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The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?
by Leslie Bennetts
Publisher: Voice  (April 3, 2007)

From Booklist:
Many well-educated American women are giving up the struggle to balance career and motherhood and making the “willfully retrograde choice” of relying on men to support them and their children, Bennetts maintains. Financial dependency can jeopardize women’s futures and those of their children, she warns. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of women as well as sociologists, economists, legal scholars, and other experts, Bennetts lays out the dangers of giving up careers. She looks at how new divorce laws have altered alimony, reducing the likelihood of a lifetime guarantee of support for stay-at-home mothers after divorce. She details the impact of a loss of income on medical and retirement benefits and weighs it against lifelong financial needs. Bennetts encourages women to consider a “fifteen-year paradigm,” viewing their lives beyond the years of motherhood and asking themselves what they want from life when their children are grown and gone. Allowing women to tell their own stories of economic abandonment, Bennetts presents a cautionary tale for women pondering giving up economic independence.  (Vanessa Bush)

Ordinarily, I have no interest in participating in “The Mommy Wars.”  I think women (working at home or not) need all the support we can get, and therefore it is particularly tragic when those who should be the greatest of allies feel the need to turn on each other, instead.

This book, however, has been brought to my attention several times lately, and the things I’ve read about it seem particularly compelling as I reflect on my own current situation and that of several other women I know.  Current alimony laws are, indeed, atrocious (a perversion, no doubt, of the feminist idea that women should now find such patronization unnecessary); women who stay home with children are demonstrably much less able (ever) to catch up financially; and in today’s society, anyone who isn’t heeding the dual American gods of “I am what I do” and “I am what I am paid,” will almost certainly take a major psychological hit somewhere down the line. 

But I also think that this apparently insurmountable conflict of interest between mothers and children need not be as dire as pure statistics (and this book) might make it seem.  For instance, two members of my own family are stay-at-home fathers at the moment (though keeping hands on their respective careers as they do it.)  I also know (because I’ve done it) that it is possible to live well on much less money than the status quo would generally have us believe.  And finally, current statistics indicate that most Americans now will work at more than one career in their lives, starting over at least once,  whether or not they’ve had children in-between. 

So maybe the real story here is about something else, e.g., the mystery of why, in 21st century America, there still are so many women who still are falling down so many holes (?)

The topic of slave chocolate would not, probably, be my first choice of campaign issues.  With Easter just a few days away,  I feel fairly evil for even having brought it up!  A friend’s daughter read my last post and now won’t let her mother buy a regular chocolate Easter bunny for another friend.  And I’ve been wondering, myself, too, how I’m going to handle this at MY house next Sunday.

Well, the most obvious solution seems to be: put on my Birkenstocks and head for the health food store – darn, and I just shaved my legs this morning, too.    Our local gourmet food and high-end grocery stores have fair trade chocolate, as well.  At Kroger yesterday, we found a single fair-trade chocolate item, in the Natural Foods section:  some kind of sports bar, and it was pretty horrid.   Oh, for a Trader Joe’s! (not in our part of the country, I’m afraid.)  Too late for mail-order, but by the NEXT holiday, I’ll have had a little more lead time.  What is that… Hallowe’en?  Or are have they started in on Labor Day, now (tiny little chocolate Jerry Lewises?)

Another loved-one wrote yesterday about a new candy factory she’d just toured in Seattle, Theo Chocolates, which claims to be the only factory in the U.S. which produces chocolate that is both organic AND fair trade. 

And how about this?  Here’s an entire BLOG dedicated to reviewing candy: this link takes you to their thread of Fair Trade candy reviews! 

And here’s a list of suppliers of both Fair Trade and organic chocolate…  the latter generally being considered as also being slave-free, as it’s grown on special plantations.  Be sure to scroll down to find even more information in the comments at the bottom of the site. 

Being unemployed has certainly changed the way I see just about everything.  But this week I have been learning a lesson about handling my own passions about exploitation, etc. etc., in a healthier manner, and my teacher has been my very own, 10-year-old daughter.

My family recently went to see the movie, Amazing Grace. 

