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Summary
Summary
Renowned Vanity Fair journalist Bennetts electrifies the debate over women's life choices with a riveting new book that completely redefines the work-family question. She offers a persuasive argument for why women can--and should--make more than one kind of mark on the world.
Author Notes
Leslie Bennetts has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1988, writing on subjects that have ranged from movie stars to U.S. anti-terrorism policy. Prior to joining Vanity Fair, Bennetts spent fifteen years as a newspaper reporter, covering "women's issues" at The New York Times and other papers. She was the first woman ever to cover a presidential campaign for the Times. Her work has been published in many national magazines, including Vogue, New York Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Town & Country, More, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, journalist Jeremy Gerard, and their two children.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It would be easy to dismiss this as yet another salvo in the mommy wars--the debate over women opting out of careers to be stay-at-home moms. But Bennetts, a longtime journalist and writer for Vanity Fair, is more interested in investigating what she sees as the heart of the matter: economics. Through impressive research and interviews with experts and with real women, Bennetts shows that women simply cannot afford to quit their day jobs. Long-term loss of income has a cascading impact in areas such as medical benefits and retirement funds, not to mention a woman's sense of autonomy, derived from financial independence. Further, a career supplies a woman with a measure of security for herself and her children in the event of unexpected sickness or divorce. As any woman who has tried knows, returning to the workforce and finding a well-paying job after an absence of years, or even decades, is difficult. Not so long ago mothers would pin a dollar bill to their daughters' underclothes when they went out on a date in case, for some reason, they needed carfare home. Those mothers knew all to well that without money of your own it's easy to be left stranded. As Bennetts expertly shows, it's still true. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Many well-educated American women are giving up the struggle to balance career and motherhood and making the willfully retrograde choice of relying on men to support them and their children, Bennetts maintains. Financial dependency can jeopardize women's futures and those of their children, she warns. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of women as well as sociologists, economists, legal scholars, and other experts, Bennetts lays out the dangers of giving up careers. She looks at how new divorce laws have altered alimony, reducing the likelihood of a lifetime guarantee of support for stay-at-home mothers after divorce. She details the impact of a loss of income on medical and retirement benefits and weighs it against lifelong financial needs. Bennetts encourages women to consider a fifteen-year paradigm, viewing their lives beyond the years of motherhood and asking themselves what they want from life when their children are grown and gone. Allowing women to tell their own stories of economic abandonment, Bennetts presents a cautionary tale for women pondering giving up economic independence. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IMAGINE a shy, observant American girl, born in the middle of the last century. For years, her mother comes home from her job as an editor and puts in a second shift cooking, cleaning and supervising homework while Dad dozes in front of the TV. Gradually, the girl realizes that something is very wrong. When she is 13, her mother gives her a newly published book and says, "Read this," and her life begins to change. The book was "The Feminine Mystique." The girl was Leslie Bennetts, and 44 years later she is no longer shy. She has built a deeply satisfying career as a print journalist: a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, she bagged Jen's first post-Brangelina interview; the issue in which it appeared, in September 2005, became the magazine's best seller. Bennetts is also married - to a mensch who washes the dishes and makes the bed - and has two happy, talented teenagers. In short, she has managed to have it all. But she has recently become concerned about the next generation of women, too many of whom seem to be ditching their careers to stay home with their children, so she revisits Betty Friedan for inspiration. The result is "The Feminine Mistake," an energetic call to mothers to stay in the work force and earn their own way - or suffer the consequences. She rallies numbers to her cause: Half of all marriages end in divorce, and while a man's standard of living actually rises after divorce, a woman's falls. The average age of widowhood is 55. Women live longer than men, yet typically have far less money for retirement. Even a brief timeout reduces a mom's earning power. As Bennetts asks, "If your husband divorces you or drops dead, was it really such a great idea to stay home if you can't afford to buy groceries to feed your kids?" This ambitious