“Making the Feminist Mistake”: Leslie Bennetts Speaks at the Yale Law School

By ALEXANDRA HARWIN

April 2009

The “opt out” idea is as infu­ri­at­ing to fem­i­nists every­where as it is sat­is­fy­ing to pretty much every­one else.  For its sup­port­ers, the “opt out” con­cept, with its handy catch phrase, solves so many prob­lems.   It vin­di­cates “choice fem­i­nism” and makes clear that the cranky lib­eral fem­i­nists back in the 1960s were mis­guided when the founders of NOW wrote, “We do not accept the tra­di­tional assump­tion that a woman has to choose between mar­riage and moth­er­hood, on the one hand, and seri­ous par­tic­i­pa­tion in indus­try or the pro­fes­sions on the other.” The phrase reas­sures us that decades of ris­ing labor force par­tic­i­pa­tion among moth­ers have been no more than a fad, one that sen­si­ble women are toss­ing aside like tam­agotchis.  (Remem­ber those?) It doesn’t bog us down with con­cerns about struc­tural inflex­i­bil­ity in the work­place; busi­ness is busi­ness, and we can’t expect to change that.  Best of all, it does away with the idea that gen­der func­tions as a sys­tem of social con­straints, forc­ing men to stick with their jobs and cheer­ing on the women who aban­don theirs.  No, gen­der is what sci­ence says it is, and sci­ence says moms are hap­pi­est when they’re tak­ing care of their kids at home.  And baking.

These were some of the claims I was expect­ing from jour­nal­ist Leslie Ben­netts at the panel on “Work­place Flex­i­bil­ity” that took place at the Yale Law School on March 28.  Ben­netts had been invited to speak as part of the Yale Law Women’s con­fer­ence “’Opt Out’ or Pushed Out: Are Women Choos­ing to Leave the Legal Pro­fes­sion?” Based on the unfor­tu­nate title of her book, The Fem­i­nine Mis­take, I fig­ured Ben­netts was another dime-a-dozen critic set on rebut­ting Betty Friedan’s sem­i­nal work half a cen­tury too late. So it came as a sur­prise to me that Ben­nett wasn’t there as an advo­cate for the women who “opt out.”  Her argu­ment was, in fact, the oppo­site: that the women “opt­ing out” were the ones mak­ing the “fem­i­nine mis­take,” decid­ing to leave their jobs with­out rec­og­niz­ing the finan­cial vul­ner­a­bil­ity that they’d face as a result.

Ben­netts broke away from the famil­iar dichotomy—“opt out” or “pushed out”?— that the con­fer­ence was pro­mot­ing.  While pan­elists like attor­ney Michael Teter stressed that inflex­i­ble work­places explained why some pro­fes­sional women were leav­ing their jobs, Ben­netts sug­gested that gen­der norms were just as much to blame.  No, she wasn’t claim­ing that women opt­ing out just like being moms bet­ter than they like being accom­plished pro­fes­sion­als.  Instead, she argued that many men and women end up in high-stress jobs that they don’t like and want to leave, but only women have an excuse to get out.  Few peo­ple bat an eye when female pro­fes­sion­als claim that full-time moth­er­hood beck­ons, but pretty much every­one seems aghast if a male pro­fes­sional wants to make the same choice.  What’s so bad about women who don’t want to work hav­ing the option not to work?  Lots, Ben­netts explains, since women who don’t work end up a lot less happy and much more eco­nom­i­cally depen­dent than those who do.

Most of us take advan­tage of gen­der norms and expec­ta­tions from time to time, and for pre­cisely the rea­son women who “opt out” do: it’s con­ve­nient.  I’ll take the seat that a man offers me on the sub­way because I want to sit down, and I’ll accept his help car­ry­ing my bag because it’s heavy.  A man won’t clean the bath­room because it’s unpleas­ant and won’t cook din­ner because he’d rather do some­thing else.  The women who opt out are doing the same, becom­ing full-time care­tak­ers because being full-time work­ers is a drag.  Ben­netts reveals that when oppor­tunis­tic gen­der per­for­mance comes into—and out of—the work­place, women them­selves end up suf­fer­ing the consequences.

Alexan­dra Har­win is a 1st year stu­dent at the Yale Law School.