We Hate Mommies

83 thoughts on “We Hate Mommies”

1. Using the Sunday Styles as a sample group for anything is almost laugh out loud funny. Half the most status-conscious, country-club females in the country are staying home with kids instead of doing what status-conscious country-club people are supposed to do: devote themselves to soul-killing careers. Has Hirshman ever read John Cheever?
   Oddly, Hirshman’s focus on the rich undermines the policy side of the debate. For most families, the social issues that encourage women to stay home with young kids are complicated by economic arguments — The need for more income or specific benefits (health care, for example), competes with the cost of daycare and preschool.
   But those really rich women just have no excuses. I love the woman who gets out of the interview because she’s making a pie. Very polite. And yet, to Hirshman, so galling.

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2. What Henry Woodbury said. I think most of the problems with the piece come from the focus on women from the NYT Weddings page.
   Not only does Hirshman downplay any job less lofty than law partner, she totally dismisses part-time work. Seems to me like meaningful, flexible part-time work is one of the Holy Grails of modern-day feminism. It’s not easy to find it, but when you can find it, it really makes working parenthood easier to manage.
   My wife works 35 hours a week (and brings home more money than I do); I wonder if she is classified as part-time.
   The main thesis–that feminism has made more impact on the workplace than the household–has some merit, I think. But some of her advice is so blunt and mercenary, it’s jarring, e.g. Marry down, marry a liberal, marry somebody much older than you who can afford a housekeeper, have only one child.

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3. Let’s just look at this one quote you used:
   “Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family — with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks — is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust.”
   From my, admittedly unusual, perspective, the first half of this argument is precisely backward. Family life is absolutely the place for “full human flourishing.” How could she possibly think otherwise? We build our social selves outward from our closest loving relationships; and for many of us, those relationships are our family, our children. Your critique is perfect: her notion of “feminism” fetishizes the market.
   Now, for the second half of the argument, I somewhat agree: men should fully involve themselves in the humanity-creating work of family life. And they should precisely because this is the place where they can create and reproduce their own humanity. If men make a mistake, it is when they, like Hirshman, come to believe that work is more humane than family. It is not.

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4. Sorry to double-post, but I reread Hirshman’s article and I think my second paragraph above totally misses Hirshman’s point. She’s writing an advice column, not a policy argument.
   And once she starts dishing advice she hits her stride. Marry down! Ignore the housework! She’s totally right on both counts, given the utilitarian context of her argument.
   The problem for Hirshman is expanding the pool of potential workaholics. Writes Hirshman “Even the most devoted lawyers with the hardest-working nannies are going to have weeks when no one can get home other than to sleep.” (Don’t you love where the word ‘devoted’ comes in that sentence?)
   I don’t know why men would put up with this, let alone women. See Cheever reference, above.

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5. What an odd conclusion she makes.
   If I worked full-time instead of part-time, (and my husband also worked full-time,) I would probably hire:
   1) someone to watch my children
   2) someone to clean my house
   3) someone to cook my meals (take-out, most likely)
   In my limited experience, 95% of those who watch other people’s children for pay are women. As are those who clean other people’s houses. I’m not sure about the cooking – maybe that is more gender equitable.
   So, if I work full-time – I’m using 2…maybe 3….other women to do the childcare/housework that I no longer have time to do.
   Economically, I suppose this makes sense. More income generated for all. Hurray!
   But as a feminist argument, this falls flat. Rich, highly educated women should not care for children and households? But it’s OK for poor, less educated women to do so? (Or – as long as someone is paying for it, it is OK?)
   I work part-time, which for me is perfect. I have plenty of more “feminist” friends who aren’t working full time (or at all)…but that doesn’t mean they have dropped off the face of the earth. They are organizing pre-schools and public school fundraisers and teaching their children and marching in peace rallies and growing organic vegetables and writing blogs and so many other things.
   These writers need to momentarily leave the Ivy League and the NYTimes Style section and come out here to my liberal midwest university town – they will find lots of familes creating happy, balanced work/home lives. It’s not perfect yet – not even close – but everytime I read one of those articles, I feel like I live in a completely different part of the world.

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6. I could certainly do less housework, and I kind of liked her pep-rally-for-fulltime-workforce-moms tone. But the real question is not how to make “women” more like “men” (I use scare quotes b/c she stereotypes and to show these are varied categories, etc.), but how to make work more compatible with other aspects of human life, as has been ably pointed out. Jody & Matt Miller recently wrote an article for Fortune magazine that’s like the flipside of this article: elite men (just like the kinds who might have been in the Sunday Styles wedding pages) are insisting on workplace changes so that they can spend more time with their families. That’s the holy grail for all folks, I think, not just moms: work life that is compatible with other, non-paid commitments, whether those involve children or something else.

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7. But as a feminist argument, this falls flat. Rich, highly educated women should not care for children and households?
   Not entirely flat. The argument is that if rich, highly educated women care for children and households, women will be underrepresented in elite, powerful jobs, and this underrepresentation has consequences for women generally. I’m a litigation associate at a big law firm. I know lots of other female litigators, but very, very few female litigation partners. If I drop out of the profession, I’m making life just a little bit harder for every other woman who wants to make partner.
   This isn’t the only feminist issue there is — it’s not even close to the most important issue there is — but it is important that the jobs that involve running our society are still predominantly held by men, and that part of the reason that’s true is that the incredibly privileged women who are the counterparts of the incredibly privileged men who do hold those jobs often choose to drop out of the working world.

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8. I get totally frustrated and fed up with the media making sweeping generalizations about women in the workforce. And her sample set of women is unbelievably lame. And if these women are as wealthy as they sound, then the quote about housework “they agree that the household is women’s work” probably would more realistically equate to managing the schedule of the housekeeper and personal chef.

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9. The poor representation of women at top law, business, and political positions bothers me. Bothers me a lot, really. No doubt that men are aided by the face that they have stay at home moms to take care of the messy business at home.
   But, hey, I’m a dropout. We just couldn’t balance two 80 hour a week jobs plus kids. There were other factors, as well. I didn’t set out to dropout. I wasn’t aware of the difficulties that I would face after I had kids. I also expect to work again in some capacity in the near future.
   Look there are major obstacles out there to creating the utopian world of gender equality in the workplace. Brow beating women to take one in the chin for all of sisterhood doesn’t seem right to me.

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10. Hirshman’s Rules

    The blogosphere (or at least the corner of it where I hang out) is lighting up over the American Prospect piece by Linda Hirshman where she argues that the Opt-Out Revolution among elite women is real and that we should

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11. Great critique of a very troubling article.

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12. I agree with LizardBreath.
    Women dropping out of their professions IS making it harder for others to advance.
    And what a different world we might have if “the jobs that involve running our society (weren’t) still predominantly held by men.”
    But 11D, you also have a good point about reading some Marx and not trying to make feminism “the handmaiden for capitalism.”
    I agree that our lives should not be all about work, but we should not ignore the societal result of those choices as they are made by women.

