Mystique or mistake?

A new book claiming stay-at-home mothers are naive has hit a collective nerve, writes Kate Holmquist.

A new book claiming stay-at-home mothers are naive has hit a collective nerve, writes Kate Holmquist.

Highly educated women are leaving the workforce for the fantasy princess realm of a dream house in the suburbs, according to the latest salvo in the "Mommy wars". A new book says stay-at-home mothers are naive, and the view has provoked a backlash.

Mary Robinson stoked a similar reaction in 2005 when she said that young women with master's degrees who left the workforce were "copping out" of their responsibilities to continue the progress made by women in public life.

Yet Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?is amazed that she has become a hate figure so reviled by stay-at-home mums that they are fantasising about seeing her interviewed on The Today Showwith lipstick on her teeth. "I'm not a mistake!" has become the stay-at-home brigade's rallying cry.

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IN 1983, WHENBennetts became the first woman to report on politics for the New York Times, she was breaking down barriers. But how fast the world has changed in 25 years. Now, growing numbers of educated young US mothers have bought into the sentimental mystique of full-time motherhood. For them, Bennetts isn't a role model. She's a traitor.

There are magazines that won't publicise her book because they don't want to upset the "stay-at-home mommies". Yet magazines targeted at "working women" are praising her to the skies.

Bennetts has become a heroine for many older, experienced women who know that husbands may get ill, lose their jobs, leave them for other women or become alcoholics. This is the generation that read Betty Friedan's ground-breaking feminist tract, The Feminine Mystique, on which Bennetts's title is a pun.

Many of Bennetts's generation of baby-boomers are the daughters and granddaughters of women who had it very tough. Bennetts's grandmother was abandoned by her husband and had to cope with devastating financial insecurity. Bennetts's mother has entered her senior years without financial security because she lost too much ground by not working during her child-rearing years.

A woman takes the biggest gamble of her life when she throws herself at the financial mercy of a husband, says Bennetts. Do it if you want to, but at least make it an informed choice. Her intention was to gather into a "single neat package all the financial, legal, sociological, psychological, medical, labour-force, child-rearing and other information necessary for them to protect themselves".

Bennetts believes a biased US media has lulled women into thinking that the "Mom and Apple Pie" life can be achieved by any woman with a husband willing to be her meal ticket. These stay-at-home mothers claim that they're leaving the workforce for their children's own good, but many are just looking for a socially acceptable excuse to have an easier life.

That's fine if your husband's financial provision allows you holidays, meals out, a posh wardrobe, a nice car and a house to redecorate whenever you're feeling bored. And if you're convinced he'll never leave, then good for you (but hope he's very rich so you get a good settlement if he does).

But for the average woman, Bennetts argues, being financially dependent on a husband could make your children worse off eventually.

Extensive interviews throughout the book reveal women who regret leaving their careers. Many said angrily: "Why didn't anybody tell me what a mistake this was?"

Bennetts says many women focus too much on the short-term period of intensive parenting, which lasts about 15 years. After that, a mother is redundant and the workplace may not want her - at least not on the terms she'd like.

No wonder the stay-at-home mums are furious. Bennetts picture of life for women is pretty bleak.

It doesn't help that Bennetts herself, a New Yorker with an Ivy League education and a hotline to Hilary Clinton, doesn't exactly live in the real world. Being a jet-setting celebrity interviewer - the sort to whom stars such as Angelina Jolie pour their hearts out - is quite a different life from leaving your kids with an unreliable babysitter eight hours a day so you can stand working at a till in Kmart.

Bennetts's career has depended on reliable support in the home - she dedicates the book to her babysitter, Norma - and this is where her argument begins to tear at the seams. Irish women, who are remaining in the workforce after childbirth in greater numbers than ever before, are well aware of their financial responsibilities and the risk of divorce. Too often, though, finding reliable and affordable childcare is impossible and the balancing act required to keep a career going becomes too difficult and even boring.

THE RESENTMENT TOWARDSBennetts seems to be partly a symptom of a greater problem - privileged women higher on the social scale telling women with fewer choices what to do. Just as women with affluent husbands may well brag about what great full-time mothers they are, Bennetts is being perceived as just another media queen telling her lessers what to do.

This is unfair for such a well-researched book, but it highlights a deeper issue. Once again, women are at each others' throats instead of working together positively to introduce better social policies for women overall, no matter what their choices.

No wonder Mary Robinson was worried.