Respecting Women's Choices

This post is the second part of a response to Leslie Bennetts' book The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?

As I read this book, one thing became clear: I'm not sure which team I'm playing on. Two days a week, I send my son to day care so I can freelance and work on my own creative projects. Does that make me a "working mother"? Am I a stay-at-home mom, since that's what I do for 60% of the work week? Sometimes I think being a stay-at-home/work-from-home/artist hybrid enables me to be offended by nearly everything people say about women and work.


The chapter in Bennetts' book with which I most identified was "The Joys of the Full Life," in which women talk about how much they love their work. As woman after woman talked about how much work made up a part of her identity, I understood. I have wanted to be a writer since I was 12. I love my work, and I will never give it up.


Unfortunately, that work is largely unpaid. The $528 I earned from a contest-winning story last year is not going to buy me much status in the world. I was happy to get the issue of Rosebud a few days ago that had my story "Dancing with Liberace" in it (what an honor to be published alongside Nikki Giovanni!), but my three contributor's copies won't help fatten my IRA. Being a novelist and poet is an impractical dream, with no guarantee of success, but I take myself seriously enough to keep moving towards it.


The chapter of the book that made reading it worthwhile was "Opting Back In." In it, the author talks about the difficulties women--and white collar women in particular--have when they decide to return to the work force after taking time off to care for their families. Such women are often surprised to find that degrees and intelligence don't carry as much weight as recent experience. She quotes legal scholar Sylvia Law, who says, "If you're going to exit, you've got to have a reentry strategy.... You can't just walk right back in. Even men can't."


Good point. This chapter provoked a long discussion with Tom about my plans for an eventual return to the regular (i.e. non-contract) workforce. Although I'm not planning on it for a while yet, it doesn't hurt to start formulating a tentative plan. The fact that I've been freelancing all this time (I went back to some projects a week after my C-section) means that my resume will be current. I know people who have the kinds of jobs I'd like to do. I may consider furthering my education to create a natural entry point back into the work force. (It made me happy to remember that Nancy Pelosi didn't enter politics until she was 47, after having 5 kids.) It also made me wonder what kind of changes would best help women reenter the workforce when they're ready to do so; there's no reason we can't have a mechanism by which people who have taken leaves of absence are brought up-to-date in their fields and trained to take up where they left off.


But this book continues to trouble me for other reasons. It makes me sad that some of the baby boomer feminists (Bennetts, and Linda Hirshman, whose recent book aimed at stay-at-home mothers is called Get to Work) denigrate what they call "choice feminism." They believe, as so many men have done throughout history, that they know the best way for all women to live their lives. It makes me sad that the work that has been traditionally done by women continues to be devalued. (Oddly, Bennetts waxes rhapsodic about the "intelligent, competent surrogate" who cared for her own children; evidently, the fact that the baby-sitter cared for children to earn money made her choice worthwhile, but women who choose to stay home to care for their own children are wasting their time and living "lesser lives.")


It makes me sad that the older feminists of my parents' generation would try to tell me that I'm doing things wrong, that I should be working full time (even if I'd rather not) to fulfill their ideas of what a perfect society should look like. I grew up a feminist. I read The Feminine Mystique--along with many other feminist books my mom was reading for her graduate classes--in middle school. In high school, I had passionate arguments with friends about feminist sociolinguistics. In college, I helped organize Take Back the Night marches, counseled abused women, and wrote columns about feminism for the college newspaper. Over the past 18 or so years, I have devoted time and energy towards defending feminism from criticism and advancing women's causes. It makes me sad now to hear other women say that that they know better than I do the choices I should make.


Twelve years ago, as a college junior, I wrote in Penn State's The Daily Collegian,

I truly believe that the heart of feminism is choice. Not "choice" in the pro-abortion sense, or "choice" meaning feminist choices -- I believe that the purpose of feminism is to free women (and men, too) to make the choices they want to make…. Although part of me wants to impose my choices on everyone, I try not to. The feminist movement should allow women the freedom to be lawyers or homemakers (or both), liberals or conservatives, pro-life or pro-choice. A woman who chooses to stay home and raise her children is no less a feminist than a woman who puts any children she might have in daycare and tries to save the world.

I still believe those words today, and when I dug them up from the online archives, I smiled, as if I'd gotten a vote of confidence from my younger self.


I am also a big believer in listening to other women and having respect for their stories. Yes, you can try to harangue people into doing what you want, but how many will comply? Bennetts makes many good points in her book. Yes, paid work can be a source of power and self-esteem for women. Yes, women should have a plan to reenter the workforce before they leave. Yes, in the event of divorce or widowhood, women should be prepared to support themselves.


But a friend of mine is going through a divorce right now. A former military spouse, she stayed home with her kids for most of their younger days, and is now working in a convenience store. She would be a prime candidate to appear in Bennetts’ book, bemoaning her bad choices—except she has no regrets. She told me,

I would never in a million years trade being able to stay home with my kids. I consider myself very lucky that I was able to be a stay at home mom (with brief spatterings of employment in there) for as long as I had been able to. Sure, my life would be easier if I had been on the career track, heaven knows. So I am glad I had been a SAHM because it was something that I had really wanted to do. That was a decision we made as a husband and wife about what we wanted for our kids. I don't regret it for one second. All of that being said, I am VERY happy about working again.

Instead of dismissing voices like my friend’s and mine, I hope the older generation of feminists will do us the courtesy of listening to what we have to say, and assuming that we are competent and thoughtful enough to make our own choices.