one size does not fit all
Posted on April 13, 2007
Filed Under career, marriage, parenting | 17 Comments
Leslie Bennetts’ book “The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?” has finally penetrated my brain. I’ve been trying hard to ignore the storm around this book. But today it just proved impossible to shut it out any longer. (Forgive me, I know I’m late to this party but sometimes I can’t help myself). First I read a review of the book while spending a few hours at the salon. I didn’t pay too much attention to the review as I was reading People magazine, looking for tidbits on Brangelina, not intelligent literary review. But then, having had my frivolous salon moment, I turned to weighter tomes and came across this week’s New Yorker Book Review. Thankfully Rebecca Mead pulls no punches and dissects the premise of the book rather thoroughly. I feel vindicated, someone smarter than myself is also irked by Bennetts’ proselytizing.
Bennetts’ theory goes something like this…opting to stay at home and raise children rather than remain in the workforce is like playing Russian roulette. The working husband up and dies or runs off with his secretary and, bang, a bullet in the head. The silly, delusional house wife and her children are destitute, depressed, homeless, hard-up.
And I suppose she’d have a point if the inherent nature of marriage and procreation and care for family wasn’t, as Mead points out, “an entirely faith-based enterprise,” something we all commit to with a giant leap and a lot of compromise. Bennett prefers to talk about economics as the basis for her thesis because to talk about the complexity of modern marriage and the fragile emotional dependency on which it is based is far too tall a topic for a book that simply attacks women for making choices different than her own.
I haven’t read Bennett’s book, nor will I, but Mead points out that Bennetts’ treatise centers around her own unique experience…she has a spouse that shares the parenting load, she can afford good childcare and has a job she loves that affords her flex hours and fabulous lunch dates with celebrities (Bennett is a Vanity Fair reporter). Well sign me up.
In truth, the real rub is Bennetts’ earnest belief that she knows what’s best for ALL women. I’m so tired of the one size fits all notion of motherhood. I think that Leslie Bennett and I have the same anatomical parts and that’s about all we share.
Just her pedantic tone is enough to make me stop listening. Here’s Bennett defending her book,
“My goal in writing The Feminine Mistake was to provide women with what I saw as one-stop-shopping that would help close this information gap. My goal was to gather into a single neat package all the financial, legal, sociological, psychological, medical, labor-force, child-rearing and other information necessary for them to protect themselves.”
Salon’s Joan Walsh puts it rather succinctly in her review of the book.
“Bennetts is trying to rehabilitate “have it all” feminism, which I think was retired with good reason years ago. It’s very, very tricky to have it all — great careers, great kids, great marriages. It’s possible to have all three, but rarely all three at once.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. We’re damned if we do, we’re damned if we don’t (work that is). So let us the bleep alone with our questionable decisions and our good intentions and our crippling guilt and let the ‘Feminine Mistake’ thing rest. Now I’m off to check on My Better Half’s life insurance policy and when I’m done with that I’m going to research divorce attorneys and after that I’m going to apply for Leslie Bennetts job.
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