by Bailey Shoemaker Richards

Created on: October 02, 2009

Plessy v. Ferguson was a court case that established the "separate but equal doctrine" -a doctrine that upheld and legalized segregation for many years, until Brown v. Topeka Board of Education overturned it. The Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" things are inherently unequal. Therefore, a book encouraging women to seek out a "different" set of goals than men based on flawed, skewed and religiously-motivated data is inherently unequal and sexist in almost too many ways to count.

The tagline for Marcus Buckingham's book "Find Your Strongest Life" is that "Women can have it all -a different kind of all!" The premise of this book based on its tagline alone is that women should be seeking to attain different goals than men: separate, but equal.

Looking into "Find Your Strongest Life" from its descriptions and book trailer and the text itself, Buckingham's work seems to raise issues of sexism a la separate but equal ideals. The general idea seems to be this:

Women

"Can have it all," where "all" is a career, education and independent lifestyle, But women are "less happy than they were 40 and 50 years ago," Because what women need is not the same as what men need (i.e. a career and equality); Women are not created to work stressful jobs or be able to manage a challenging or independent lifestyle, Therefore, women should start staying home and devoting their lives to religion and their husbands.

The message of this book is that what "all" should mean for women is a return to the 1950s era housewife. Give up dreams of an education or career and just get married and spend your time, energy and intelligence working on making your husband and god happy.

In what world does "different" mean "just as good as"? Look at the result of Brown v. Topeka -separate is inherently unequal, and unequally weighted in favor of one side. The exact same thing applies here: "different" in this case implies that women should just give up the fight for equality that's been going on for decades and return to the kitchen and go to church on Sundays wearing a little hat.

"Different" in this case means that women should consign themselves to goals within the walls of the home and let men go out and bring home the bacon, because jobs are making women unhappy.

There is nothing wrong with being a stay at home parent -there are proven benefits to having a parent at home. But claiming that women shouldn't enter the workforce because "it's making them unhappy" without providing any scientific evidence to back it up, and instead basing it on case studies of women hand-picked to support the sexist, religiously-motivated viewpoint of the book is not a sound argument.

Making the case through an entire book that women should spend all their time discussing their at-home roles, working around the house, attempting to please their husbands and return to a male-dominated power structure that is only just now being turned into something resembling equality does not make for good reading.

Setting up a book based around the idea that women somehow need "different" things out of life or a career than men is not an entirely flawed premise; men and women often do want different things. But consigning women to the "different" arena Buckingham proposes is not an acceptable kind of "different" -it is a lessening. It is a tipping of the scales in favor of male power. It is a return to a time when "separate but equal" was an acceptable idea.

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