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13. “I know lots of other female litigators, but very, very few female litigation partners. If I drop out of the profession, I’m making life just a little bit harder for every other woman who wants to make partner.”
    I agree with this completely.
    I wonder if there isn’t a way for a person to be a litagation partner (or a doctor…or a professor) and not work the traditional “full time” 80 hour work week we associate with that role. I’m not a lawyer or doctor, so I don’t know if that would even work.
    Our pediatrician is part time. (works 4 days/week). She works with 4 other pediatricians. I think 3 of them are part-time and they cover for each other. It’s a private practice – not associated with any HMOs. (I don’t know if that makes a difference.) It works.
    I do the same job as I did when I was full time. But I only am in the office 20-24 hours/week. I’m paid less, but not significantly less.
    I guess my point is that I don’t see myself as any less of a “feminist” for the choice I made. My husband and I made the same salary when I got pregnant. Either one of us could have stayed home with the kids. But I wanted to – desperately wanted to. Frankly, I blame it on lactation….I guess it is harder to “burn the bra” when it’s a nursing bra.

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14. Instead of blaming women for opting out, I would like to learn why they opted out and figure out how to help them. Do they simply dislike corporate life and are glad to leave it behind? Would they like to work part time, but don’t have the option? Did they face too much hostility after they had children? Can we stop blaming women and blame corporate life?
    You know, Hirshman’s rules aren’t that way off. If I had a daughter who only wanted money and power and had no imagination or creativity and had no need for the comfort of others, I would give her exactly the same advice. In fact, I would even be stricter. I would tell her to have zero children. I would tell her to never get married, but to have several lovers. Harvard business school all the way.
    Hirshman is totally right that this is the path to money and power. I just don’t think that this is the right way to go for everybody. My sister always knew that she wanted to be a mother, more than anything else. She chose a profession, teaching, that would allow her to be home when her kids got back from school. She would be miserable at a top law position right now. How insulting is this message to everyone who isn’t a law partner or a doctor? Are all the nurses and kindergarten teachers and secretaries failures?
    The other idea that is kicking around and still bothering me is that women who go to top schools are traitors and resource squanders if they don’t become law partner or doctors. My sister has a BA from Georgetown and a MA from Columbia. She’s is not earning a salary at the moment. Who the fuck cares? When did our worth as people come down to our pay stubs?

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15. It does make it harder for others to succeed when women drop out of the most demanding careers. It’s the truth. That doesn’t mean one should feel an obligation to stay, but it does happen.
    What irritates me about the rich, white moms is that they like to say how much organizing and work they do at preschools and such. Yes, the preschools of the rich, white children are awash in homemade cupcakes and bake sales. The moms are definitely helping their own.
    I wish some of the moms would pack up Muffy and Zack and go do some charity work where it’s less appealing, and more selfless.

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16. LizardBreath writes about the “incredibly privileged men”–in my experience, it’s those men, with their SAH wives, who make it the most difficult for working moms to succeed. They see their wives as “fulfilled” at home, and their family making it financially. They are the ones who don’t want moms (and in some cases they work to actively block their female co-workers) to progress and achieve in the work world–more competition for them, doncha know. You’d think these men would/could be the ones leading the charge for well-paid, challenging part time work for all–but no, they are content to pull up the ladders for all those who come later.

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17. Laughing….Thanks for the read:)

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18. Laura, I like your last comment. I would add that anyone’s son who only wanted money and power and had no imagination or creativity and had no need for the comfort of others, would also benefit from Hirshman’s advice.
    Obviously, many more men than women seem to be inclined monomaniacal careerism, but I don’t think it’s a majority of men. Most of the men I know are trying to balance career and family, in their own half-assed ways.
    I’m not sure that encouraging more women to become maniacally ambitious is going to do much to change corporate culture. Even a wonderfully diverse bunch of corporate hacks are still going to be corporate hacks.
    We’re a wealthy civilization. For more and more families, flexible schedules for one parent and sometimes both are becoming an option. If anyone changes society it will be the dropouts, not the climbers.

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19. What irritates me about the rich, white moms is that they like to say how much organizing and work they do at preschools and such. Yes, the preschools of the rich, white children are awash in homemade cupcakes and bake sales. The moms are definitely helping their own.
    I wish some of the moms would pack up Muffy and Zack and go do some charity work where it’s less appealing, and more selfless.
    But if you are a corporate lawyer living in McMansion, you are doing God’s work? A doctor putting in breast implants on Playboy wanna-bees is making the world better for humanity?

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20. I like that comment: “If anyone changes society it will be the dropouts, not the climbers.” I hope this heated controversy over the need for ‘well-paid and challenging part time work’ will make flexible work schedules a reality. That seems like the best answer to this whole parenting/work dilemma – whether you are a father or a mother.

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21. A doctor putting in breast implants on Playboy wanna-bees is making the world better for humanity?

    OTOH, does the world need more Ph.Ds researching the hermeneutics of Mayan fire ants or a feminist anlaysis of women living in a single block in Cleveland?

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22. Great rant. This pissed me off thoroughly, as well. Basically, she dismisses the notion of “choice” as false consciousness and then rants about how feminism is about personal autonomy and making the world a better place. Given that she provides very precise rules about how we should all be living our lives, I can’t see how that provides all that much personal autonomy, since we must all exactly share her preferences, or else be gender traitors. Furthermore, her invocation of the utilitarian principle of “do more good in the world than harm” is somewhat difficult to square with her dismissal of do-gooder work in favor of climbing the corporate ladder.
    This is extremely catty, but as I read the article, I found myself wondering if she had children, and how she felt about that. I couldn’t bring myself to include that in my own blog rant, but this is a comment, so I will be less restrained.

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23. The Daughter Track and Humanity

    My car crash (you’ll be happy to know that Maggie’s eye is getting better) shifted my attention away from this piece a couple of days ago. It seems that a noticeable (by sociologists, at least) number of career women

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24. I had exactly the same question as Mrs. Coulter. I haven’t been able to turn up much concrete information, because almost all of the things I’ve turned up are by Hirshman, not about her. She seems to have writen something called “The Woman’s Guide to Law School,” and there is a very short bio on a Penguin website, which I will give in its entirety: “Linda Hirshman is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in philosophy. She has written widely for academic and popular publications, including Glamour, Tikkun, Ms., the ABA Journal, and the Boston Globe. She divides her time between Cave Creek, Arizona and Falmouth, Massachusetts.” So she’s had an interesting and varied career, nearly the opposite of what she advised women to do.

