Leslie Bennetts, Vicki Iovine and Ayn Rand?

I wrote about The Feminine Mistake by Leslie Bennetts here and have been following her various appearances (for example, her debate with Elissa Schappell on BookTV and on The Huffington Post).

She does insist that her book is not another lob in the “Mommy Wars” and I think that is probably true. Beloved “Girlfriend” herself, Vicki Iovine has a similar message (in that she says "it can be done") in many of her books including The Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood where she writes:

About half of all mothers return to work within the first year after giving birth, and another big chunk will return when the child is old enough for nursery school or kindergarten, so you know it can be done. Not only can it be done, it can actually be fulfilling and an essential part of your life, but we Girlfriends feel it’s our duty to tell you:

IN THE BEGINNING, GOING BACK TO WORK WILL NEARLY KILL YOU (emphasis Iovine’s). (223-224)

Now, while lots of people absolutely love Iovine, Ayn Rand is a much maligned voice for a bunch of reasons, but not necessarily known for her thoughts on motherhood specifically. In a giant book (Atlas Shrugged) she managed to insert a couple lines about work and motherhood.

The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley – two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it. They did not have to look she had seen in the children of the outer world – a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred. The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value…(274)

I am not an Ayn Rand expert by any means, but her basic idea is that all work should be compensated with money and not to receive money for labor is to disrespect your human identity. She and Bennetts have a lot in common.

As A General Rule

As a general rule, I don’t think that The Hours by Michael Cunningham has much in common with Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. But, the following quotes have a similar feel and message.

From Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart contemplating while she is waiting for Hank Rearden:

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to the savings account of one’s life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived. The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one’s life. (343)

From The Hours, Clarissa’s thoughts towards the end of the book:

There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. (225)