Resumo de Book: The Wives Of Others

When Betty When Betty Friedan wrote ?The Feminine Mystique,? forty-four years ago, she did more than launch a revolution by identifying ?the problem that has no name??the crushing ennui of the modern housewife.
In 1967, ?Alice in Womanland, or The Feminine Mistake,? by the pseudonymous Margaret Bennett, provided a satirical overview of the condition of the American woman, its chapters on marriage, family, and work framed within an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll?a tactic that, like the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane?s ?White Rabbit,? might once have made sense but these days indicates a culture that was on the verge of losing its collective mind. ?We can even say that the glass ceiling was a blessing in disguise,? she maintained. ?Today, women can not only see to the glass ceiling, they can also see through it.?
The latest ?Feminine Mistake? by the journalist Leslie Bennetts, means to be a corrective to such correctives.
Bennetts, who is the same age as the mothers of those Ivy Leaguers, is appalled by that attitude. She argues that women must work, even after becoming mothers?not so much because, as Betty Friedan lyrically expounded, ?if women do not put forth, finally, that effort to become all that they have it in them to become, they will forfeit their own humanity,? as because a Woman without a job or a career will be in dire economic straits if she loses her provider to death, desertion, or debility. Nor should a woman who leaves the workplace when her children are babies count on being able to rejoin it later; her skills may have become unmarketable, Bennetts warns, and her years off will be counted against her. ?It?s nice to be at home when your child loses her fourth tooth,? she writes, ?but is it worth the price you might pay if your breadwinner dies or divorces you, and you end up losing that home entirely?? 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.

from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisShe is alarmed that women aren?t taking precautions.
To Bennetts, the new ?stay-at-home momism,? as she termed it in the 2005 magazine article from which this book grew, is a kind of nationwide female delusion: ?a plague of silence across the land,? she says, with Friedanesque rhetoric. (Elsewhere, she cites a soccer mom turned entrepreneur who likens the divorce and desertion among her peers to ?the slaughter of the lambs??a slightly less inflamed metaphor than Friedan?s description of domesticity as ?the comfortable concentration camp,? but along the same lines.) 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. (A typical response to a question about plans for the future??To be honest, I haven?t thought long and hard about that??is provided by the stay-at-home mother of a two-year-old and a two-month-old, a woman who deserves a medal simply for answering the door to Bennetts.) The response of one woman to the bald question of what she would do if the worst were to happen??I would get married again??strikes Bennetts as so absurd as to be barely deserving of commentary, although half of all divorced women remarry within five years of their first marriage ending, and three-quarters remarry within a decade of a split.

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