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25. People are taking this awfully personally. Yes, the personal is the political, but puhleez! I think she hit a very sensitive spot.
    First, do we care that our politics is (still) overwhelmingly male, especially at the top? How about our business? I do, and I don’t think I am all that rare. (If not, substitute race for gender – does it matter that our politics and business are still whiter than society as a whole, esp. at the top?)
    Why is this important? Because for a variety of reasons, probably both intrinsic and conditioned, men and women, on average, have different priorities, and approach problems differently. This is a statement about populations, averages, not about each and every individual. When women are adequately represented in the halls of power, different problems are addressed, and different solutions are considered to the same old problems. This is not to say that women’s solutions or priorities are superior or preferable to men’s but that they are different, and that giving those of both sexes roughly equal consideration would likely lead to superior social outcomes.
    Given the above, Hirshman is looking at a group of women who seem to be in the best position to contribute to ameliorating the lack of women in high places. Her survey of the NYT wedding pages is the equivalent of a back of the envelope calculation. Not definitive, but it gives some idea of the size of the problem.
    The feminist movement of the 1960s-1980s was reasonably successful in battering down barriers to women. Unlike women of her generation, the women she surveyed have had many more opportunities available to them. Yet, a much larger proportion of these women are choosing to drop out of the halls of power than are their male counterparts.
    Why? It is no longer the case that women have substantially fewer opportunities available to them by law and custom. Are women and men intrinsically different in their tastes and capabilities? This is probably not a good place to begin, given the pervasive effect of society on conditioning people’s tastes and abilities. And it appears that these women have already demonstrated their abilities, at least so far as they can be measured by schooling.
    Perhaps the differences in the constraints that men and women face have something to do with this. That seems like a promising place to start. For one, the expectations that individuals feel with respect to career and family responsibilities, from friends, family, in-laws, colleagues, employers and society more generally differ systematically by the individual’s sex. Second, people’s expectations for themselves, shaped by many things including what they think they can achieve, differ systematically by sex. This seems to become more pronounced with age and experience, and reflects the lack of women at the top. So the situation suffers from positive feedback: fewer women at the top leads fewer women to try, etc., etc.
    Not only have most American workplaces barely adjusted to the general lack of a full-time stay-at-home parent, few American families have made the necessary adjustment, either in expectations about what needs to be done or the division of labor between the sexes. By and large, this lack of adjustment falls much more heavily on women than on men.
    In response, many of the women in whom society has made the greatest investment have decided that this struggle is not worth fighting. And for themselves, it’s hard to argue that their choice is wrong. They can see at least the immediate costs and benefits and are presumably in the best position to judge. But their decision reverberates with implications for the rest of us. With them AWOL, changes in family structure, in the organization of the workplace and in society at large will take much longer and be more costly for the rest of us.
    A bit of hyperbole: it may make sense for frontline soldiers to conclude that a particular battle is not worthwhile, and to desert. But that has costs for those counting on them to fight that battle. One of the ways for keeping them in line is shame. That is what Hirshman is proposing.
    It’s late, and I wonder if I’ve gone off the deep end, ranting. So I’ll stop now, and hope that I have been reasonably clear and level-headed.

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26. In the opinion of Linda Hirshman:
    1 If I were to return to work, pay another woman $15/hour to raise my kids while I earn more than 150/hour, while the children of the woman working for me receive care from a relative, or in a subsidized day-care, or are actually living in a different country receiving checks from their mother, that would be *GOOD* for feminism?
    2. Well-educated feminist women raising children who will (hopefully) turn out to be well-raised feminists sons and daughters is *BAD* for feminism?
    What would Linda Hirshman think of women spending less time in graduate school and becoming electricians or plumbers – both high earning, autonomy enhancing trades dominated by men?
    How about having an actual maternity leave – I’m Canadian and we are able to take a year off – it’s no solution, but it helps.

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27. People in these comments so far are conflating a lot of different points, which is not surprising because Hirshman seems to be coming at things from an odd point in multi-dimensional issue-space, so to speak. (That is, her arguments & commitments don’t clearly line up with any of the pre-existing camps.)
    What I think is totally, totally wrong is her glorification of capitalism, utter disdain for the domestic sphere, willingness to continue to see “work” and “home/family life” as mutually exclusive & intrinsically competitive.
    What is absolutely right–and needed to be said–is that feminism cannot just be about “choice”; that feminism must not shy away from insisting on its rightful application to the family and domestic life; and that, for fuck’s sake, the number of women in positions of authority & prestige is disgusting.

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28. What about all those women that “choose” to take their husband’s name upon marriage, because it’s best for the parents to have the same last name as the kid?

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29. I am torn between two perspectives:
    The Academic part of me becomes very angry with people who get advanced degrees and don’t use them. This is because by getting into graduate school X, person Y ensures that some person Z DOES NOT get into that school; ie, space is limited. So taking the slot someone else could have taken, then wasting your education by not using it means you don’t just deprive someone else of that education, you’re then ensuring giving it to you was a waste.
    The rest of me finds that Hirshman doesn’t seem to grasp that many people hate working and are glad to get out of the workforce; some people are crushed and stultified by child-raising; others love it. I know plenty of couples where they would BOTH stay home with the kids if the money would just flow in miraculously and others where they never should have had kids because they’d both rather work than be domestic.

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30. John,
    While you are probably right about professional programs (law, medicine, MBA), elsewhere graduate schools are choked with smart students who are killing themselves with work but who will never have a tenure track position and will move from one year job to one year job, if they are “lucky” and not forced to leave the field entirely. Keeping people out of graduate school is a mitzvah.

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31. I agree with most of the criticisms of Hirshman’s article, but I think in parts of her article she starts to recognize on some level that not everyone gets personal fulfillment through work and some might be better off doing something else.
    It’s when she advocates “marrying down”. The idea being that over the long term this might encourage men who are temperamentally suited to be nonprofessionals to go that route, so that it’s not just women who are expected to do this. A world in which feminism truly leads to increased personal choice would be a world in which men are not the people primarily driven to be the breadwinners. Today there’s some pressure for women to earn money, but little corresponding easing up of pressure on the men or legitimization of stay-at-home husbands as normal. Here and there in the article, she just starts to get this.
    On the other hand, she then undercuts this in the last part of the article about professionalism as the only truly worthy life, which reads like something out of Ayn Rand.

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32. …As for not using advanced degrees, I guess I’m guilty since I got out of the field immediately afterward, though as Amy said, it was in a scientific field where there is such a glut of PhDs relative to jobs that the waste of grad-school slots really isn’t an issue. Actually, people in the field constantly fret about overproduction.
    But I don’t regret it much because, in retrospect, I got the degree more to fulfill personal curiosity than as career development. The odd thing is that I keep doing things like that, learning random things out of pure curiosity, and then bits and pieces of the stuff I learned keep coming up in seemingly unrelated professional contexts.
    My educational path was insane by any rational career-development standard but I keep benefiting from it anyway. I’d probably be considerably richer if I’d had more conventional professional training, but not happier, and frankly I’m not doing too badly. So have I used my degree or not?
    The thing is, I doubt that my life story translates into good advice for anybody else, male or female.

