This article in Slate entitled Women Who Ditch Their Career for Homelife Could Be Making a Huge Mistake initially made the hair on my neck stand on end.

The author, Leslie Bennetts recently wrote a book entitled The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?

From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Bennets received scathing criticism from a whole flock of SAHMs, many of whom didn’t even read her book. I can’t imagine why with a title like that. At first glance it puts me in mind of something the horrifying “Dr.” Laura would come out with and that in and of itself makes me want to scream.

I have not read this book either. This article is in response to this backlash. In my mind, this article seems more self-promotion and doe-eyed Who Me?, I Was Just Trying To Help than anything else. But OK, here she is again telling scores of women that we are naive and simply not facing the facts of the matter. Of course the comments to the article are a healthy mix of Screw You and Yeah, Stay At Home Moms ARE Stupid.

I am a stay at home mom and I guess a homemaker. I pretty much stay out of the mommy-war fray because a) it is stupid and b)I simply don’t consider myself a typical SAHM or part of the opt-out culture. Being a SAHM and homemaker was never what I or anyone who knows me ever envisioned I would be doing nor did I ever see myself on the career fast track. The opt-out revolution bullshit seems like something that happens to women who actually graduated from college and were truly on the Corporate Ladder to Success (or glass ceiling, whatever).

How did I get here you ask? Here is the short and ugly version - I quit college as a Fine Arts major (big money-maker there) to pursue acting more fully. However, I still had to pay the bills so I ended up taking administrative positions in big corporations and was strangely good at it. I made fairly good money. However, the more I worked the less I was able to pursue acting in a way that justified quitting school for a “career” in acting. I met and married a person who totally supported my acting career and who understood how miserable I was sitting in an office NOT pursuing my career. I quit the full-time office bullshit and started to focus on my career and then tried to find jobs that would allow me to pursue acting 100%. Things began to progress and blah, blah, blah.

Then I got pregnant and well, here we are. Now I am trying to start my own business doing something that I love and which will allow me to continue to be very involved in my son’s rearing. I guess I am a WAHM and a SAHM.

Rest assured as I was growing up I always said that I would NEVER have children unless I could sustain myself and my children. However, shit happens. Things change and people change. When we are young we make big plans - lots of big plans. When we are young we have the tiger by the tail and we are in control of all things. And we should! But ultimately life occurs and sometimes plans change.

Don’t think that I don’t consider the very prospect of Bennetts’ book at times. Of course I do. Who wouldn’t? Any other SAHM who says that she doesn’t think about the prospect of an abandoned future is deluding herself. And yes, she should consider it. I think any Stay-At-Home-Dad would do the same.

People die, people leave, people are laid off, people are injured, people simply change their minds. Shit happens. It is important for people to be prepared to support themselves and a responsible parent has a responsibility to be able to support their children properly. So, I guess I agree with the gist of this book, to a certain extent. Yes, we must be prepared.

However, I don’t think that we should all have to give up staying home with our children, if we want to, because of some perpetual idea that all of our relationships are bound for devastation. What kind of life can we live if we spend the whole time doubting the bedrock of how we have decided to live. I mean we have to trust our partners and if we don’t then we shouldn’t be with them. And if we find later that we can’t trust them then yes, we should not quit our jobs rather we should do what we have to in order to change our situation, to the best of our ability.

But erm, here is an issue: Quality full-time daycare for one child can cost as much if not more than what the average woman makes annually. Now factor in the cost of a car and gas and clothes to wear to said job and frankly you are paying money to work. And if you are single you are really fucked.

The bigger issue that people like Bennetts and Linda Hirshman seem to refuse to spend any quality time and energy on is that we simply live in a society which largely expects women to stay home and be good little wives and yet provides nothing in compensation for this job. Nothing. Instead of suggesting possible ways to change the system, they only try to brow-beat us into believing that it is our own fucking fault and since we can’t beat them, we should just join them. We should blame ourselves for not being smart enough to work two jobs in case our world as we may know it falls apart? Thanks. Yes, I needed more shit to feel like a failure for.

When do we start being able to change that compensation gap? Being a parent is a 24 hour job, whether you have another job or not, and nobody is getting paid for it.