Okay, everybody else is weighing in, so I'll put in my two cents on Leslie Bennetts--specifically, Rebecca Mead's review of Bennetts' book The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? in this week's New Yorker. First: I haven't read the book, so I can't say much. But I've read enough reviews to get Bennetts' central thesis: that women who opt out of the workplace to stay home and raise kids are making a big mistake--giving up their career marketability and putting themselves at high risk of becoming poor if, like many marriages, theirs ends in divorce or desertion. She thinks that many women who stay home with their kids are copping out: "Under questioning, many stay-at-home wives admit they were bored or unhappy with their work before quitting their jobs," she writes, and saying that they decided to be full-time mothers is "the socially acceptable cover story" for their failure to find fulfilling work (and I quote here from Rebecca Mead's very discerning review).
Their failure, note. Women's failure. Not the failure of the workplace to offer creative solutions to child-care dilemmas; not the failure of employers to consider things like flextime or job sharing or telecommuting; not the failure of those husbands who delegate"kid stuff" entirely to their wives so they can enjoy the career benefits of being full-time road warriors; not the failure of employers who penalize husbands who do attempt to share child-care responsibilities with their wives as being "not serious" about their jobs; not the failure of society in general to consider that raising the next generation is every bit as important, and as time consuming, as the next software launch or the next IPO or the next warehouse delivery, and not an endeavor that one can schedule for the 90-minute time period between 7 and 8:30 p.m. every day (assuming the commuter train's not late and the late-afternoon meeting doesn't run long).
Nope, it's women's failure. Specifically, those of us who are mothers--we're the culprits, we who are just so stoopid that we cannot manage to find creative, fulfilling work such as being a magazine writer/book author who works from home, with extremely flexible hours and great big fat checks that come regularly in the mail, like the job Leslie Bennetts herself has. Because she is so much smarter than somebody like me, for example, who has a very similar kind of job except for some reason I don't get a lot of big fat checks in the mail--but then, everybody knows that the best writers who tackle the worthiest topics make the most money. It's just so clear to me now, and now that I've had it explained to me I can go to bed and rest easy tonight, because, boy, this has cleared up so many questions that now I'm not even sure I need to read the book. That's how enlightened I feel.
But seriously, folks: when women ever get to the point where they stop reflexively blaming themselves for problems caused by other people, and when women like Leslie Bennetts stop defining success as basically the male corporate life in drag, then we'll know the feminist movement has fully and truly succeeded. Until then, Leslie, piss off.