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33. My wife effectively followed Hirschman’s advice years before it was written. When we married, she was on her way to a Ph.D. in chemistry from MIT, and I had an M.Ed. in deaf education. Our original plan was that I would go into a teaching career and she would bring home the majority of the household income as a chemist.
    Then we discovered that:
    (1) Most of the jobs available for people with her kind of chemistry degree were in places we didn’t want to move to.
    (2) The place she did end up working at was so full of toxins that she wanted to be long gone from there before she got pregnant. (In a perfect world, the EPA, OSHA, and the city fire marshal would have raced to shut that laboratory down.)
    (3) Compared with the cost of housing in Boston, the salary of a teacher of deaf children is pocket change.
    So I got a job doing technical writing, and later went from tech writing to programming. She went from being a chemist to being a science writer, and shortly before our second child was born, she became a stay-at-home mommy.
    We had the best of intentions, Dr. Hirschman, really we did….

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34. What jumped out at me was Hirschfield’s opening assumption: “the educated elite, who are the logical heirs of the agenda of empowering women.”
    I’m just a tiny bit aghast that a women’s study professor would make such a claim. One can certainly see that the organized feminist movement’s leadership has been overwhelmingly white, educated, and elite (if you finesse the biographies of feminism’s early leaders, many of whom were born into working-class families, were they not?) but it’s an entirely different thing to claim that either _organized_ feminism or _organizational leadership_ would be the places we would look for “the agenda of empowering women.” The failures of feminism are often laid at the feet (fairly or unfairly) of white, educated elites who fail to make common cause with black, Latino, Asian, working-class, etc etc women.
    In other words, it’s entirely possible to argue that feminism’s agenda has been just as alive among working-class black women as any other group, if one is prepared to examine what feminism might be in the first place.
    I take LizardBreath’s argument very, very seriously. I think she’s absolutely correct to point out this problem. But the world of high-powered law and education has not, traditionally, been the place where women advance the agenda of feminism. Have women not made their greatest strides on the streets, and in the union halls, and (okay, yes) in the courts? Hirschfield makes blanket claims that are endlessly debatable, within feminism and without it.
    All that having been said, the failure of academic men to take parental leave (to cite the example dearest to my heart) makes me almost blind with rage. And obviously, the fewer female department chairs and colleagues there are to make it more comfortable for men to take that leave, the easier it would be for more women to take leave.
    On the other hand, when has feminism ever demanded that its task be _easy_? You take the leave or step off the racetrack and then demand an on-ramp back when the kids reach kindergarten. [Even among the educated elites, how many women remove themselves from the workforce forever? And how do we think about jobs like the PTA president, which involve much more than cupcake sales? Should those women be doing more to improve all public education? Absolutely. But volunteer labor has been a cradle for feminism and feminist action since Jane Addams and Hull House at least. Arguably the early abolition movement was fueled by educated elite women and their ability to work for free. But I digress.) You fight for that on-ramp. You enlist foot soldiers in the campaign, and if you don’t find them in your bedroom at the very least, you reconsider your choice of partners. You fight on.
    Meanwhile, with all due respect to Hirschfield, I’m going to spend less time worrying about the educated elites and more time paying attention to the feminist leaders you find in Wal-Mart and Sodexh* and all the other places where women without college educations are fighting for their rights. Because I’m pretty sure that they’ve got a feminist agenda, too, and that they have the power to see it through.

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35. oops:
    “And obviously, the fewer female department chairs and colleagues there are to make it more comfortable for men to take that leave, the [harder] it would be for more women to take leave.”

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36. Yay! Great comments. (Excellent point, Jody) Keep going. I even like those who disagree with me (I’m in the comments there).

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37. Gee, it must be nice to be able to have the choice not to work.
    Actually, if the alternative is being a slave in meat-for-sex arrangement, I’d rather starve.
    Which I have.
    –A choice I made at age 12, btw, watching my oh-so-traditional parents in their celebrated traditional marriage, and listening both to their peers and the secular outside world in person and through the media hammer home the message that I was nothng but a subhuman who could expect nothing but a meat-for-sex arrangement, with a little frosting of “romance” on top, and count myself lucky if I wasn’t beaten and raped in the course of having seven or more kids.
    And this was the dream to which I should aspire…
    So I must work 50+ hours a week at something over minimum wage and count myself lucky that a) it isn’t one of the many Jobs From Total Hell I’ve worked before, even if it is stressful, and b) after paying rent and power bills I can sometimes buy a few books or see a movie, or a secondhand dress, if my car doesn’t break down and I don’t have to beg for help with a blog fundraiser – the only money my expensive college education has ever gotten me, in a most roundabout way.
    Yeah, I’d love to be able to not punch a clock, and devote myself to study and writing fulltime, or to have one of the truly fulfilling jobs that also pays enough to make ends meet and have something left over to put into a savings account rather than living paycheck to paycheck, despite my expensive college education and loans.
    I’d also like a pony, too, while we’re at it.

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38. –I’d also love to be able to go back and get an advanced degree, now, after beating the depression that had me in a suicidal haze for the close of my undergraduate career, if I could only figure out what field to specialize in. But I can’t even afford to go and take enrichment classes in the many fields I favor. (At least, not without giving up my power, phone/internet, and even then it would be a scraping-by.)
    And people wonder why I don’t subscribe to the worship of Holy Capitalism either – even the stay-at-homes who don’t recognize how their own lives of opting-out are subsidized by the same rat-race they have opted out of. Aux barricades, citoyennes!

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39. Gender traitors, all of us

    Looks like I’m not the only one foaming at the mouth about this article. Check out great contributions 11D, Half-Changed World, Playground Revolution, Rebel Dad, Angry, Pregnant Lawyer, and Blogging Baby. If you know of others, let me know in the com…

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40. I just love this unintentional homonym, straight out of Matthew Yglesias:
    “You have to work, because you don’t know if your husband is going to bale”
    To bale is to gather hay or other strands into a large bundle. To bail is to skeedaddle (among other things). And yes, it’s true, sometimes you don’t know if your husband is going to bale, because some stay-at-home farmer-husbands are just damn lazy. But if it gets that bad, you should probably just bail. 😉

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41. in her comment above, kristen makes note of what it takes for a mother to work fulltime:
    1) someone to watch my children
    2) someone to clean my house
    3) someone to cook my meals (take-out, most likely)
    she also notes that the individuals performing these roles — especially the first two — are likely to be women working for low wages.
    the always-interesting caitlin flanagan explored this very same topic in a piece for The Atlantic last year. it’s called “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” and it’s a sobering read.

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42. What Lizardbreath said, and
    Jody, What jumped out at me was Hirschfield’s opening assumption: “the educated elite, who are the logical heirs of the agenda of empowering women.”
    I read this as “its beneficiaries”.
    Mrs Coulter, I’d say Hirshman is inconsistent on choice, sometimes seeing it as determined, sometimes not. I do think this point of hers is good
    Great as liberal feminism was, once it retreated to choice the movement had no language to use on the gendered ideology of the family. Feminists could not say, “Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.”
    and I wish she’d elaborated on it as I’m fairly sure her failure to do that has led to some of the criticisms here.