While I realize the film takes some liberties with the true story, what captivated both me and my 10-year old daughter (albeit for different reasons!) was how easily societies, and even decent people, can happily live with horrible things like slavery in their midst.  How hard it is to go against our self-interest, especially when doing so will cause us very real hardship.  Then, as now, the moral battle was generally sustained only by the marginal and the very young. (for instance, it became fashionable for idealistic young girls to stop taking sugar in their tea) 

I told my daughter that the tyranny of the status quo is ever the way– and the example I used was the modern chocolate industry, which is indisputably tied up with child slavery.  She was outraged!  Well, of course she was.  The real puzzle is why I haven’t been!  So we looked it up again, together, to be sure we knew the facts.  Here’s some of what we found:

There is a surprising association between chocolate and child labor in the Cote d’Ivoire. Young boys whose ages range from 12 to 16 have been sold into slave labor and are forced to work in cocoa farms in order to harvest the beans, from which chocolate is made, under inhumane conditions and extreme abuse. This West African country is the leading exporter of cocoa beans to the world market. Thus, the existence of slave labor is relevant to the entire international economic community.
– Source:  American University

At a run-down police station in Sikasso, a small town in Mali, the files on missing children are endless. The sad truth is that many have been kidnapped and sold into slavery. The going price is about US$30. The local police chief is in no doubt where the children have gone. “It’s definitely slavery over there,” he said. “The kids have to work so hard they get sick and some even die.” In all, at least 15,000 children are thought to be over in the neighbouring Ivory Coast, producing cocoa which then goes towards making almost half of the world’s chocolate. Many are imprisoned on farms and beaten if they try to escape. Some are under 11 years old.
Source:  BBC News

Talk of the Nation, February 14, 2005 · This Valentine’s Day, Sen. Tom Harkin won’t be giving his wife a box of chocolates — instead, he’ll opt for flowers. He and his colleague, Rep. Eliot Engel, maintain that major U.S. chocolate companies — Nestle, Mars, and Hershey — rely on child slave laborers in the Ivory Coast to get their sweets to supermarket shelves.
Source:  National Public Radio (NPR)

My daughter and I both love chocolate hugely.  But we’ve decided to give up slave chocolate.  I’m not as picky as I should be about other exploitative trade practices, e.g. the coffee trade, but as this one involves the kidnapping, slavery, and abuse (and sometimes the killing of) children, I’m afraid I have to go along with my daughter.  

Good news, though!  Fairtrade and organic chocolate (generally considered also to be slave-free) are pretty widely available, and buying slave-free chocolate is a way to support world-wide reform of the industry.  So eating chocolate is still a GOOD thing!!

 A few days ago, I thought my lesson was how wise and single-minded children can be, to the salvation of those of us who have grown old and complacent — if we are paying attention.

But that was the easy part.

My daughter lost her best friend yesterday (in a horrible scene, one of those absolutely heart-rending things which may or may not last the week).  On their list of irreconcilable differences was that, while the friend was willing to go along with an Anti-Chocolate Crusade for a day or so, the pressures of youth and normality and self-interest soon reasserted themselves.  My daughter became “Goody Two-Shoes” and I became the Mother Who Forgot To Talk About The Consequences Of Being Counter-Cultural.  Face it, no one is going to win a battle against chocolate!  I mean, CHOCOLATE, for God’s sake!  (after all, didn’t I ignore the news myself, first time I read it?)  

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.  - Revelation 3:15-17

Here’s the harder lesson, little girl.  We do need to take stands on things.  Absolutely.  We even need to tell people that we have done so.  But we also have to learn when to gracefully YIELD.  In this case, my daughter and I need to decide what we will do ourselves – e.g., no more buying slave chocolate – but we also need to decide what we’ll do if, e.g., someone serves  us chocolate?  Gives it to us as a gift?  Sits with us at lunch, eating a Nestle chocolate bar?  Lives in our house with us, even, and tells us we’re silly?

Basically, we have to struggle with this very important question:  under what circumstances must we be absolute in our ideals, and under what circumstances will a little bit of compromise be the better way to further our cause in the long run?  (the movie presented this struggle quite brilliantly, I thought.)  I still believe we all tend to compromise far more than we should.  But if we alienate everyone who might otherwise have been an ally, we won’t accomplish much of anything, and will lose our friends, besides.

I don’t have a good answer for my daughter, but her tears (lots and LOTS of them!) are sobering.  Andnotice to all:  we are not eating slave chocolate any more  — um, except if we are at your house and we can’t avoid it without really hurting your feelings.  And yes, sadly, that includes Hershey bars (her favorite!) and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups (mine!)