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{summary} As a wife to Jeremy, and mother to Emily, 18, and Nick 15, Leslie Bennetts knows firsthand the challenges of being a working mom. In her new book, "The Feminine Mistake" released last week, Bennetts makes a case for why women should not leave their careers behind. In the process she has unwittingly ignited a hotbed of debate about the merits of staying home versus being a working mom. Part one of my interview sparked much debate on our own message boards. In this continuation of my interview, Leslie discusses the controversy and uproar from stay-at-home moms.Samantha: I have a friend who has a baby and a successful business career and she says that if her husband were making enough money she would quit tomorrow. What would you encourage her to think about before making that decision? Leslie: Women often think about this decision as if they can count on the husband's income over the long run. If you add up all the risk factors it becomes unavoidably clear that the majority of these women are going to end up on the wrong side of the odds. Half of them are going to get divorced and in addition to that some of them will have husbands who become sick or disabled or who die prematurely and a lot of them are going to have husbands who lose their jobs at some point or another. Women are living longer and longer these days so these women who are leaving the workforce have to say if something happened to my husband even through no fault of his own do you have enough resources to support you and your children until you are 95? Almost nobody has that kind of money. Women are already in poverty at twice the rate of men in their later years. 4 out of 5 of the women who are poor were not poor when they had husbands around. Samantha: What positive effect is there for husbands when their wives work? Leslie: It is a lot of pressure to put on men to expect them to be the single source of income for a family and many men feel very resentful. They may not tell their wives about it but it feels like a very overwhelming responsibility to them to know that they are all that stands between their families and disaster. Because it is a very uncertain world out there and if you stick your head in the sand and deny that challenges might arise it is not going to help you to deal with them when they come. {pagebreak} Samantha: And what about the implications to the workplace if women are leaving? Leslie: The American workplace is not family friendly. More and more of what we see in corporate America is extreme jobs, the ones that demand that you work 60 or 80 or even 100 hours a week and this is bad for both men and women. If a man is working those kinds of hours he is going to have a diminished relationship with his children. It is only when women stay in the workforce that everybody starts having to deal with the caretaking and at that point you get pressure on corporate America to start effecting real change. If both men and women have to deal with kid emergencies where the school nurse calls you and says you have to come get Jimmy because he is sick and somebody has to leave the office to go do that, only then are you going to start to see real change in the workplace. But not until we all start to demand it. Samantha: What advice do you have for women who find themselves in a social environment where they are the token working mom among stay-at-home moms? Leslie: One of the things I would say to working moms is â??Get through these years.' You are going to be very grateful that you have maintained your ability to deal with whatever challenges life throws your way. It will be better for you, better for your children and it will make your family a lot more secure no matter what happens. These days when a typical American family has two kids if they are two or three years apart the really intensive period of hands on mothering lasts 15 years or less and if you graduate from college when you are 22 lets say you live to 82. That is 60 years. So 15 years out of 60 in an adult lifetime is a relatively short period. For more than 40 years the social scientists have been comparing the children of working mothers with the children of stay-at-home mothers and trying to establish that kids turn out better if you have a stay at home mom and it is simply not true. So we have all been victimized by this fiction. Samantha: Did you ever experience mommy guilt? Leslie: Absolutely. Ever minute of every day. When my kids were little I felt guilty when I was working because I wasn't with my kids and I felt guilty when I was with my kids because I wasn't working. And looking back on it, the only thing I regret is having wasted all that energy feeling guilty. I would like to shake myself in that previous era and say, "Get over it!" {pagebreak} Samantha: Did you have any mentors throughout your career? Leslie: What I had was a powerful role model in my mother. My mother always worked but I always felt that her family came first and I don't know how she did it because she didn't have any household help. She was ahead of her time in believing in good nutrition and home cooking and we had a very close secure family life so growing up it never occurred to me to question whether you could do both. Samantha: Have there been any surprising fans or foes of the book? Leslie: There has been such an uproar from a lot of stay-at-home mothers who are really angry about this book. All I was trying to do was to provide women with one-stop shopping, with all of the information that would be helpful in considering these serious issues, everything from legal and medical information to child development studies to labor force information but what I am finding is that this is such a hot button issue that a lot of stay at home moms are furious at the suggestion that they may be making a choice that will jeopardize their futures. Samantha: In many ways don't you feel having the controversy is good? Leslie: I hope so. I appeared on the Today Show early this week and they have not had an avalanche of such negative response since Tom Cruise criticized Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants for post-partum depression and all of the response was along the lines of a personal attack. All of these women wrote in and said Leslie Bennetts is obviously divorced and childless and bitter and lonely and it is very clear that her husband dumped her or she wouldn't be saying these things. I have been married for nearly 20 years. My husband is a very lovely supportive man and I have two children. {pagebreak} Samantha: Have you faced more criticism because you worked from home which is thought of as an idyllic work setup? Leslie: I think that people say, "Well you don't know what it is like being a working mother" but that is not really true because we all suffer the same pain when we have to walk out the door for whatever reason and we have a two year old hanging on to our knees saying "Mommy don't go." My job was idyllic in some ways in that I was in the house a lot but then I would get a call to be on a plane for Nairobi or Dubai the next day and I would have to go. It is never easy -- the juggling and coping with emergencies that every working mother has to do. Of all the industrialized Western nations the United States has the least family friendly policies in place. The other countries put us to shame and we need to start asserting the needs of our families in a more effective way in order for things to begin to change in a direction that will serve both men and women as well as our children. Samantha: Your daughter is off to college in September, what will you do with your new time? Leslie: I still have one child at home so I think things don't change that much. I do notice that since my kids have become teenagers I have more time just because I am more independent. It is not a coincidence that although I have been earning my living as a writer for more than 30 years I have not until now written a book. Samantha: If you had an extra hour each day how would you spend it? Leslie: Oh my God. If I won the lottery I would spend it getting a massage. But until I win the lottery, how would I spend it? Probably just hanging out with my kids. Speak out on our message boards! What do you think about Leslie's research and message? Samantha Ettus is a new mother and the creator of The Experts' Guide series. Her third book, The Experts' Guide to the Baby Years, a collection of chapters from the 100 leading parenting experts, was released by Crown Books in October, 2006. You can learn more at www.expertsmedia.com Comments? Email Samantha at samantha@modernmom.com http://modernmom.com/543/