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43. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the other comments yet, I’m not American and don’t live in the US, I have only been following this debate indirectly and rather on and off.
    The Prospect article may come off as brutal in pieces, and is certainly aware of it, but in my view it is brutal honesty, and the main points it makes are absolutely spot on.
    All that advice on aiming for money and losing capitalism virginity – I don’t read it as some kind of notion that women should become “corporate robots”, I read it as very sound and pragmatic call to value ambition and self fulfillment in society. Marx is irrelevant to this issue, he never even bothered with the problems women have to face, and it’s ridiculous to use the evils of capitalism as a way of saying it’s not that bad for women to opt out. You can’t have a fairer, more equal, more environmentally sustainable and more socially conscious economic and political system in the space of a few generations. But in a wealthy country, wider female representation is feasible in a few generations. Scandinavian countries seem to have managed to get a good start on that, no?
    No the world may not be magically better off if there were more women at the top, but there’s no denying her point about the importance of representation. More women in politics and business in those countries like Sweden means there’s also more services like day care, generous maternity leaves, etc. and the other way round, it’s a virtuous circle. That’s unlikely to happen in the US, and the reasons are not limited to the mentalities she criticises, but they do play a part.
    I also think she is right about the trap of the language of choice, it reduces everything to isolated personal stories, and fails to look at the wider view, it fails at social critique and political change, which is what feminism was supposed to be about.

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44. Now I have read the comments and just want to add I completely agree with lizardbreath, workingagain and paul.
    She is deliberately looking at the “elite” and top jobs in the current market, precisely to make that point that “It does make it harder for others to succeed when women drop out of the most demanding careers”, and also the point about political representation. I wouldn’t assume that must mean she despises lower paid jobs or jobs for which an academic education is not necessary – it’s just those are not leadership positions, and leadership is where political and economic choices are taken or influenced.
    I don’t read her views as a glorification of capitalism, it just seems to me she has a very disenchanted view about the system and is putting it forth in the most direct and provocative way to make her point.
    Why be mad at a woman who decries the attitude that takes for granted it’s up to women to take care of children and the house when married? It’s like yourself in the foot, isn’t it?
    I understand she did touch a sensitive spot, like paul said, and I think she did it so much more forcefully because that personal sensitivity to criticism of personal choices is part of the problem she’s criticising. Because it’s not just about personal choices and personal choices are not isolated phenomena with no social repercussions. Especially for privileged women who do indeed have all the choices available to them.
    It is women who need to change things to their advantage, no matter how many odds against them, no one else is going to do that work.

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45. Re: update point 5b and the various places where this idea appears in the comments (“mercenary” etc.), specifically, “Demand no changes from men.”
    Demanding changes from those in power just isn’t very effective. Power has to be worked for, taken, earned.

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46. What women do (because nobody else cares or is required to) is to do some collective math: if I want to get me and my children to have the best results as a group, what do I do?
    Given the economic figures they start with, the end results come out very differently. If you make SUPERMONEY, you might be able to pay for really, really good childcare. Anything less than SUPERMONEY, and the childcare sometimes isn’t so good unless you happen to get smiled upon by the Childcare Gods (Gee, why not that as an objective for government? Too busy financing a war, I guess). If you’re a single parent, working and working like hell to work out some childcare arrangements with friends and relatives may be the answer. In any case, no one will help you, it will not be easy, and no matter what you do, someone will crap on you for it in handwringing pieces in the Times — either about you dropping out of the workforce or warehousing your kids somewhere. Because it’s your problem personally, don’t look at us (But I’m looking at you, Tim). For the spectrum in the middle, the answer can come out any variety of different ways.
    It’s very hard to argue that a particular woman is doing the math “wrong” without knowing a lot about their bank balance, their family circumstances, and their kid(s).

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47. Also, people in this thread are saying that women have no right to demand that others change their personal choices for their benefit, but isn’t that exactly what we’re asking them to do when we ask them to put their kids on the altar so that some abstract class of women will, theoretically, do better in the future?

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48. Lisa: very well put.

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49. “It is extremely elitist to assume that everyone is made happy by their jobs.”
    Or merely ignorant. Are there people in the world that actually think this? They should get out more. Personally I’d like nothing more to give up my hideous job and become a domestic “honey-bunny”. Don’t think I’d be able to sell this idea to my boy’s mother though…

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50. I’ve been looking at Laura’s option 5a, and I’m not sure there is an obvious solution.
    Any success in amelioriating the problems of long hours, lack of childcare, no materity leave, etc., might affect the makeup of the blue and white collar workforce, but I doubt it would touch the leadership class at all. Because people at the leadership level are working as independents. They get ahead by virtue of the hours they put in.
    Is this fair? Well yes. People who work really hard at one thing will generally get better at it. Should they be stopped? Well no, I don’t think so. I don’t want to live in a culture that has that power over personal autonomy. Consider if, instead of talking about lawyers and business executives (as we seem to), we were talking about artists? Does anyone feel it’s right to tell, I don’t know, George Thoroughgood, to to shut up for a while so someone else can get some gigs? Or what about entrepreneurs? Should Steve Jobs be told to stop fiddling with his computer on weekends because we’re tired of all his new ideas?

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51. I linked to you too! http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002468.html

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52. Let me be clear that I disagree with Hirshman on many levels. However I think Hirshman would agree with Laura’s option 5a. I think her point is that the goal of “mak(ing) it easier for women who care more about power than kids to get to the top of industry” is directly weakened by Laura’s other 5a point, “If women don’t want to work and have the financial resources to stop, then you shouldn’t care”. Well, those two things do not go together. We would reach parity with men much faster if we all worked together. And let’s face it: the women who opt out of the workplace and yet expect it to be fair/unhostile for them when they return? They’re benefiting from the work of the women who remained in the workplace.
    However I am very struck by Lisa’s point: someone who defends their right to stop working as their personal preference is asking others to sacrifice for them. But so is anyone asking a woman to continue working for the greater good of womanhood.

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53. Jen,
    Maybe we should accept that the current distribution of women at home and in the workplace *does* represent women making choices for them and their kids out of enlightened self interest.
    If we accept that women are acting out of enlightened self interest — making choices to get the best outcome for them and their kids as a unit — then what explains the big gap between mens’ achievement and womens’?
    To paraphrase James Carville (though I assure you this is not intended for you directly): “It’s the childcare, stupid.”
    It’s also the fact that most jobs that are predominantly feminine (schoolteacher, childcare, retail, service professions) pay less. If these had more parity in prestige and pay with other professions, they’d attract more men, and that would leave more entry level positions in the fields that are predominantly male.
    I’m not sure that someone defending their right to stop working as a personal preference is neccesarily asking someone to sacrifice for them. If one parent offers to stay home and do fulltime childcare for free, why isn’t this considered a favor to the other parent? The childcare has to be accomplished somehow, so why do we come to the conclusion the stay at home parent who offers to do it for nothing, and often at their own expense in the form of foregone wages, is the one who’s producing the drag on the family economy?

