I was surprised at how angry Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? made me.
The book is a compelling, yet ultimately flawed look at privileged women’s “tragic” decisions to give up careers in order to rear their children and tend to thousands of domestic chores.
Bennetts’ thesis is that her generation—the Baby Boomers—fought the good fight, and triumphantly paved the path for women to “have it all.” She asserts, through countless interviews with women (many of them remain anonymous as she mercilessly chides them for being silly housewives), that the younger generation has decided to trade in their fancy degrees for a life of baking pies and raising babies. She says that the women of today’s baby-making generation are not taking heed of the high divorce rate and the likelihood of a husband’s death or illness. These pitiful young ladies, Bennetts writes, will no doubt be left in poverty, hawking a big diamond ring on food stamps, while the husband rides off into the sunset with a successful career and a young bimbo.
In a nutshell: Women who quit work and rely on their husband’s money-making prowess will end up getting burned.
It is a scary concept—and an interesting one. Bennetts’ book is an easy, breezy read, and it engendered some soul-searching. But in the end, Bennetts is just the latest in a long line of women scolding other women.
I am thirty years old, and the mother of a seven-and-a-half-month old. I have a bachelors degree from Duke University and a masters from Columbia. I quit my full-time job to work part-time and take care of my son. My mother is an accountant who went back to school to get her masters degree when I, the youngest of three, was in kindergarten.
My first frustration with the book was this: Bennetts says that women are supposed to have full-time, hard-charging careers, and have children, and continue to garden, cook, clean, and tend to other domestic duties. To me, that sounds like we are just servants. Why should women have to be all things to all people, while shirking responsibility to their own happiness? I’m sorry, but working a stressful job, tending to children, and running a household is not “having it all.” It’s simply doing it all—and frankly, I’d rather not.
