Prior to joining Vanity Fair, where she has been a contributing editor since 1988, Leslie Bennetts spent ten years at the New York Times. Bennetts started as a writer for the Style section and went on to cover national politics, metropolitan news, and City Hall, becoming the first woman ever to cover a presidential campaign for the Times. In her new book, The Feminine Mistake, Bennetts asserts that women's decisions to abandon their careers may save them stress in the short-term, but the repercussions are enormously dangerous-and women often fail to understand this until it's far too late. Further, she argues, the financial and psychological benefits of working outside the home are enormous. Bennetts herself serves as a prime example of this assertion, having crafted an enviable journalism career over the past thirty years while simultaneously raising a family. She spoke with the Humanist in March, shortly before her book's release, to discuss the urgent message she wants to impart on today's younger women.
The Humanist: What do you consider the main points you want readers to take away from your book?
Bennetts: This book was originally inspired by my exasperation with the whole issue of women quitting their jobs to stay home with children. It's covered in the media and in our culture as if it were simply a lifestyle choice. Nobody ever mentions money-the economic risks that women take on by becoming financially dependent on a man. And every time I read a story about how juggling work and a family is so stressful that women are quitting their careers to stay home I'd think, yes, but what about ten or fifteen years from now when their kids are grown up? Half these women will likely get divorced, others may lose their husbands due to premature death, or their husbands may lose their jobs. There are all kinds of risk factors that just weren't being discussed. People also cover this issue as if you can opt out of the labor force for x number of years and just waltz back in whenever you want to, and women are just disastrously unaware of how difficult the barriers to reentry are and what an enormous financial penalty they pay for time out. So I started this project with the purpose of warning women about the risks of economic dependency. That's the first takeaway.
The second part of this is the good news. For a variety of reasons, many of which have to do with the way they're socialized, women in our society are unaware of the many benefits of work, aside from the paycheck. Women are raised not to brag; blowing one's own horn is the male model, the Donald Trump model. So women don't talk about how great it is to be successful, how great it is to make a lot of money, how great it is to have power, and how empowering it is to take on new challenges.
The Humanist: How did you approach the writing of this book?
Bennetts: I interviewed all kinds of women from age seventeen to eighty, and I found that women are horrendously unaware of the risks they're taking until it's too late. They're making these choices usually in their twenties and thirties, and they have very rosy expectations of the future. If you interview women in their forties and fifties, many have found themselves on the wrong side of the odds: divorced, widowed, or suddenly thrust into the role of breadwinner and they know what a high price they've paid because they can't find a decent job.
In addition to researching all the risks of dependency, I've also researched the benefits of work for women, and the bottom line is that working women are happier and, believe it or not, working women are healthier. There are really fascinating longitudinal studies that show that multiple roles are in fact good for women.
The Humanist: I was really surprised by the health issue.
Bennetts: It's just amazing. And women don't know this because we've been bombarded for thirty years with the same old story in the media about the unbearable stress of the juggling act. And so you tell people that long enough and they buy it. The truth is it isn't unbearable. All of my friends have really successful careers and really wonderful families. And I don't think we're anomalous. Millions of women out there manage this. They work, they put dinner on the table for their kids at night, and they manage to keep their families together and to bring in a second income, increasingly one that represents the major share.
The Humanist: How did women evolve to this reality?
Bennetts: I think there was a segment of the baby boomer generation that learned from their mothers-the women of the 1950s and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique-who were left stranded when the divorce rate spiked in the 1970s. Many of them didn't have college educations or professional credentials because they had been housewives. One of the women I interviewed said to me, "I saw what happened to my mother and her friends, and I said to myself, that is never going to happen to me." And so some women like her went out and pursued careers. A great many others didn't, so what I see is a lot of women out there in their late forties or early fifties who are feeling really lost and frightened, and many of them don't have partners anymore. Like the New York Times recently reported, there are now more American women living without a partner than there are living with one. Marriage is no longer the normative state for women in this country, and yet we're still bringing girls up to believe that it is and that there's always going to be a man around to take care of them, which, in fact, isn't the case.
Moreover, women are living longer these days, so that marriage is coming to represent just a segment of a woman's life. It's a very scary prospect for society as well as for individuals if women don't take responsibility for ensuring that they can support themselves throughout a life, not just a part of it.
One of the things younger women today don't seem to understand is how relatively finite the period of intensive mothering is over the course of a lifetime. In my book I call it the "fifteen-year paradigm" because if you have a couple of kids and they're two or three years apart, it's less than fifteen years that you spend really consumed by the demands of mothering. And over the course of a fifty-year work life, what's fifteen years? So because of the short-term demands of mothering small children, women are making this fatal choice that's going to compromise their interests and leave them with very little after their children grow up.
If you look at women in midlife, the ones who are really happy and excited about the future are the ones who have their own careers. The difference is so dramatic. They pay for it with a certain amount of stress early on, when their kids are young and they're juggling like mad, but as the years go on the benefits increase exponentially for working women, and the penalties increase exponentially for women who have given up their careers.
Heidi Bruggink, who holds a B.A. from Harvard University, is currently writing for The Hill newspaper in Washington, DC. She formerly served as Legal Coordinator of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center.