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54. Lisa Williams: I think you and others here are all taking that too literally. Of course she is not arguing to force women to work even if they’d prefer staying home. Who would enforce that “sacrifice”?
    And it’s not that women should work even if they prefer to stay home becuse they have to think about some “abstract” future generation of women who’d benefit from more women working…
    It’s a given that any individual does what they want. But social changes do not stop at individuals.
    Personal choices *are* influenced by social circumstances, mentalities, habits, and because the habit/mentality of child care and domestic work falling on women — even in the filthiest richest couples where the woman got the same education the man had and could have the same level of career but quit — is still there, reinforced from childhood through a lot of channels, it’d be disingenous to ignore the part they still play in influencing those personal choices.
    I don’t see what’s wrong in encouraging girls and young women to think more in terms of self-fulfillment outside the home, not just through work, but, not all work is soulless slaving away for evil corporations.
    If there’s a risk of glorifying capitalism there, then there’s an equally extreme risk of glorifying the domestic life.

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55. “half the wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females in the country stay home with their babies rather than work in the market economy.”
    So half the wealthiest and most privileged women in the world don’t have to frigging work for a living? Well, knock my ass over with a feather. Isn’t that a rich, privileged, spoiled shit’s favorite job, to sit on their superior asses and let everyone else keep the world moving?
    Best educated — big damned deal. A bunch of spoiled rich kids whose degrees were bought for them by mommy and daddy’s library endowment would sooner sit on their asses than work for a living. I’m supposed to be surprised by this WHY?
    And those people get on poor people’s cases about sitting around on welfare. Makes me sick. They’re on welfare, too — it’s just Daddy and Hubby’s money instead of the state’s. Aristocrats have never had a work ethic; this is no change from the past at all.

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56. Neil French got in a lot of hot water – to the point of losing his job – recently for offering two reasons that there were no female creative directors in the advertising industry: A) “They’re crap” and B) “they always take time off to suckle something.” People in comments here are agreeing with B, albeit phrased a bit more delicately. I admittedly can’t put my finger on exactly why this seems wrong, but it does.
    Maybe people shouldn’t be aspiring to positions of power. But shouldn’t someone point out that the actions you take as an undergraduate, grad student, or even young professional can close off those options in ways you don’t realize at the time?
    Or that there are actual biological-gender issues (medical insurance not paying for birth control) vs. social-gender issues (can’t take months off to care for your baby), and that women checking out of the rat race prevents progress on the former?

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57. I can think of any number of personal and societal reasons that a particular person may wish to follow Hirshman’s recommendations. But Hirshman seems intent on meeting her dogmatic opponents with equally dogmatic claims when she states that:
    “these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives.”
    Wow. Somewhere, I missed the the reasoning that established these time-tested standards as normative for women generally and then how these standards entail the conclusions that Hirshman asserts.
    This is far too important an issue to trivialize with poorly reasoned rhetoric.

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58. Jake, you are right about this: “there are actual biological-gender issues (medical insurance not paying for birth control) vs. social-gender issues (can’t take months off to care for your baby).”
    However, I’m not sure what an individual woman is supposed to do in the face of this other than evaluate her specific situation and make the decision that works best for her and her family unit (by that I don’t mean the nebulous “best for the children”, but rather what creates the optimal situation for all family members)…the idea that “women checking out of the rat race prevents progress on the former” suggests that we have a higher obligation to women as a class than we do to ourselves and our own families. Do you make your life decisions based on what’s best for your gender, race, or religious group as a class? Then why should we?

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59. No, I don’t make my decisions based on what’s good for my race or gender group. But my race and gender groups aren’t getting the short end of the stick, either. And while it’s clear that there are varying definitions of what it means to be a feminist, I make no claim to be a masculinist.
    One of the new-to-me observations in the Hirshman article was that “what is good for the family unit” usually ends up being “the man keeps on keeping on, the woman adapts”, but that it doesn’t have to be that way, and a lot of the things that make it that way are not obvious at the time (e.g. liberal arts degrees, high-status husbands).

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60. “A good life for humans includes…the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world.”
    One of the most shiningly central facts of motherhood is the deferment toward an open-ended and continuing moment represented by the child. Weighing the balance of harm or good “in the world” of that deferment is impossible without some kind of eternal perspective.
    It’s the myopic insistence on immediate evaluation that has taken from us so much that was essential and given us so much that’s harmful. Because in the short run these qualities weren’t visible.
    Some things won’t surrender their value to examination by incompetent judges.

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61. A would go further than Rollo and deny the invocation of utilitarianism, which is a very poor standard for defining a “good life.” If we do that, we will invariably come to devalue those who appear not to add as much “good” to the world as others. I am thinking here of my profoundly disabled son. I can justify him in utilitarian terms; but I can also imagine a utilitarian calculus that would leave him completely out in the cold. No. The beauty of raising children is not to be found in what they become, measured by some value-added formula; it lies in what they are, in and of themselves, regardless of how society might evaluate their accomplishments. Hirshman’s impoverished utilitarianism makes it impossible for her to understand this.

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62. LMYC: It’s only “welfare” in your mind because in your mind — and in most peoples’ — mothering is worthless in the literal “get a paycheck” and the nonliteral “get the benefit of prestige from society” senses.
    The most radical thing of all would be considering mothering to be actually worth something, in the exact same way a law partnership is.
    Nina: So if it’s impossible to enforce it, why is it not possible to point out that people are calling for it? I’m not sure I’m the one being overly literal here.

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63. It is very worrying for these articles to be published, and publicized, now. When I was young, there was still the widespread notion that women would abandon their professional training once they got married and had kids, and in a conservative profession, of course every female applicant had better present as resolutely heterosexual. Are we going back to those prejudices? Disqualified for being hetero, disqualified for being lesbian?

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64. NancyP: Maybe the prejudice was really a prejudice against parenting and never went away at all.

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65. 2. A lot of women with kids are dropping out of the workforce.
    Actually, women with kids are dropping out of the workforce at lower rates than ever before. And the least likely women to “opt out” are the ones with the expensive educations.

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66. One point I haven’t seen anyone raise in this comment thread is that when women “choose” to stay home to raise their kids, they absolve men from needing to do so.

