Megan Basham seems surprisingly shy for the latest controversial American author to have charged on to the public battlefield between mothers who stay at home and those who work. Ordering an iced tea in a New York restaurant, the 33-year-old conservative commentator appears to be cut from a different cloth to the ever angrier voices on both sides of what the American media refers to as the ”Mommy Wars”. Her new book, Beside Every Successful Man: A Woman’s Guide To Having It All, reads like a cheery pep talk for women alienated by the increasingly polarised debate.
In the book, Basham sets out a strategy for women who want to stay at home but can’t afford to. ”Most research says 80% of women want to work fewer hours when their kids are young,” she says. ”How can you ignore that and tell them they’re wrong or naive?”
She argues that women can opt out of the nine-to-five by focusing on helping their husbands be more successful in their careers, and find fulfilment by doing so. And as a happy side-effect, she says, these more traditional marriages are less likely to end in divorce. She cites herself and a series of high-profile couples as examples, and backs her argument up with statistics such as: ”Men whose wives aren’t employed earn on average 31% more than single men, but for men whose wives have full-time jobs, that number drops to 3,4%.”
Critics have denounced the book as irresponsible, delusional, immoral and misleading, but Basham insists she didn’t expect such reactions. ”It wasn’t originally meant to be political,” she says. ”But at the time, there were books coming out saying that women must work full-time, that it’s not fair to the sisterhood to take any time out. I just didn’t feel they were realistic. I’d noticed how many successful men would say, ‘I wouldn’t be here without my wife,’ and I was curious, I wanted to know what these women were doing. I wanted to emulate them.”
In fact, she already had: the book tells the story of how she helped her husband, Brian, now a TV weatherman, work out what he wanted to do with his life. But more than just acting as cheerleader, she rewrote his CV, researched jobs, wrote letters and found him an agent. And when he landed his first job in the business, she quit full-time work as a journalist and university curriculums editor, went freelance and moved from Arizona to Texas. They now live in Tucson, where he works on breakfast television. After a long time trying for kids, she is five months pregnant and looking forward to ”finally scaling back” her work in the summer.
”Women are collaborators,” she says. ”We have a more communal concept of success, and a lot of that applies to our relationships. Look at Michelle and Barack Obama. People forget she introduced him to the political scene in Chicago.”
Her main critic is the formidable Leslie Bennetts, a Vanity Fair contributor and author of The Feminine Mistake — an urgent warning to women that if they step out of the workforce for as little as three years, they will permanently damage their earning potential. When the pair appeared on a television show together, sparks flew.
”After the cameras went off, she turned and screamed at me,” Basham recalls. ”She must have misunderstood me, because I didn’t say all women should be at home, barefoot and pregnant. I’m talking about women pursuing their dreams. I was shocked that she would brook no alternative, that there is such a violent reaction to suggesting other options.”
For her part, Bennetts accuses Basham of misrepresenting facts, and it is true that Basham knows how to spin her statistics. Take what she refers to as the ”male marriage premium”, which states that when a man gets married, his earnings increase by between 20% and 50%, while women often experience the opposite: a ”marriage penalty”. While this kind of inequality enrages her opponents, Basham argues that if wives encourage their husbands to earn more, the extra household income enables women to take a pay cut.
Basham’s approval of the ”traditional” family is clearly influenced by her own experience. The daughter of an unwed teenage mother, she grew up to be, she says, ”pretty pro-life”. Her parents reunited and married when she was five, before having two more children. After all her offspring had left home, her mother became an interior designer, and Basham holds her up as an inspiring example of a stay-at-home mother going on to have success.
Basham’s book has arrived at a point when the Mommy Wars debate is more polarised than ever. One month after her row with Bennetts, a section of the American religious right launched their True Women Manifesto, calling for a counter-revolution to the advances of feminism. It asserts that men and women are designed to reflect God in ”complementary and distinct ways”, essentially arguing that women belong in the home, men in the workforce, and that women can be liberated through submission. It’s an extension of a Biblical concept known as ”complementarianism”, one that Basham doesn’t entirely reject.
”You can see that biologically there are differences between the way our brains are wired. And some of the things we prioritise might be different,” she says. ”The problem is that I know couples who are the opposite, so you can’t say all women are complementary to their husbands. At the same time, I think the negative thing is pretending that women are men, setting up a paradigm by men’s rules, assuming that only success in business is achievement.”
Does she receive hate mail? ”Yes,” she says, with a dismissive laugh. ”I’ve had a lot of emails from college students who are clearly in the midst of their women’s studies, saying I must be uneducated. I took feminist studies like everyone else.”
She describes herself as a ”choice feminist”, and in the book, writes that ”though the feminist movement was essential in many respects, certain factions of it have led to a place where women are encouraged to treat their husbands as rivals and their homes as battlegrounds over whether everyone is doing the same amount of the dishes and earning”.
Indeed, in the Basham household, she does more housework, ”but he gets up at 2.30am. My schedule’s not as tough. I think it’s a bit silly to insist that the division of labour be 50-50, because, well, whose version are we talking about? Most men have a higher tolerance for messiness than women so they think the labour is being evenly divided. It’s so funny, because when you show any love or support, well, you’re letting down the sisterhood. Really, I’m not.” – guardian.co.uk