TBR: The Feminine Mistake
Leslie Bennetts has been very harsh about people who criticize her book, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, without having read it. So I’m here to report that I slogged through the whole thing, and now I feel perfectly entitled to criticize it. Here are my major complaints:
1) Bennetts says repeatedly that she’s not making a moral judgment about the value of stay-at-home parenting, only pointing out the economic risks of dependency. But I just don’t believe her. She refers to stay at home parents as "parasites," to singularly focused lives as "sterile and stultifying," and suggests that the children of such parents will be overly dependent. As far as I can tell, she believes that devoting your full energies to parenting is waste of brains as much as Linda Hirshman does, but doesn’t have the courage to stand up and say so.
2) Bennetts is unbearably condescending towards Gen X (and Gen Y) women. She’s fallen hook line and sinker for the story that Gen X women are looking at Boomer Women and rejecting their attempts to "have it all." So she thinks that Gen Xers are lazy/wimps/expect to have perfection handed to them. But there’s no evidence that’s true — mothers’ labor force participation has declined slightly from its peak, but is still higher than it was in the 1980s or earlier.
3) She doesn’t take the issues of lower-paid mothers seriously. In the section on child care, she blithely writes that "the horror stories about negligent or malignant baby-sitters do not reflect the reality of quality child care as those with reasonable means typically experience it." That’s probably true, if you define reasonable means as earning $60,000 or more a year. But that’s not most families. And she rhapsodizes on about the importance of having meaningful intellectually stimulating work, with hardly a nod to the possibility that not everyone has that kind of work.
4) The issue of economic vulnerability is a real one. While I’ve said here before that I think Bennetts overstates the risk of divorce, she’s totally dead on about the long-term financial consequences of breaks in labor force participation. But where Ann Crittenden talks about these same issues and asks why should a 5 year interruption in work reduce your earnings for the next 40 years, Bennetts just scolds women for making bad choices, even as she quotes people like Pamela Stone as saying that these were constrained choices.
Towards the end of the book, Bennetts quotes a working mother who reports on what her pediatrician said: "I have taken care of thousands of children from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one consistent thing in raising well-adjusted children was parents who were happy with their choices." Pity that Bennetts didn’t seem to hear what she was saying.
October 5th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
I always wondered about the same point you just made– Even assuming that they are correct in their assessment of stay-at-home mothers, are Hirschman and Bennetts claiming that its more intellectually stimulating/ rewarding to clean other people’s toilets than stay with your kids? I mean, a plush office with a computer and an assistant is great. But what about most people, who actually don’t like their jobs and aren’t earning a fair wage anyway?
October 6th, 2007 at 8:54 am
For those interested in a strategy for resuming a career after a career break, see Back on the Career Track: A Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms Who Want to Return to Work (Warner Books, June 2007). Also check out http://www.backonthecareertrack.com and http://www.iRelaunch.com, a career break connections company.
October 7th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
In general I have a problem with Bennetts point of view. Her attitude on Gen-X and Gen-Y is unoriginal and she seems to be taking on the slacker idea already exhibited by other critics. I find very few people writing about this topic take into account lower income mother’s issues; the only people who seem to have time to contemplate stay-at-home vs. work have the time to do so. Everyone else is out working to pay their bills. There still has to be a dialogue, though, and it reminds me of the early suffrage movements organized by the same class of women discussing these issues today. Personally, I am a fan of Crittendon (The Price of Motherhood) and Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth), writers that give opinion with decisive facts.
On a personal note, I decided to go back to work part-time 3 months after my daughter was born because I could not stand being home. I had just completed my master’s degree and was in dire need of non-baby centered adult conversations. 3 years later I still feel the same way. Work gives me an outlet from taking care of the house, kid and pets; my worst day at work is still better than a week at home. I work because I want to, not because I need to. This lack of need has brought on interesting treatment at various jobs. I fully realize that not all women feel the way I do and it seems that Bennett is just adding more fuel to the flame in the so-called Mommy Wars.
October 8th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I’ve never understood the objection that Hirschman doesn’t address lower-income women doing physical unpleasant jobs. Her premise is not about the needs of low-income workers (expect to the extent that she argues that the presence of women in the workforce in reasonable numbers will force some changes). She is specifically talking about the choices made by women who really can choose whether they work or not.
I don’t know what Bennett’s book addresses (since I haven’t read it yet).
The issue of women and work is different for workers who require the income, and for those who don’t. Our current system is difficult for both, but the solutions that work for one aren’t necessarily going to work for the other.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
bj, Hirshman is quite clear that her primary concern is about elite women wasting their brains and opportunity. Bennett claims that she’s all about the economic risks — and correctly points out that less affluent women are at greater risk — but then rhapsodizes on about how the problem is that working moms are too brainwashed by the cult of motherhood to talk about how much they love their jobs. And she never touches the point that Edin and Kefales make in Promises I Can Keep, that for the least educated women, there’s very little penalty for time out of the labor force.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Here’s my take on the book, if you’re interested.
http://deepmuckbigrake.com/2007/07/31/book-review-the-feminine-mistake-by-leslie-bennetts/