Adventures at Midlife

Ask Allison has an interesting post on a book by Leslie Bennetts, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, a title that appears to be pretty inflammatory for some readers.

Her thesis: Women cannot afford to give up careers to become full-time homemakers. (Yikes! I can feel the heat already!) Before you break out the flame-throwers, know that Bennetts’ position appears largely economical, not social. “Can we afford to become dependent on our husbands?” she asks. Factor in job layoffs, divorce rates, marital infidelity, inflation, medical costs, school tuition and the sheer difficulty of re-entering the workforce after even just a few years away, and it becomes a compelling question.

(Many of the customer reviews on Amazon criticize her oversimplification of the issue. “According to Ms. Bennetts, if you decide to stay at home with your children, you’ll end up broke, unfulfilled and alone,” says one mother. But another reviewer has a more sage approach: “A man,” she admits, “is not a financial plan.”)

I have not yet read the book, but I understand what a hot button this topic is. Years ago, at a five-years-post-high-school luncheon with some old friends, I innocently asked what everyone had been doing and if they were working. (I was unmarried at the time, and dumb.) One woman who got married two weeks after graduation absolutely BRISTLED at the question. “I have two kids, and I work just as hard as anyone who has a JOB!” she fussed. Come to think of it, I haven’t gone to one single reunion lunch where some SAH mom didn’t take a jab at me about work and home.

It’s because I’ve always been employed. I just have. I worked part-time when the boys were very small, including a year when I helped The Spouse with a freelance editing business, and eventually went back to full-time, at first for the insurance benefits and then for the income. I didn’t work to make anyone else feel bad or to make some kind of personal statement. I just worked. I was raised not to expect anyone to take care of me. I have a college degree. I’m good at what I do. Thanks to EEO and what friends tell me is my take-no-prisoners persona, I haven’t experienced too much grief about it from my male colleagues. But I so clearly irritate some women that I’ve learned to be really low-key about what I do.

I wish some of the women who get their panties in a wad about this subject could sit in on the class for “displaced homemakers” my friend teaches at the local community college. (She’s a survivor of the marriage wars herself, but her husband never made any money, so her transition back to single life was comparatively smooth financially.) She tells me that these women — mostly older mothers with children still at home and no skills that could be readily applied to the workplace — are like deer caught in headlights. They were broadsided by their husbands’ departures, and they have no clue what to do now. Their stories make me want to weep.

My take? If you can afford to stay at home with the kids, GREAT! But don’t abdicate your responsibility for your financial future. It’s not fair to you, or him.