Let’s have no more talk about the evils of high heels when this evil is going on in the world. Girls as young as 11 are getting married off to much older men in places like Afghanistan. “About 1 in 7 girls in the developing world (excluding China) gets married before her 15th birthday, according to analyses done by the Population Council, an international research group”.
More on the gender gap in college.
Two more responses to Linda Hirshman. The first by Katha Pollitt who writes,
Hirshman’s weakness is her assumption that the social problem of women’s inequality can be solved if enough women make the right individual decisions. She mocks “the same old public day-care business that has gone nowhere since 1972.” But really, isn’t the stay-home vogue at bottom a response to the fact that society has failed to adapt to working mothers? Isn’t choice feminism itself a way of dealing with the whole complex range of resistance to women’s equality, by throwing up your hands and saying, Let each woman make her own tradeoffs? Unlike Flanagan, who wants women to give up the struggle, Hirshman wants individual women to fight harder and smarter, and that’s great. But it only goes so far. If better personal decisions could bring about gender equality, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.
I thought that Pollitt got Flanagan totally wrong. Flanagan, at least in her earlier writings, was very proud of herself for have a job. Still, Pollitt makes an excellent point about the problems with Hirshman. It’s not all about personal decisions.
Cynthia Whitfield, a regular reader, also has a published response to Hirshman.
Apt. 11d 
Hirshman’s claim that women are encouraged to stay home is downright comical. Where does she see evidence of this? There are more books on the market and articles in magazines about employed mothers than at-home moms.
Woah, stellar reasoning. That must explain why there’s a section marked “gay literature” at my bookstore, but not one marked “straight literature” — because being gay is more socially acceptable.
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Even more stellar reasoning from the “Gender Gap in College” article, explaining why Dickinson College uses affirmative action to increase the percentages of men:
“When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women,” said Joyce Bylander, associate provost. “When men were so highly prized that they could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators. It was an unhealthy atmosphere for women.”
One wonders if “I went to a majority-female college” will become an acceptable defense for serial rapists.
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Richard, I agree that Bylander’s remark was among the more stunningly stupid things I’ve read lately.
And, Laura, thank you for the link to Cynthia Whitfield’s excellent response to Hirshman. Thinking about it, Hirshman isn’t entirely wrong – women do have to prepare for the possibility that their husbands won’t always be around to or able to support them, and there still is a “domestic glass ceiling” which stymies women’s progress.
Yet. Hirshman’s philistinism really gets my goat. “Make money! Make LOTS of money! Executives rule, teachers drool!” Mmm-hmm. If all the teachers, police officers, firefighters and other underpaid workers who really are the backbone of our society walked off the job for a day or two we’d find out who really was important.
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K’s response makes no sense. The percentages of gay to straight men and women are quite different. More than half of all women with children under one stay home full-time, and more than a third officially stay home with children under 6, with many more considering themselves at home moms than are counted by the Department of Labor. That’s because women who make any money during the year are included in “working moms”, including women who work very part-time, seasonally, just a few hours in a family business, in a home-based business, or like me, very part-time as a writer. There are not a comparable number of gay to straight people, so the comparison just doesn’t work. And what about the rest of the article? If that’s the only thing you found offense to (and that offense makes no sense), then thanks so much!
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I should mention that I’ve been out of town and just saw K’s remarks. I’d like to add there are many reasons I say at-home moms don’t get the good press– (I didn’t have enough space in my original column): Moms at home are routinely negatively protrayed in the media — look at Stepford Wives and Desperate Housewives, references to June Cleaver even though at-home moms have evolved a great deal since then. And why do we call at-home moms housewives — do we call employed married women officewives? As a black at-home mom I know negative stereotypes when I see them, and negative at-home mom sterotypes far outnumber negative employed mother stereotypes — there’s not enough room here to explore it fully, but trust me, once you are sensitized, you will see it. Once no one thought there was a problem with the stereotype of the dumb, shuffling black person until blacks objected, and pointed out that most blacks did not fit this stereotype. Until at-home moms speak up, the media and people like Hirshman will think it’s okay to demean and dismiss at-home moms. I’m encouraging other at-home moms to speak up.
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