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On Newsstands Now!
Check out the May 2012 issue: raw stories, shocking confessions, candid advice about motherhood—and more!
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She May Be Out of Touch, but Gwyneth Didn’t Say All Moms Should Stay Home
February 3rd, 2012
By Megan McChesney
It’s fairly widely known that Gwyneth Paltrow operates in her own kind of world. That’s the world where building a wood-burning pizza oven in the backyard is a must-do and a pair of snakeskin Louboutin sandals are a great choice for casual wear.
But when her recent interview in the March 2012 issue of Harper’s Bazaar hit newsstands (and she looks amazing in it, BTW), press all over the place started saying that she had proclaimed that she thinks that anyone who is a mom should stay at home and be a mom and a wife.
But that’s not what she said. This is what she said (taken from the Harper’s Bazaar story directly):
“I have little kids in school. I want to maintain my marriage and my family, so I have to be here when he [husband Chris Martin] comes home.” Hence her recent advice to a girlfriend (who remains tantalizingly unnamed): “She is an actress and in a new relationship with someone else with a big career, and I said this may not be feminist, but you have to compromise. It’s been all about you and you’re a big deal. And if you want what you’re saying you want—a family—you have to be a wife, and that is part of the equation. Gloria Steinem may string me up by my toes, but all I can do is my best, and I can do only what works for me and my family.”
She’s saying this was her choice, and it’s what works for her. I didn’t read anywhere that she thinks it’s the way all women should operate. And as much as I think she’s not exactly in tune with the financial realities of most families, I think everyone needs to give her a break.
I do take issue with part of her quote, however: I would like to know when compromising for the people you love became somehow unfeminist. Because I thought that the feminist movement is about making sure women have choices, and that we’re able to live our lives as we’d like—staying at home, working, working at home, with kids, without kids, putting our careers first, putting our partners’ careers first, whatever it it might be. That’s what the feminist movement is about for me, and it’s too bad that Gwyneth seems to believe that’s not the case.
Copyright © 2012 St. Joseph Media. All Rights Reserved.
I am definitely not one to defend la Goop, but I never read it as, I am home for him with a cocktail in hand every night, either. I assumed she meant that, when he’s not on tour, she’s home. Maybe I’m also wrong, but I figured she was alluding to the fact that if you’re never in the same city, it’s hard to have a marriage. Perhaps unfeminist if we take it that she’ll put her dreams and career on hold for his, but Gwynnie isn’t exactly sitting around twiddling her thumbs – she has our whole life to tell us how to run.