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67. ampersand, thanks for the info on that new study. I’m looking forward to reading it. Everything that I’ve read so far has a hard time when it comes to finding out who’s working part-time v. full-time and totally off the books. I’m curious how this new study deals with that.
    bitch, thanks for coming over here to comment. I was going to comment at your blog, but then things started getting too hairy for me. The whole good mother thing.
    As to letting the men off, I’m not doing that. I think that is one of the problems with Hirshman. She makes some sneers that we should find some patsy to do the house work, but if home life is as bad as she says, I’m not sure why anybody would want to watch the kids. I think she doesn’t think that men or the workplace are even going to change.
    Yeah, it would be more fair if more guys had to agonize about these decisions as much as we do. In our house, we talk regularly about giving my husband another two years at his job and then we swap. I have a lot of friends with stay at home husbands. There are a few blogs devoted to this subject. I am not sure what the numbers are, but I have to think that their ranks are expanding. I just hope that they don’t read Hirshman’s article and find out that they are liberal saps.

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68. I suppose all this talk of abandoning choice rhetoric bothers me a little because I don’t want to entirely abandon the idea that freedom of choice in how we live our lives is a good thing. If all we’re doing in worrying about politics is to take up one stifling orthodoxy in preference to another, what good is it?
    On the other hand, it ought to be real choice, not choice mediated by a bunch of gender-biased expectations about what the choices are. Obviously that’s not how it is today. And how do you get there from here?
    I think the stay-at-home husbands are worth looking at carefully, and are part of the answer, because it strikes me that maybe men aren’t being allowed by convention to make the choices that they’d want to if they were allowed to want to. Which is not to make some ridiculous claim that men are the true oppressed beings, but rather that the high value a patriarchy places on traditional male roles could be paradoxically constraining them.

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69. I thought feminism was all about choice.

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70. I’m going to make a completely different point:
    This article is wrong for all the reasons mentioned, but they’re not the ones that worry me. Offend me, yes, but not worry me. What worries me is the base assumption that women would rather be home with the kids, in the absence of any evidence for this assertion. The numbers (that fewer women are working now) are being stretched well past the breaking point–it’s true, fewer women in the US are working now than previously. Fewer PEOPLE are working now than previously; the economy isn’t doing very well. And it scares me, quite frankly, to see the employment needs of the economy recast as women’s “choices.”
    Why? Because every time the labour needs of hte market change, women (and especially women with children) are the ones who have always been tossed out first, and this tossing has always been cast as a “choice.” Industrialism–women belong at home! Angel in the house! 1950s–Fulfillment as a woman means full-time motherhood! And here it is again–the economy is tanking, women with children are leaving the workforce, and it’s all being cast as a “choice.”
    Whenever that happens, work sucks for any woman who does stay in the labour market–it’s assumed that she doesn’t really want to be there, that she’s just putting in time until she can quit, so it’s not necessary to treat her as equitably as her male counterparts. Strides for women in the labour market have been made at times when the cultural assumption was that women, or at least some/many women, did in fact WANT to work. As soon as that assumption changes, progress stalls. Or reverses.
    So it really scares me when I see even self-proclaimed feminists writing extensive articles based on teh assumption that women are leaving the workforce because they want to, in times when the economy is causing people of all sexes/life paths to leave the workforce whether they want to or not. Are some women leaving the work force because they want to? Probably. But all of them? I kind of doubt it.
    It’s not hard to find some numbers for this: In Canada, where the economy has been doing quite well, the number of women in the full-time labour market is still rising. It’s lower than the number of men in the labour market, of course, but it’s not falling. We also have a decent mat leave policy for women who can access it, fewer average hours of work per worker, and more average time off per worker. While this is far from scientific evidence, it’s not hard to conclude that it is highly likely that policies enabling a decent work-life balance in the context of a reasonably strong economy lead to more women in the workplace, and that its reverse will lead to fewer women in the workplace. I’d also like to point out that in 2000, Canadian mat leave policies were extended from 6 months to 12, and female employment in all age categories rose steadily throughout the entire period. Oh, and the economy grew.
    Under the logic of this article, one would have to assume that feminism “succeeded” in Canada and “failed” in the US, which is absurd.

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71. Are some women leaving the work force because they want to? Probably. But all of them? I kind of doubt it.
    totally.

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72. On the question of feminism’s heirs: yes, I’m sure Hirschman implied beneficiaries. But I think the tenor of her article also implied the sense of heirs as continuers of a tradition.
    Which brings us back to a completely separate point, relevant to the structure of Hirschman’s article and this question of women’s choices, although not the underlying point (which is, how do we make men feminists)
    How many of the women with advanced degrees in the Style pages were ever feminists in the first place? I NEVER expected to be a full-time SAHM while pursuing my education. If I had known anyone in grad school who claimed she intended to quit work FOREVER when she had kids, I would have (a) thought she was nuts; and (b) known she wasn’t a feminist. But clearly those women exist: people for whom grad and professional degrees have become another way of spending time and actualizing themselves before going on with the “real life” of an idealized 1950s family. (Please don’t call that set-up the traditional family, because it’s completely ahistorical to believe in such a thing.)
    If someone has $120,000 to get an advanced MRS degree, why is that a problem? Why do we think it says anything about feminism? These women were never feminists in the first place. If admissions committees could sniff those folks out, they should. But since most women I know with professional and grad degrees ARE using those degrees (especially the MDs), why are we so convinced it’s a problem?
    For me, the tough questions start when you think about those feminists who ended up as SAH parents in spite of their best intentions. (Of course: that’s MY story. Insert wry grin.) Yes, I _wanted_ to spend this time with my kids. I wanted it badly enough to trade off some degree of future career advancement. But I wouldn’t have had to trade off as much if my husband, and our male cohort, also wanted to spend more time with their kids, wanted it enough to demand better work-family employment conditions.
    I’m not excusing my choices, nor do I defend them as feminist choices. I’m at home with my kids, I’m willing to make these trade-offs, but I don’t consider my current life part of the feminist vanguard. Quite the contrary.
    On the other hand, I think we could talk a lot more about where the feminist vanguard is. If you look at labor unions, the civil rights movement, or even the movement for better childcare, it’s clear that leadership does come from places other than the college-educated white middle-class group.
    I’ve been thinking in circles on these issues for quite a few days. I keep coming back to: once again, it’s the women’s fault. And to bounce off of Bitch PhD wrote (in the context of changing names: why should we do it for family cohesion, implying that we’re responsible for that): why is Hirschman so quick to fall into the assumption that this is a women’s-only fight? Feminism won’t succeed, it seems to me, if it doesn’t become a movement of people with penises AND vaginas.
    Hirschman seems to give up on that possibility. We’ll never make men feminists, in the sense of converting them to the idea that family and work roles should not be divided by sex or gender, so we might as well give up and get as much political and economic power as we can. Never mind the absence of a roadmap for how that power would convert men to feminism. We might get better childcare and maternity leave for women, after all, but those would still be seen by the men as women’s benefits. Because even with Hirschman’s plan, we’re still acting as if women must bear all the burden of adjustement and change.