book sets out to replace choice feminism - the revisionist view that says as long as women are happy with their decisions about balancing work and motherhood, it doesn't matter what those decisions are - with the ethos that giving up paid work is not just another legitimate option among many but a serious error. By shifting the focus from family values to economics, Bennetts hopes to sidestep the emotion that has dominated the debate and persuade women to change what she perceives as self-destructive behavior. It's a provocative idea (and one that's posited even more starkly in Linda Hirshman's 2006 polemic, "Get to Work"). It is also - up to a point - undeniably correct. Common sense requires every woman who opts out to have a strategy for opting back in, when and if she wants or needs to. (Like Bennetts, I have worked from home as a writer for about 18 years, since my first child was born, but I have taken long timeouts along the way.) In her book, Bennetts seeks to counter a wave of media attention that continues to see the "opt-out" impulse as admirable or inevitable, and works hard to deflate the myths surrounding the brain drain. She argues, for instance, that many women are not as drawn to raising their children full time as they are dissatisfied with their jobs. And she reminds us that child-care concerns fade as quickly as children grow up, but lost career momentum is gone forever. Unfortunately, "The Feminine Mistake" doesn't do this loaded issue justice. A more thorough argument would first acknowledge that it's possible for a woman to find deep meaning in a life spent mostly caring for her family. Instead, Bennetts portrays the stay-at-home mother as a financial and emotional drain on her husband; a bad example for their children; and a disappointment to her gender, to society and, worst of all, to herself. Forget about carrot versus stick: Bennetts uses a battering ram. Despite the author's claim that she has no interest in the Mommy Wars, this book is a battlefield. Women in both camps may find inspiration in her passionate account of the importance of work in her own life. But too often she lapses into know-it-all mode, as if marching into the living rooms of stay-at-home mothers to try to talk sense into them. As in most conflicts, language is a potent weapon. Bennetts and her sources variously refer to the problem that has no good name as "micromanagers," "lost women," "übermothers," "dependent wives," "schlepper mothers" and (my favorite) "unachieving parents." Much of the heat is in the kitchen: In Bennetts's book, working mothers never have time to bake, while stay-at-home mothers do little else. It doesn't help that the book at times reads like a bloated magazine feature, recycling exhibits that first appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. More troubling - or perhaps telling - is that her sample captures a narrow spectrum. Most of the women she interviews live in the Northeast and the Midwest and work (or used to work, or are married to men who work) in the fields of law, media and finance. NOT everyone can relate to the Manhattan book editor who says she's glad her income buys her the right to tell her husband where she wants to put the pool at their country house. Or the law professor/MacArthur genius award recipient/gourmet cook/mother of one adult son who announces that "being a mom is a temp job." Bennetts is right to dread an exodus of accomplished women from the work force. But this book is so unwieldy, and so polarizing, that it is unlikely to convince many stay-at-home mothers to return to work - or to develop that backup plan. Friedan wrote with elegance, authority and empathy for the readers whose lives she hoped to change. Bennetts seems to have little but disdain for the women she is trying to reach. When I finished the book, I didn't feel the need to give it to my daughters, as Tina Brown's back-cover blurb urges. Instead, I dug up an old copy of "The Feminine Mystique." I hear it's really great for teenage girls. Bennetts portrays the stay-at-home mother as a disappointment to her gender, to society and to herself. Eugenie Allen has contributed articles about family life to Time and The New York Times.
Library Journal Review
Passionate and well argued, this program questions the supposed familial rewards of stay-at-home mothering. Bennetts focuses on "economic dependency"--when one partner (usually the man) provides the sole financial support for a family--and enumerates the financial, emotional, and legal costs of this arrangement for women. While she covers many points, the studies showing the difficulty women have reentering the work force are particularly grim. Even more surprising, Bennetts found that many young, well-educated women did not want to consider these issues, preferring to think that divorce, illness, the death of a partner, and work reentry difficulties will not happen to them. Bennetts investigates possible reasons for this deliberate myopia and offers countermeasures. This audiobook, along with Robin L. Smith's Lies at the Altar, are essential listening for women contemplating marriage and a family. Highly recommended for public and school libraries.--Kathleen Sullivan, Phoenix P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.