NEW YORK — "Something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives," the late Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," her groundbreaking 1963 book attacking the idea that a husband and children were all a woman needed for fulfillment.

That book effectively launched the modern women's movement. But more than four decades later, writer Leslie Bennetts is trying to sound a very similar message. In "The Feminine Mistake" — the title's no accident — she argues that many young mothers have forgotten Friedan's message, embracing a 21st-century version of the 1950s stay-at-home ideal that could imperil their economic future as well as their happiness.

Needless to say, the book isn't going down smoothly with everyone — especially mothers who've chosen to stay home with their children.

"She's stereotyping stay-at-home moms," says an annoyed Debbie Newcomer, mother of a 14-month-old baby in Richmond, Texas. "This is my personal decision. I'm a better mom by staying at home."

Bennetts says she never intended to issue the latest salvo in the "Mommy Wars" — that long-running, angst-ridden debate over whether mothers should stay home with their children. And she says she's surprised by the reaction.

"The stay-at-home moms are burning up the blogosphere denouncing me," she mused over coffee this week. "They're saying I must be divorced, childless, bitter, lonely and angry to be writing this." (Bennetts, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine, has two children with her husband, a fellow journalist.) "Clearly, I've struck a nerve."

Bennetts says she merely wanted to present evidence that there are great risks involved when a woman gives up economic self-sufficiency — risks she may not be thinking of during those early years of blissful, exhausting parenting.

Divorce. A husband losing his job. A husband dying. All of those, Bennetts warns, could be catastrophic for a woman and her children. And if the woman decides she'll get back to her career later, once the kids are ready? Stop dreaming, Bennetts says — a woman takes a huge salary hit after a relatively short time of being absent from the work force — that is, if she can get back in at all.

The author's arguments ring true to Anita Jevne, a mother in Eau Claire, Wis. A medical technologist who's worked the past 28 years, Jevne says she's tried to stress to her daughters, now 16 and 19, that they need to be financially independent: "You can't assume a man is going to take care of you."

When Jevne's husband was hurt four years ago at the salvage yard where he'd worked since he was 16, the family had to depend on Anita's income while he recovered and worked toward getting a new job. "If I hadn't gone to school and gotten a degree, if I had stayed home, we would have been in big trouble," she says.

Beyond the financial necessity, Jevne always enjoyed having a world outside the home to be part of. "You're part of a community," she says. "You're giving something." That's the second message Bennetts says she's trying to impart — there's a crucial sense of self-worth to be gained outside the home.

Some women find her views condescending, saying they deny the value of childcare in the home and assume that stay-at-home mothers haven't fully thought out their decisions.

"I objected to her saying we haven't thought it out," says Newcomer, the Texas mother who saw Bennetts on NBC's "Today" earlier this month, but hasn't read the book.

A college graduate and a former financial analyst for a casino, she said she's certainly considered the consequences of staying home with her daughter, and has made contingency financial plans.