This week I read an article by a successful woman called Leslie Bennetts. A couple of years ago she published a book called the Feminine Mistake in which she argues that women who give up their careers to be at home with their children are taking a gamble that they will live to regret. In it she portrays the women who choose to be full time mothers as at best naive and at worst weak and stupid with the almost certain outcome of finding themselves alone and penniless. But is it always a bad decision to dedicate yourself to your family or can the decision to leave paid employment be just as strong and positive as the decision to stay?
Bennetts does raise some valid points; obviously there is a financial risk when depending on a spouse for support. Equally having opted out of your career it is not always so easy to opt back in, particularly at a similar level to when you left. She argues that women often make these crucial life choices in virtual ignorance of the long-term consequences and that many will be blind-sided by painful challenges in the years to come. Half will get divorced; others will have to cope with a spouse’s illness, incapacitation or premature death. Then there’s unemployment: many men lose their jobs at some point, which can have a catastrophic effect when the husband is a family’s only breadwinner.
When you add up all the risks, she argues, it becomes clear that most women who relinquish their financial independence by quitting work will eventually find themselves on the wrong side of the odds with enormous consequences for them and their children.
It is of course true that today many marriages do not go the distance but is it right to assume failure in the decisions that we make? If you follow the argument to its logical conclusion, if we do not have sufficient faith in our marriages to feel secure in giving up or taking a break from our careers, then surely we should call in lawyers to draw up a pre-nup to protect our hard earned assets even before we call our friends to announce our engagement. And, as has long been debated, if you are drawing up a pre-nup because you think that your marriage may fail, why bother even walking down the aisle?
Yes, there could be challenging times ahead if your marriage does break down and you find yourself in financial hardship but as the recent global recession taught many of us it is not just errant husbands that leave us having to be creative to make ends meet.
Why would we assume that a woman who was driven to achieve in her career prior to having children would have lost that skill afterwards? Indeed, with one of the fastest growing groups of entrepreneurs being single mothers it seems that far from turning our backs on work we are in fact simply moving away from third party employment to the greater flexibility of running our own businesses.
Prior to having children I ran a large listed company with offices in 8 countries, 1000s of employees and consequently enormous demands on my time. I left home at 5.15am and rarely returned before 10.30pm with frequent trips around the world thrown in. I waited until my mid 30s to have my children and it certainly never occurred to me that I would not be the person they opened their eyes to in the morning or the one that kissed them goodnight each evening. Yes, I still work which is a personal choice but if I compare my income now to the very significant rewards of my old job or if I compare the number of hours per week I dedicate to my work today compared to the 100 plus hours that I used to work then certainly I have chosen to ‘sacrifice’ my career for my family and for me it is absolutely the right decision. Admittedly, it is strange to have moved from being the main breadwinner to being very definitely the lesser contributor to our family pot but the change has allowed my husband the space to fulfill his potential and his businesses have enjoyed huge success with his extra attention. For me, the decision to spend more time at home was a strong and positive one rather than an ill thought out gamble.
Surely, the key is to ensure that your choices work with your lifestyle? Just as the Board of a company has to ensure that everything is taken care of along the way to a healthy P and L, any couple running a family and household have to ensure that someone is there to provide a secure environment for children, that someone contributes more financially each month than is spent and that someone keeps the house running from day to day. Who does what is surely irrelevant as long as everything is covered and why should we assume that women who choose to stay at home are powerless or men that choose to provide financially unappreciative?
True, stay-at-home wives don’t get directly paid for their contributions and therefore they assume a degree of economic risk. If a couple divorces, the breadwinner walks away with the family’s major asset, which is a career. In this sad circumstance one would hope that the partner with the career would behave appropriately to his (or her) ex spouse but where this is not the case the legal system steps in and, in most cases, ensures the security of the children’s environment for the future.
Bennetts goes on to warn us that even if our husbandsdon’t leave, they can fall sick or die again leaving the career less woman destitute. I don’t know of anyone who has children who has not taken out some sort of life insurance and this seems a far more rational response to something which might happen than living ones life assuming that it will.
I am all for women combining careers and motherhood and I think that it can be a satisfying and rewarding path, but I have equal respect for women and their husbands who decide as a unit that their family will run best if one of them stays at home. To make this decision with the person that you have decided to spend your life with and trust enough to have children with is,to me, both rational and intelligent and not a sign of weakness or naivety.
Bennetts cites Freud and the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson who both defined work and love as the two essential components of a mature, healthy adult life and concludes that there’s no good reason why women should settle for less. I wholeheartedly agree, but as many volunteers will testify work does not need to be paid to be satisfying and I would suspect that any full time mother would feel that they certainly do a working role.
For me, the empowering aspect for women is the ability to choose the role that they play in their family life. Whatever decision you make, you should trust your instincts and feel proud of your achievements whether they take place in the boardroom or the home.
Executive and Life Coach, Rachael Wood, www.ogilviedavies.com can be contacted at Rachael@ogilviedavies.com and is an accredited full member of the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches
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