Stay-at-home moms have been taking a beating lately. It’s because of a new book called The Feminine Mistake.

Its premise is that whether they know it or not, moms who make the “mistake” of raising kids full time are discontented, and stuck with unfulfilling work. Most important, such women are a financial disaster waiting to happen. It’s all but inevitable, the author says, that your husband will die, lose his job or divorce you — and then what?

The book was written by a former New York Times reporter named Leslie Bennetts, who now works for Vanity Fair magazine. I am not surprised. When you see someone questioning the choices of stay-at-home moms, it’s almost always working women.

I say that as someone who has no problem with either choice. That’s how most people should see it. If a mom wants to have a career, that’s fine, and often necessary. If she wants to be at home full time, and can swing it, that’s fine too.

But women like Leslie Bennetts don’t feel there are two good choices. They feel there is only one.

The Feminine Mistake has been called an “important” book, with an “important” message. I looked up the reviewers who applauded it that way. Most were working women. It’s one of the reasons why it must be hard to be a full-time mom. When your role is questioned, you don’t have a ready podium to defend yourself.

The Washington Post review, written by contributing editor Rachel Hartigan Shea, was typical. Shea observed: “Staying at home deprives women of the real satisfaction that outside work can bring.” Take that, you full-time moms.

To me, one of the most unsettling parts of this book is that Bennetts questions what might seem the main positive of being a stay-at-home mom — that it’s best for the children. I’d guess that most of us would look back and say the ideal childhood is one where a mom was mostly there. You’d think Bennetts could acknowledge this, while legitimately pointing out that nevertheless, for financial and personal reasons, many moms often need to balance that with career.

But she doesn’t. She needs to protest that her own choice is better not just for herself, but the kids. She claims that children of working moms do better in school and are better socialized. She says that working moms, being more fulfilled, make for an equal marriage that benefits children more than when a mom is unfulfilled at home. At one point, she quotes economist Heidi Hartmann as saying that "unless you are the mother of an Einstein or a Madame Curie, which most of us are not, your own work, if it is significant, is probably more important than raising your kids."

I guess that bringing up decent, happy children doesn’t count for much.

This isn’t the first time moms have been attacked. In 1998, New York Times metropolitan editor Joyce Purnick told Barnard College graduates, “Women who have children get off track and lose ground.” And for decades, there has been a call — by women — to “free” stay-at-home moms from their shackles so they can pursue careers. Those who raise children full time are labeled traditionalists who set the clock back on all women.

The Feminine Mistake is also a bit of an attack on men, saying we do zero around the house, and, sooner than later, we’ll probably die, lose our jobs or dump our stay-at-home wives.

Here’s a typical line from Bennetts: "In my own experience, husbands will get away with whatever you let them get away with when it comes to sharing housework."

The bums.

She reveals that she let her own husband know she would not be his “unpaid servant.” She told him: “We had to share the work — or he could forget the whole deal." My goodness.

One telling quote in the book stays with me. “When you say you’re a lawyer,” one woman told Bennetts, “people sit up and take notice. When you stay home and take care of your kids, people just assume you don’t have that much to contribute.”

People may well assume that. Which makes me ask: Why is there so little respect for stay-at-home moms?

I’ll give you one reason: books like The Feminine Mistake.

Leslie Bennetts can call it a mistake all she wants.

But here’s the truth:

What she does for work — what I do, what any career person of either gender does — is not as important as raising children.

mpatinkin@projo.com