, I do recommend giving this book a read. If you’re not working, I think it would be a little (a lot) hard to take, but I would be very interested in hearing your opinions and whether or not it changed your views on or plans for working.
