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.