The mommies continue to slug it out in the Mommy Wars. The latest wrinkle, as any working mother probably already knows, is Leslie Bennetts’ book, The Feminine Mistake. That book argues that it’s a bad idea for mothers to opt out of the work force – statistics show that many marriages end, and even a woman living a comfortable lifestyle could find herself on the economic losing end if she doesn’t have solid work skills and time in the work environment.
Many of the other Mommy Warriors, of course, have weighed in. Writing yesterday in her blog for the New York Times, Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, says, “It seems to me that if a woman has a choice between a job she neither likes nor needs and playing tennis and taking – I don’t know – flower-arranging class, it’s not so incomprehensible that she would choose the latter, particularly if her family is so well-off that, should her husband die or divorce her, she’d still have way, way more money than you (perhaps) or me.”
Meowch. The irony in this raging debate – and it is raging – is that the Times also reported this week that Bennett’s book is not exactly a hot seller. The book went on sale April 3 and has so far sold a whopping 5,000 copies. While that may say something more about the pathetic state of publishing today than about the success of Mommy books, it also probably says something about who might want to buy these books and whether – at the end of the day – they might just want to put the kids to bed, put their feet up, and watch a “The Secret Lives of Women” on TV. Somebody else’s addiction to cosmetic surgery is always good for a certain smugness: at least we’re not THAT bad.
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