By Francis Dass

The author of The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? challenges FRANCIS DASS’s perception of a feminist.

THE gods MUST be crazy. I kept thinking that when I was assigned to interview a speaker at The Women’s Summit, Kuala Lumpur. Being old-fashioned, the thought of interviewing a feminist made me roll my eyes and shrug my shoulders.

The day arrived and there I was all ready to meet a possibly angry woman railing against the world and men; one whom I imagined would be disdainful of relationships or at the very least luckless in love; appear style-challenged and overweight.

Then in walked Leslie Bennetts. This perfectly well-adjusted woman is a happily married 57-year old New Yorker with two children (aged 15 and 18); has a supportive husband; holds a wonderful job with Vanity Fair magazine and delivers a levelheaded interpretation of what it means to be a feminist in the current age.

“Although I call myself a feminist, I am wary of labels,” says Bennetts, explaining further that people tend to get carried away with labels and stereotypes.  The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? was published and she has been receiving more attention for this book than she has ever gotten for even her cover stories for Vanity Fair (on personalities like Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt – both of whom she is well acquainted with).

The book’s success resulted in her getting a call from the women’s summit organisers here and she gamely accepted the invitation to come halfway across the world to talk on the topic of Are Women Giving Up Too Much?

She observed that feminism in this region is still in its infancy stage. However, whatever stage it is in, the feelings amongst women are the same, she notes, all around the globe.

During the interview, she related how she’d heard a woman at the summit say that when her marriage ended, so did her idea of a fairy tale life; a comment Bennetts had heard a woman in Connecticut, in the United States, make when Bennetts was researching her book.

Her book’s title actually alludes to The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan, a landmark book that germinated and launched the modern-day feminist movement, from the 1970s.

“In my book, what I’ve said is that there are segments of society that promote traditional gender roles,” she states. And Bennetts wants to demolish gender generalisation.

In order to write her book, the contributing editor for Vanity Fair spoke to hundreds of people — women between the ages of 17 to 80, lawyers, and various parties who could lend her case credence — that when women place themselves in a position of economic dependency in a marriage, they are placing themselves at great economic risk.

What if their marriages end in divorce, or the husband is incapacitated, or dies unexpectedly, she asks.

“My interest is to look at the facts, not argue about different values (people hold). Facts are indisputable. I am a reporter, I wanted to look at the facts and I set out to look at the outcome (on women when things don’t work out, economically or maritally),” she stresses.

Bennetts claims that most stay-at-home wives in America are perceived to be subservient or second-class citizens. She wants to see this state of affairs to change.

The solution, which she sees all around her in New York where she lives with her journalist husband, lies in a model of marriage that appears to be very viable: where women need to share in the breadwinning role and men share in the child-rearing arena.

“New York is one of the most tolerant and multicultural and diverse places there is. It is full of very successful people, where husbands and wives are successful.

“Real partnerships come about when everyone is better protected and you share all the roles,” she points out.

In her own marriage, says Bennetts, who travels quite a bit to Los Angeles and London for work (“wherever the story takes me”), there is a give-and-take partnership.

Her New York-centric husband is a cultural critic and editor at Bloomberg News and he does house duties when Bennetts is away.

From all her research for her book, what can be done to keep women working?

“Make the workplace more attractive and flexible so women don’t leave work” she says.

But when pressed, she does concede that women’s economic empowerment, probably, correlates with the rate of divorce. In the United States, at least.

Read the full text of Leslie’s Women’s Summit speech

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