Motherhood is a Temp Job : The Feminine Mistake
May 19, 2008 by Tracee Sioux
Filed under Parenting
I’m in the middle of FEMININE MISTAKE, THE: ARE WE GIVING UP TOO MUCH?
Leslie Bennetts, the author brings up the idea that, as she puts is, motherhood is a Temp Job.
Being a mom is a temp job, and if you take that temp job and become completely dependent on your spouse, that makes you so vulnerable,” says Sylvia Law on page 100. The odds that your spouse will die or fall in love with a younger woman or have a midlife crisis are pretty good. Of course you can’t depend on a guy - just read the divorce statistics.
Motherhood is a vital temp job - vital to society, vital to the family, vital to women and vital to children - but a temp job nonetheless.
She says it’s ludicrous for women to give up their entire careers and professional ambition for this 20 year temp job when it’s unnecessary and puts women’s financial security at risk.
While you’re a full-time mother for a good chunk of time, she argues, you have a profession for much longer.
Women shouldn’t be giving up a validating and exciting 40-50 year career for a temp job, when they can have both.
Kids. Grow. Up.
People. Get. Divorced.
Our job is to get them to grow up so they leave home. (If your kid is still in the basement at 40, that’s failure at your mothering job. If your daughter and her three kids are still in your basement, that’s failure at your mothering job.) We’re here to raise independent adults who contribute to society.
If we are successful, we are no longer needed. We’ll still have a function as mothers, but it won’t be enough to build a purpose and an identity around. In fact, many women find that it’s not enough to build their identity around in the first place when the children are still young or once their children are in school.
Women who have shed all identities other than mother, even if they remain married and financially viable, suffer from an identity crisis when children leave and their purpose is gone.
What do YOU think?
I think she trying to simplify the subject matter.. Financial safety isn’t nearly as important for many, many people then family security.
And frankly, every quote I’ve read from this book sounds incredibly condescending. It’s like the over-correction thing you were talking about on So Sioux Me.. Why must women who believe in and want career & kids push down those who want their career (for as long as it lasts) to be raising kids.
There are two sides to this. My aunt’s children are grown now - and she is divorced from their father. He made lots of money when they were small - but consistently drove their cost of living up - with uneccesary, frivilous purchases..He made her feel like she HAD to keep working full time and even told her to. (She had her own beauty shop and could have easily cut down to just mornings or afternoons or something) She resents the HELL out of this now. She looks back and is sad and bitter and it is literally the biggest regret of her life. She feels robbed.
These days people - even women people, have two-three careers in a lifetime. Why is it so awful or shameful to take a break and spend time with your children?
Money is not everything.
I would submit that perhaps it’s not the author who doesn’t have an open mind about the issue.
It’s a fat book, definitely not over-simplified.
Though she does condemn some of my choices - I have not found the book to be overly condescending. She does use inflammatory words to get her point across and to make the reader THINK about what her choices are and why she made them and why she wants to defend them. She does that effectively and I do think the issue is worth thinking about.
She doesn’t take an absolute stance against “a break.” She does take an absolute stance against completely “opting out” for good.
Why do you think women are so defensive about being asked to THINK about their choices?
She’s saying our “either/or” perspective is a false choice.
She’s not asking us to forgo the family’s interests.
She’s asking us to fight for our own interests.
She doesn’t believe you can have one without the other. The mother is the family.
I certainly didn’t mean my post to be defensive.. I work - so I can’t really be emotionally defensive concerning this.
I guess what’s offensive about being asked to ‘think’ about their choices is that it’s an assumption that they haven’t already. Most women I know who work ‘think’ about it all the time, and the women I know who stay at home ‘think’ about it constantly. For many, they’ve had to make sacrifices to stay at home and it was a tough decision to make.
It seems like she’s talking to us as if we were yanked out of 1954…like we don’t know any better or that it hasn’t occured to us to really weigh our options. Do you see what I mean? or no?
I have not read the whole book, just excerpts so I could be way off base.
I think all women - working, not and in between - are defensive about this.
And I think the author’s premise is that if women keep “opting out” then we’re on our way back to 1954 and that’s going to have serious repercussions for our personal security, as well as society.
I think she’s right when she asserts that maybe we’re not considering all the ramifications - for us, for our families, for when our children grow up, for society - of quitting a public life.
If they aren’t even testing medication on women - don’t you think that’s because there is no female scientist in the lab to say, “How does this effect women?”
I find the implications of women volunteering to quit public-life alarming.
We’re 71st in female political participation. Don’t you think it effects laws if there is no female congressperson to say, “How will this law effect women?”
The same questions can be applied to all professions.
I think it’s worth asking and worth thinking about and I’m grateful someone was brave enough to ask me “Have you thought about all the real ramifications of this decision?”
Cause in reality, I haven’t. And a lot of the women I know haven’t either. Or maybe they did 5 years ago when they had kids and it’s time to reconsider.
We should always keep reconsidering.