Being a woman isn’t for sissies. My sex is plagued by numerous ills that, by some cosmic injustice, have swept right over men: childbirth, for instance; shady strangers on the subway; and, for the vast majority of us worldwide, the troubling fact that we will always throw like a girl.

In her new book, “The Feminine Mistake,” Leslie Bennetts unveils even more trials for the fairer sex. Women who stop working after having children, she argues, are dupes. Money equals power, and husbands could very well run off, get fired or squander away the nest egg, leaving wives alone, poor and unfulfilled (often in a tasteful, soon-to-be-on-the-auction-block Connecticut Colonial).

Bennetts clearly anticipates controversy from her book. Condescension toward stay-at-home moms — Bennetts approvingly quotes Simone de Beauvoir, who calls them “parasites” — is woven throughout. “The smart ones,” a Wall Street woman tells Bennetts, “are bored.” (Incidentally, I have also heard this said of German shepherds.)

This mommy-baiting is unfortunate, because between cheap shots, Bennetts makes some important points. Among them: Women shouldn’t view a man as a financial plan and stay-at-home moms should have a long-term financial backup strategy.

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Children, meanwhile, will not be permanently scarred if they have a nanny, go to day care or eat store-bought frosted animal cookies instead of painstakingly crafted homemade ladyfingers — most kids prefer the former, anyway.

Bennetts also argues that women should have a life outside of marriage and children. This is refreshing given the current zeitgeist, which has somehow inflicted a child-obsessed, Baby Einstein-fueled madness on a significant segment of the American population. Not coincidentally, this segment tends to be made up of upper-class overachievers — the very people who populate the vast majority of Bennetts’ book.

At times, “The Feminine Mistake” nears unintentional hilarity with its tightly sealed, moneyed bubble, where everyone seems to be a “high-powered” lawyer, a Harvard MBA, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” an employee of Graydon Carter — or else a traumatized housewife in Greenwich, Conn.

This largely closed world diminishes the book’s economic argument, given that in other quarters, where jobs may not be lucrative enough to cover child care, staying home with kids actually makes financial — not to mention parental — sense.

As the book progresses, it becomes clear that there are some rather large elephants in the room — and they’re not the nefarious “conservatives” frequently brandished as “Female Enemy No. 1.”

Money, Bennetts frequently reminds us, is power. After reading this book, you could be forgiven for thinking that money is everything. Amid the tales of frenzied work hours, sacrifice and stress, no one really stops to ask what it’s all for.

And when “The Feminine Mistake” waxes poetic about finally earning your husband’s respect (which you can’t do, the book argues, without earning money) and the empowerment of a separate checking account, it strikes an empty, disturbing chord.

“The Feminine Mistake” was designed as a wake-up call, and, on many levels, it is — but it’s debatable as to what. Very few of the book’s disastrous marriages end with uncontrollable tragedies: sickness, disability or death. Instead, the vast majority explode into messy, bitter divorces, many precipitated by years of awe-inspiring consumerism.

Bennetts’ proposed solution to this whole mess is a French-style socialist system with universal day care and a 35-hour workweek. This might be appropriate, perhaps, if the marital problems outlined in “The Feminine Mistake” were economic (and, of course, if socialism actually worked). Unfortunately, they are anything but.

Beneath it all, Bennetts’ book is a tale of values gone horribly awry. Sadly, it’s easier to ignore the root causes of disintegrating marriages than to tackle the scary truth — and, for both sexes, this may just be the ultimate mistake.

Book excerpt

In trumpeting the virtues of a return to the home, few full-time mothers are willing to acknowledge that this choice represents a fundamental abdication of responsibility for their own lives. The modern women’s movement was supposed to have changed such childish thinking. After all, the world was a very different place in 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir scandalized the world with “The Second Sex” and its rallying cry for women to become independent individuals rather than living through men. In analyzing the reasons for their plight, she placed much of the blame on the ways women are culturally conditioned to embrace dependency. …

The larger society is admittedly a complex place to live, and there are times when most of us are tempted to withdraw to a cozy suburban Colonial where all we have to worry about is what to make for dinner. But the seeming security of such domestic havens is a dangerous illusion, and if women retreat to that comforting cocoon, the path ahead of them is likely to become a minefield.”

– Leslie Bennetts, “The Feminine Mistake,” p. 309 & 316

Heather Wilhelm is a communications consultant in Chicago.