Megan O’Rourke has a very good take on Linda Hirshman’s new book:
But—though I almost hate to say it—buried beneath Hirshman’s overblown rhetoric is a useful idea, now set out in a short book titled Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World: namely, that our obsession with choice prevents us from asking tough questions about how to achieve further equality. “Deafened by choice, here’s the moral analysis these women never heard,” she says: Until there is more equity in the cultural norms for child-rearing and household tasks, each time a woman decides to “opt out” she is making a political decision that reinforces an already ingrained social inequality. Women who believe otherwise suffer from a mixture of false consciousness and impractical idealism. It’s when Hirshman is at her most radical—when she sets aside the language of personal fulfillment in favor of injunctions about the collective good—that she is at her most valuable. I would never write this book, but I’m glad somebody did.
Yes.
I’m with O’Rourke on this: I don’t agree with everything that Linda Hirshman is saying, but I’m sure glad that she’s saying it.
The reason all this matters, Hirshman persuasively argues, is that choice feminism creates a “mutually reinforcing” cycle. Affluent and well-educated men rarely leave the workforce (and when they do, it’s usually to return to school or start a business); a portion of affluent and well-educated women do opt out (and when they do, it’s almost exclusively to raise children). When these women choose to devote their skills to childcare rather than to the workplace, they are “perpetuating a mostly male ruling class”—precisely the type unlikely to help make the case for more flexible work arrangements that would allow more women back into the workforce. The result is disempowering for less-well-off women, who have fewer public female role models, and for the opt-outers themselves, who find it hard to re-enter the work place and, if divorced, may have to depend on their husbands for support. None of this, Hirshman points out, dovetails with the aims of feminism.
This is an important conversation to have. Yes, women should make individual choices, but we don’t get to ignore the fact that those choices aren’t made in a vacuum, and they do affect other women.
It is in forcing us to consider the implications of all this that Hirshman’s book is most interesting: If you are a woman who is committed to gender equality, who doesn’t believe that a woman’s place is necessarily in the home, she argues, then you have to think about how your choices shape the collective good. Her stubborn insistence is refreshing. Unlike others, she is willing to come out and say, in no uncertain terms, that the luxury of making our own decisions as if they had no larger implications isn’t ethical at this point in time. If that makes feminism unpopular, so be it; but shying away from persistent inequality by invoking the language of “choice,” she observes, is hardly feminism. If you buy her argument, then even if you find it hard to leave your baby at home, and even if you find the workplace sometimes less-than-fulfilling, it’s important—to society as a whole—that you work. This sounds extreme, but of course it’s the lesson every man is taught when he’s a boy: Your responsibility to society—the way to become an adult—is to work.
Emphasis mine. It is funny how, if this book was directed at men, no one would bat an eye. Because men working is an assumption.
Whatever the flaws and limitations of this book—and they are very real—it’s liberating to be told to think as calculatingly as men do about how to lead your life as a parent and an employee. The essence of the mommy wars in recent years has been the assumption that the woman who stays at home does so for selfless reasons, invoking the good of the children, future leaders of our country. But Hirshman flips the terms of debate, reminding us that women who work aren’t being selfish: even 40 years after the feminist revolution, educated working women, especially those with top-level jobs, are still pioneers. Women have the right to stick up for their own careers, not just for reasons of personal fulfillment but for reasons of social necessity. Praising the man who comes home at 6, while worrying about a mother who has part-time job, is simple sexism. And any mother who sniffily says to another that she can tell which kids are in day care and which aren’t should be “shown the door,” as Hirshman puts it. Until those who care about equality recognize that it will take collective action to create further change, the kinds of policy amendments most women want to see won’t take place, and women will continue doing 70 percent of the housework—while men continue to do less housework after marriage than they did as bachelors.
Yes, yes, yes. Read the whole article.
Related: Why Linda Hirshman doesn’t understand Betty Friedan.