Zatera Ul

Linda Hirshman is so far out there that even many feminists don’t agree with her. In this article, she chronicles some of the reactions she’s gotten:

Everybody started hating Linda, apparently, when I published an article in the progressive magazine the American Prospect last December, saying that women who quit their jobs to stay home with their children were making a mistake. Worse, I said that the tasks of housekeeping and child rearing were not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings. They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings. Oh, and by the way, where were the dads when all this household labor was being distributed? Maybe the thickest glass ceiling, I wrote, is at home.

As Cathy Young has written, saying that housework and childrearing are menial and demeaning is probably not the best way to motivate husbands to share in them equally. Especially the husbands who are already working 60 hours a week.

IWF’s Inkwell has a good summary, with commentary:

Instead of “choice” feminism, Hirshman believes in no-choice feminism. Every woman should marshal herself into a career, and then stay there for life. She should allow herself exactly one child, no more, so the little ones’ insatiable demands won’t distract her from that briefcase full of Very Important Papers. Taking care of the house? Hey, just let it get dirty enough, and your husband will pitch in and do that elusive 50 percent of housework that feminists have been trying to badger men to do since the dawn of feminism.

Naturally, readers weren’t wild about these propositions. especially female readers, especially female readers who thought that the compromises they’d worked out between career and family suited them fine. They recoiled. They wrote refutations. They said mean, cruel things about her on the Internet. One of them even used the F-word!

How dare they? The cows! Didn’t they know that she, the great Linda R. Hirshman, is a philosopher, a former professor at Brandeis, while they were merely, in Hirshman’s own inimitable words in the Washington Post….”the mommy bloggers.”

The vehemence of the “mommy-blogger” and conservative response to Hirshman seems to disprove her assertion that mother-work is not honored. Actually, in some circles (which Hirshman later dismisses as patriarchal fundamentalist kooks) being a full-time mother is quite valued. As my pastor noted last week in the sermon, though, in the Bible both men and women worked very hard, in and out of the home. Still, I don’t think it was chance that gave women the wombs and the breasts.

Didn’t Spiderman say something about “Greater power, greater responsibility”? He wasn’t just talking about the fun jobs. One of my greatest gifts is that I get as much satisfaction and sense of accomplishment from vacuuming the house as I get from creating a new approach to a problem at work. In any case, Hirshman oversimplifies the challenges of housework–there’s physics going on all over the house. Just managing the entropy around here takes substantial energy and organizational ability. A great intellect isn’t strictly necessary, but on the other hand, it doesn’t hurt. She also, I strongly suspect, vastly underestimates the risks and rewards of childrearing. Perhaps she’s confusing the rewards and status of caring for your own home and children with those of caring for someone else’s; for me, the rewards of working for myself and my family are substantially greater than the paycheck and social recognition I would get if I were a cleaning lady or a daycare worker.

Hirshman claims that her stuff has found greater acceptance among working women, but that they’re just too busy to say so. That’s supposed to make the 60-hour-work-week-plus-daycare-shuffle sound attractive to me?

I’ve done some workload analysis as part of my job. One thing you see is that as workload increases beyond a manageable point, the worker starts dropping or skimping on the less important tasks. Hirshman’s solution is to drop housework and caring for children, to maintain Equality in the workplace and at home. Many women would rather drop the career or cut back for a while, to have a happier and saner home life. Beancounting the number of hours that you versus your husband spend on housework does not lead to either happiness or sanity; working together in love for the greater good of the family does.

Interestingly, Hirshman has three daughters, and is retired. Does she regret having the last two daughters?? Apparently it’s ok to not work full-time when you’re old and your nest is empty.