Samantha Ettus www.modernmum.com

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.

In the first of a two part series, Leslie took time out to speak with me about her own life and the findings in her book.

Samantha: Many moms think they will just take the baby years off from work. What are the implications for making this decision?

Leslie: There is this myth out there that you can opt-out when your children are young and then go back when they are older when it suits you. Over and over again in my interviews, I have stay at home moms say to me, “I am smart, I have skills, I have credentials, I will be able to find something when I want.” The reality is they take X number of years out of the workforce and when they decide it is time to go back, they send out 150 resumes and they don’t get one job interview. Everybody who has studied this has found is that there is tremendous ageism and sexism. I think that the media and popular culture has done women a disservice by portraying the opting-out part of the equation and not informing women about the difficulties of opting back in.

Samantha: You have been a journalist for your entire professional career. How did your professional life change once you had children?

Leslie: I made a huge change in order to accommodate having a family. I was a daily newspaper reporter for 15 years. I spent ten of those years at The New York Times. Although I know many fabulous women at the Times who have stayed and had families and continued with their careers, it is difficult if you are a reporter and you are on call 24/7. So, I jumped at the opportunity to move into the magazine world when I was pregnant with my first child and hired at Vanity Fair. There is just a different pace at a magazine than at a daily newspaper.

Samantha: How did your job change work out for you?

Leslie: My job is ideal in some ways. I have in some ways been a stay-at-home mom simply because I am a writer who works at home. But as any mother knows, little children have to be attended to every minute. I was really fortunate to luck into the world’s most wonderful babysitter. We had the same babysitter throughout all of the years that my kids were growing up.

Samantha: Every mom worries about their kids growing up to resent them – working moms in particular worry that their kids will resent them for not being around as much as the stay at home moms. Have you seen this?

Leslie: There are several sociologists who are doing work on this and the findings are very different than what you might expect. Very often the kids who grow up with stay at home moms end up feeling that that was the wrong choice. One man I interviewed for my book said, “I would have had a much better childhood - and my mother and father would have had a much better marriage - if my mother had something else to do because she was so overly invested in me. She was afraid to let me make mistakes or take chances or have any independence.” Often, as the children of working mothers get older, they come to really respect what their mothers did and to view them as role models.

Samantha: Many women have concerns about childcare. What do you say to them?

Leslie: 80% of women in this country are actually happy with their childcare. The truth is although the media has kind of demonized daycare and childcare, and a lot of stay at home moms feel as though every babysitter is a potential axe murderer, many of us have had wonderful relationships with babysitters.

Samantha: You have been a journalist for your entire professional career. How did your professional life change once you had children?

Leslie: I made a huge change in order to accommodate having a family. I was a daily newspaper reporter for 15 years. I spent ten of those years at The New York Times. Although I know many fabulous women at the Times who have stayed and had families and continued with their careers, it is difficult if you are a reporter and you are on call 24/7. So, I jumped at the opportunity to move into the magazine world when I was pregnant with my first child and hired at Vanity Fair.

Samantha: How did your husband impact your ability to be a working mom?

Leslie: Husbands have to step up to the plate. It is ridiculous that women are still doing the dreaded second shift of all the childcare and domestic responsibilities. I believe that if women are sharing the breadwinning, men just have to take on half the burden of what is going on at home. My husband and I both are breadwinners and we are both parents.

If he was having a really frantic day at the office I would be the one to take the kids to a doctor’s appointment and if I had to be in London he would be the one to leave work and take them to the doctor. We traded off.

Samantha: After writing this book do you have any friends left that are stay at home moms? How do they react to it?

Leslie: Well one of my closest friends is afraid to read it. She still hasn’t read it because she feels that giving up her career was the biggest mistake of her life. She is just wonderful. I just got off the phone with her. She gave up her career and her husband ran off with another woman. She stayed home with their kids and having encouraged her to do, he then said “Well I need to be with somebody who is as successful as I am.” So he ran off with a more successful woman. One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I was noticing so many women in their forties and fifties who had found themselves on the wrong side of all of this. I think it is very easy when you are younger to think that stay-at-home motherhood is a viable option but by the time you get a little older you just see the carnage.

Samantha: Your book emphasizes that a working mom provides added security for her family. Have you every experienced this firsthand?

Leslie: Yes. My husband lost his job last year. He went happily into work one day into the job that he loved and it turned out that the financial investor backing the company had decided to close it down with no warning a week before Christmas. It took him six months to find another full time appropriate job with benefits. Because of my career and my income, it was a just a temporary inconvenience instead of a catastrophe. I am so grateful that I was able to carry our family and give him the time that he needed to find something that he wanted to do. It gave him a freedom he wouldn’t have had if he were the single breadwinner.

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