Once, when I was in my mid-20s—living on my own, childless, and still unaware that adulthood would eventually require life-defining compromise—my boyfriend asked me if I was a feminist. "Well," I stalled, "actually, I think I'm something newer."
To this day, he—the boyfriend became my husband—repeats that line with relish. And yet, looking back, I don't think my appraisal was so far off. I wasn't a feminist: I was enjoying the advantages the women of my mother's generation had fought for me to have, but I wasn't half as aware, or grateful, as I should have been. And I was newer: I was a woman who had grown up with enough privilege to take it for granted.
Leslie Bennetts is worried about women like me. Or at least the me of yesteryear, the one who dreamily believed she could bypass feminism, when really she was just safely tucked under the wing of youth. (Now a wife and mother, I practically burn my bra when my husband asks if I've done the laundry.) More specifically, Bennetts's new book, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, is directed at women who have not just lost sight of feminism but have tossed it aside, choosing to stay home with the kids while their husbands forge ahead professionally. "Your own career is an investment you make in yourself," she writes, "one that will pay dividends throughout your life. Some benefits are financial, some are intellectual or creative.... If you devote your life to supporting your husband's career, those dividends belong to him—as does the career itself." (Bennetts reminds her readers often that marriages, promises that they are, can easily be broken.)
This book is one of many recently published about motherhood—To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, by Caitlin Flanagan; Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner; and Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, by Linda Hirshman, to name a few—that take a stern look at the choices made by women today. The key word being choices, since having them is a relatively new phenomenon in motherhood, and one that does not extend to women everywhere. Many involved in the Mommy Wars—these authors included—have pointed out that such books are mostly aimed at upper-middle-class mothers, the elite few who can afford to bite their nails about whether to work. And yet these books do spur on a worthwhile conversation about the increasingly complex experience of being a mother today.
In 1963, Betty Friedan gave voice to the growing malaise in The Feminine Mystique: "As if they were waking from a coma, [women] ask, 'Where am I ... what am I doing here?'" Friedan famously went on to point out that things were not going to get better until women set a liberating example that subsequent generations could follow.
Times have since, thanks in large part to the late Friedan, changed. Flanagan, Warner, Hirshman, and Bennetts, among others, are chronicling that change and its attendant anxieties—alternately advising women to get back home (Flanagan) or to the office (Hirshman, Bennetts). Warner, the least inflammatory of the group, doesn't send mothers in either direction, but asks them to stop flashing Baby Einstein cards at their babies and start campaigning for better national support for families.
These writers all seem to want to re-create the Friedanian battle cry of the '60s, but the uniform discontent of that day no longer exists. Instead, our once-flowing river of worry—Have I lost myself to motherhood?—has been diverted into many rushing streams of anxiety. Our burden is now one of choice; whether to work, who should care for our children in our absence, even what to do with family downtime, have an edge of competition, given our current obsession with cultivating genius. Women have been granted more freedom, both in the workplace and in marriage, and now we must make our myriad decisions and live with the guilty consequences. Perhaps this is our generation's feminine mystique.
As a result, we can count on—as these authors' publishers most certainly do—a fine tremor of nervous discontent running through so many mothers' lives, a queasy feeling that somehow somewhere someone is doing a better job of pulling it all off. Perhaps that is why many of these manifestos are so extreme. In order to quiet the cacophony of voices rising up in complaint, one must speak as loudly and as exaggeratedly as possible. Certainly this is Flanagan's and Hirshman's tactic. Where Flanagan artfully manipulates her readers into believing domesticity should make a comeback, Hirshman barks out orders, boot-camp style, for women to not even think about quitting their jobs. Bennetts, too, offers a distorted portrait of women leaving the workplace in droves, even after citing two prominent studies that show only a slight increase. Buried within the rhetoric, though, is a persistent truth: We are desperate for answers.
