Rebecca Mead: Are stay-at-home mothers putting themselves—and feminism—at risk?
When Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique,” forty-four years ago, she did more than launch a revolution by identifying “the problem that has no name”—the crushing ennui of the modern housewife. She also invited a bit of wordplay that has proved irresistible both to her detractors and to her would-be successors. If “The Feminine Mystique” has acquired the status of a classic, the various iterations of “The Feminine Mistake” have provided something of a barometer of a shifting cultural climate.
In 1967, “Alice in Womanland, or The Feminine Mistake,” by the pseudonymous Margaret Bennett, provided a satirical overview of the condition of the American woman, its chapters on marriage, family, and work framed within an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll—a tactic that, like the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” might once have made sense but these days indicates a culture that was on the verge of losing its collective mind. By 1971, the feminist movement was sufficiently well established to merit a parodic counterblast from the humorist Cal Samra, whose own “The Feminine Mistake” was, he claimed, “perhaps the first true masculinist tract since the Koran.” When Judith Posner’s “The Feminine Mistake” appeared, in 1992, it was time for feminist one-upmanship. Posner, a sociologist influenced by the burgeoning New Age movement, argued that those women who had followed Friedan’s counsel and sought to enter the workplace on a par with men had gained nothing but their own subjection to corporate culture, and would do well to cast aside career in favor of personal growth, forming a vanguard for the wholesale reformation of consumer capitalism. “We can even say that the glass ceiling was a blessing in disguise,” she maintained. “Today, women can not only see to the glass ceiling, they can also see through it.”
The latest “Feminine Mistake” (Voice; $24.95), by the journalist Leslie Bennetts, means to be a corrective to such correctives. Just as Posner’s book was conceived as a response to the media phenomenon of the overwhelmed Superwoman (Posner cited a Time cover from 1989 that featured a woman with a baby in one arm and a briefcase in the other, accompanied by the text “In the ’80s they tried to have it all. Now they’ve just plain had it. Is there a future for feminism?”), Bennetts’s book appears amid trend stories like one that was published, notoriously, in the Times in the fall of 2005, in which female Ivy League students disparaged the working-mother model of their mothers’ generation and declared an intention to be provided for by their future husbands as soon as they possibly could.
Bennetts, who is the same age as the mothers of those Ivy Leaguers, is appalled by that attitude. She argues that women must work, even after becoming mothers—not so much because, as Betty Friedan lyrically expounded, “if women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, they will forfeit their own humanity,” as because a woman without a job or a career will be in dire economic straits if she loses her provider to death, desertion, or debility....
Read entire article at New Yorker
In 1967, “Alice in Womanland, or The Feminine Mistake,” by the pseudonymous Margaret Bennett, provided a satirical overview of the condition of the American woman, its chapters on marriage, family, and work framed within an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll—a tactic that, like the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” might once have made sense but these days indicates a culture that was on the verge of losing its collective mind. By 1971, the feminist movement was sufficiently well established to merit a parodic counterblast from the humorist Cal Samra, whose own “The Feminine Mistake” was, he claimed, “perhaps the first true masculinist tract since the Koran.” When Judith Posner’s “The Feminine Mistake” appeared, in 1992, it was time for feminist one-upmanship. Posner, a sociologist influenced by the burgeoning New Age movement, argued that those women who had followed Friedan’s counsel and sought to enter the workplace on a par with men had gained nothing but their own subjection to corporate culture, and would do well to cast aside career in favor of personal growth, forming a vanguard for the wholesale reformation of consumer capitalism. “We can even say that the glass ceiling was a blessing in disguise,” she maintained. “Today, women can not only see to the glass ceiling, they can also see through it.”
The latest “Feminine Mistake” (Voice; $24.95), by the journalist Leslie Bennetts, means to be a corrective to such correctives. Just as Posner’s book was conceived as a response to the media phenomenon of the overwhelmed Superwoman (Posner cited a Time cover from 1989 that featured a woman with a baby in one arm and a briefcase in the other, accompanied by the text “In the ’80s they tried to have it all. Now they’ve just plain had it. Is there a future for feminism?”), Bennetts’s book appears amid trend stories like one that was published, notoriously, in the Times in the fall of 2005, in which female Ivy League students disparaged the working-mother model of their mothers’ generation and declared an intention to be provided for by their future husbands as soon as they possibly could.
Bennetts, who is the same age as the mothers of those Ivy Leaguers, is appalled by that attitude. She argues that women must work, even after becoming mothers—not so much because, as Betty Friedan lyrically expounded, “if women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, they will forfeit their own humanity,” as because a woman without a job or a career will be in dire economic straits if she loses her provider to death, desertion, or debility....