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Recommended Reading: 'The Feminine Mistake'
April 16, 2007

Let me say right up front that I truly enjoyed reading The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts – it’s well written, exceptionally readable for a nonfiction book, interesting, and smart. It’s not, however, without some debatable points. But I still recommend it highly and hope that it will spur more argument about how we live today.

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead reviews The Feminine Mistake  and, in discussing how Bennetts' message differs from the first wave of feminisim, writes:

"The feminists of Bennetts’s youth proclaimed that a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle; Bennetts’s point is that bicycles get broken or stolen all the time."

Hmmmmm. So, if a fish does not need a bicycle, a woman does not need a man. But if the fish chooses a bicycle, then a woman might choose a man? And if she chooses him... ahhhh, now I'm getting it...

All I wound up thinking was: Is Prince Charming riding a bicycle when he comes along?

  

If Mead's metaphor is slightly difficult to untangle, so is Bennetts' message: that women not only should work, but they should enjoy it, too. The strongest caveat to her dearly held thesis comes when she interviews a 46-year-old working-class woman in Indiana who has chosen to stay home now that her children are on their own.

"When I ask why she doesn't work, she snorts: 'Because I don't have to,' she says. 'It just seems like we can make it without me working now. I don't have to, so I don't. I like not working, because I can choose what I do. I crochet, I sew, I cook; I'm busy. I don't feel that I'm not fulfilled.'"

In other words, what we have here is a failure to communicate across class boundaries. Not that Bennetts neglects to mention this; she does admit that working-class and poor women may not enjoy their work at all, and may not have all that much invested in it, unlike the lawyers and doctors and executives whose interviews make up the bulk of The Feminine Mistake. However, despite her attention to women "from the heartland" (as she refers to them in her Prologue -- nearly all of them are in Indiana), she predicates most of her arguments about why women should work on women "from the high end" (as I have decided to refer to them -- nearly all of them are in New York).

Meanwhile, Mead's review focuses on taking Bennetts down before even considering what this author stands for:

"Where Friedan’s interviews convinced her of a pervasive discontent, though, Bennetts finds, and deplores, a pervasive contentment. Interview after interview reveals a woman who seems, actually, pretty happy with her lot, at least until Bennetts sweeps in and points out how terrible things will become if her husband leaves her."

First of all, Bennetts is not only talking about adulterous creeps; she's also talking about unforeseen tragedies and changes in life circumstances. I wish she had made that clearer somewhere up front (on the cover?: "Not Just About Adulterous Creeps!"), because life transitions (as her interviewees make abundantly clear) have a lot to do with when and why women work and don't work.

One of those transitions, of course, is marriage. As Mead points out, emotional dependency is at the heart of marriage. While Bennetts has been married for eighteen years, she not only neglects to fully explore the deeply held cultural beliefs about that emotional dependency -- she neglects to fully explore men's and women's relationships to those beliefs, and how they might shape things in a positive direction. While she does talk about egalitarian marriage towards the end of the book, there are other angles that she does not address: for instance, how an imbalance in marital economic power might be rectified over time.

I've gone on for quite a while, and I could keep going... but again, I think is more interesting than reading my thoughts is to read Bennetts' and comment....

Posted by Bethanne Patrick on April 16, 2007 | Comments (1)