Six years after hyping a trend, NYT finally examines its downside
September 20, 2009 12:58 pm ET by Jamison Foser
Over at The Daily Beast, former New York Times reporter Leslie Bennetts takes her old paper to task for belatedly examining the potential downside for women who give up their careers to stay at home:
Guess what The New York Times has just discovered? Women who quit their careers to stay home can face financial challenges if a recession hits and their husbands lose their jobs! And-gasp!-when these women try to re-enter the labor force after a timeout, it's hard for them to find work, and they earn far less than they did when they left!
The front page of Saturday's business section ... featured this startling news in a lengthy story under the headline "Back to the Grind: Recession Drives Some Women to Return to Work"
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In this case, however, the paper of record bears an unusual responsibility for setting the record straight-something it has taken an extraordinarily long time to do. Six years ago the Times published a Sunday magazine cover story that discovered what it deemed a happy new trend among affluent women and coined a catchy phrase-the Opt-Out Revolution-to describe the cushy lives of women who quit their careers to become full-time mothers. In what seemed an astonishing oversight, nowhere in that 2003 cover story did the Times investigate the economic challenges that the privileged Princeton graduates it portrayed might face should they ever lose their husbands-or their husbands lose their incomes.
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Having spent a significant chunk of my own life interviewing such women, I found the Times' belated acknowledgment of their problems to be bittersweet. Two years ago, I published The Feminine Mistake, which documented the financial risks of dropping out of the work force and also criticized the mainstream media for neglecting the well-documented but catastrophically under-reported economic aspects of the opting-out trend.
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The Times-whose Sunday book review section is notorious for its hostility toward serious books by and about women-assigned its review of The Feminine Mistake not to a recognized expert in any of the fields it dealt with, but rather to a stay-at-home mother who trashed it.
Oh, just go read the whole thing.
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It is much easier to run pieces that promote the myth, of course. All they have to do is update that fist piece of propaganda they ran in 1851.