Print Email RSS DIGG del.icio.us Stumble It!

A Balancing Act: Leslie Bennetts, Author of The Feminine Mistake - Part II

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.

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.

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!"

Votes: 0

5 4 3 2 1  

Related Articles

• There are currently no related articles available.

Comments