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73. Googling Linda Hirshman, I found an interesting review of her book about women and law. The reviewer’s comments shine, I think, some revealing light on Hirshman’s attitude to women in general. It’s not just “stay-at-home brides” she dislikes: it’s women who, even while studying law, are not displaying the correct attitude to their careers.
    The reviewer wrote: “The desires [Hirshman] found instead sound pretty reasonable to me, but Hirshman lists them with a tone of distinct disapproval: “They wanted to be left alone in class rather than have to defend their answers in a high-pressure exchange, to have time for socializing rather than edit the law review, and to work in public interest jobs, as union-side labor lawyers, or in firms that don’t require ‘more than forty hours’ a week.” (6)? In what seemed to me a highly uncharitable view of her fellow women, Hirshman says: “I wonder how many of the idealistic public interest students I interviewed are actually thinking their boyfriends or husbands will fill the money bill, although they’d be reluctant to admit it.”
    http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/lawbooks/revfeb00.htmme
    Funny how Hirshman speculates WHAT these women might be thinking – without bothering to ask them!

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74. If you look at labor unions, the civil rights movement, or even the movement for better childcare, it’s clear that leadership does come from places other than the college-educated white middle-class group.
    Right.
    But in most of those cases, didn’t change come from within the group that was getting the short end of the stick, and usually from the more privileged members of that group? Weren’t there also usually people in the disadvantaged group who had made their peace with the situation and didn’t want to rock the boat?
    “Scab” is not exactly term of endearment, nor is “Uncle Tom”.

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75. Jake, from my way of looking at it, when women demand more family-friendly workplaces, it’s the men who function as the scabs. It’s the men who stand waiting to take the jobs and accept the job conditions that the women won’t accept on the current terms.
    Of course, those men are frequently married to non-feminist women, or women who compromised their feminism for other things. THOSE women would be the Uncle Toms, I presume? And perhaps we are.
    I think it’s important at this point to highlight how many feminist women have stayed in the workplace even as they feel they’re losing the work-family fight, and how many more feminist women have decided not to have children because they don’t care about that fight. Lots of women make lots of different choices, and in my world, very few feminist women abandon feminism and pursue and Ozzie-and-Harriet existence. Of course, I also meet quite a lot of women who don’t consider themselves feminists. But not a lot of them went to law school, or went after even a liberal-arts grad degree.

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76. If I had a daughter who only wanted money and power and had no imagination or creativity and had no need for the comfort of others, I would give her exactly the same advice. In fact, I would even be stricter. I would tell her to have zero children. I would tell her to never get married, but to have several lovers. Harvard business school all the way.
    Because we all know that only women with no creativity or any social skills or any desire for closeness whatsoever — inhuman robots, in other words — are totally fulfilled by an influential career.
    Pleased to meet you — I’m the evil ballbusting robot you’re all content to flog in front of each other’s eyes like the icky thing you don’t want to be. “I like my job, but I’m not like one of those icky, unfeminine kidless career bots!”
    “I’m a SAHM! I’m not one of those icky, scary, unfeminine career bots!”
    It might surprise you to know that I spin, tat, quilt, and crochet, that I’m a sold artist, that I have opted to learn to speak a third language on my own, and am currently studying medieval strict-meter Celtic poetry. I’m a pianist and a published fiction writer.
    But as a career woman with no imagination or creativity, and no need for comfort, I guess none of that counts. How goddamned dare you characterize me and women like me as emotionless robots. It’s so feminist to imply that a woman can either achieve in the world at large only if she has no emotions whatsoever. Go ahead and achieve dear, but you’re going to die a lonely old maid if you do!
    I don’t doubt that that myth can be very comforting to women who regret their life choices. I might never have gotten that Master’s degree, but all those women are mannish, ugly freaks with no emotions anyhow. Whatever gets you through the night.
    LMYC: It’s only “welfare” in your mind because in your mind — and in most peoples’ — mothering is worthless in the literal “get a paycheck” and the nonliteral “get the benefit of prestige from society” senses.
    No, it’s welfare because as much as you might despise the capitalist system, you are still depending on it — by allowing a man to take on the moral stain of making money in that system. NONE of the women in my family have ever had that option; upper and middle class white women are all acting like being a working mother is a brand-new thing,that no woman with kids has ever had to work before. PLENTY of women with jobs also raise their kids, and plenty of women without kids cook and clean as much as a SAHM does. I don’t see anyone telling me I should get paid for doing my own laundry.

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77. I was responding to Hirshman who was demanding of women that they strive not just for careers, but for high powered careers. Around here, in the NYC area, that means an 80 hour week. Easy. Probably more. I’ve got friends doing it, and its really tough. It means no hobbies and no breaks. And to do it right, you do have to follow Hirshman’s rules.
    Some love it and some hate it. I just think that different people have different preferences. High powered careers aren’t for everyone.

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78. LMYC,
    I’m trying to follow you, truly, but you’re diving in and out of sarcasm too quickly. Unclench a little! I think you’re saying something interesting, then I suspect I’m getting the wrong end, possibly.
    However, you wrote unambiguously: “plenty of women without kids cook and clean as much as a SAHM does.”
    What???

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79. THOSE women would be the Uncle Toms, I presume? And perhaps we are.
    I should caveat that I find people calling other people Uncle Toms or scabs to be profoundly distasteful. Nothing says you have to fight every fight someone wants you to, or that you’re a bad person if you don’t.
    But – for those who are fighting the fight… they want more solidarity among women. They want to be able to say “I’m not doing the housework, period” and not have their mates say “fine, I’ll go find someone else who will.” They need other people to join them, and shaming is one way to do that. It worked for the labor movement, right?
    I think that they’re incorrect when they say that if someone quits their job to do housework you’re a bad woman, but think that it’s reasonable for them to say that they’re a bad feminist, and absolutely correct to say that they aren’t helping the feminist cause as much as they could and request that they think about what could be different.

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80. uh, nobody is quitting their jobs to do housework. They’re quitting their jobs to take care of the kids, because they think it is important. Or they are quitting their jobs, because managing two 80 hour jobs is hard. Or they are quitting their jobs, because their job won’t let them stay home when their kid is sick. Or they are quitting their jobs, but setting themselves up as a consultant from home. Or they are quitting their job, because they really always hated their job.
    If feminism means working full time, then quitting is letting down the movement. It’s just not how I define feminism.

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81. LMYC:
    This debate is about the Linda Hirshman piece, and her very long and stringent list of “rules” for educated women. Please read her piece and other people’s comments on it carefully! What Laura and many others have criticized about the piece is that Hirshman is trying to steer women away from creative, liberal arts, and non-profit work and into top corporate positions, and if we don’t comply, we are letting womankind down. So Hirshman is actually condemning about 80 or 90% of educated women, both working AND sahm. That is what many of us dislike Hirshman’s piece.

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82. Linda Hirshman makes the mistake of identifying monetary success with safety, happiness, and personal fulfillment far too narrowly.
    Chava

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83. Motherhood and work, today

    Back in September there was a blogoflap (my neologism for flap in the blogosphere) about a New York Times article “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood.” (See two posts by Kieran Healey at Crooked Timber, and…

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