Yes, It Continues, My Analysis of Part II
Section II of Linda Hirshman’s “Homeward Bound” article is entitled “The Failure of Choice Feminism” and I am sure is the source of most of the anger from the stay-at-home mother crowd. However, I do not think she is being controversial when she states:
Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed” because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.
Again, I agree. Everywhere I have worked, I have watched older men struggle with the socially correct way to interact with female colleagues. Some hold it in for a while, and then eventually blow, like when one of my bosses asked a potential future employee if she was planning to have kids any time soon (she didn’t get the job for other reasons, but she could have sued that company’s pants off, although apparently it only had a pair of running shorts left because it went out of business shortly after the incident). At my last job, I was often in the position of reviewing the work of four older (50 to 60 year-old) men. While I was merely performing my duty as a reviewer when I marked up their drafts and attached a list of questions, I could tell from the muttering that they sometimes thought I had “overstepped my bounds.” One other worthless coworker once brought me a piece of paper on which he had scrawled something that he wanted added to a report. I read it and said “Okay, type it up and send it to me,” which left him absolutely flabbergasted. Obviously he felt that since I was younger and female, I should type it up for him.
Right before our son was born, the HP and I met with a financial planner who was showing us all sorts of charts and figures of what we needed to save and how much insurance we needed, etc., etc. I finally stopped him and said “These projections don’t make any allowance for my income.” He said to me “Wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to work again?” I said to him “No, I can’t wait to go back to work when the kids are bigger.” He looked at me for a minute and went back to his spiel. I didn’t insist that he recalculate everything, mainly because I didn’t want to have to see him again. The worst part of the incident was that he was not an old man, he was my age, and he thought I should aspire to a life of leisure. Something is not right there.
I’m sure that the anger about this article started brewing at the end of this section, where Ms. Hirshman states “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.’”
Where do I go with this one? I wholeheartedly agree that housekeeping is indeed not interesting or socially validated and it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, etc. A lot of the parts of child-rearing are interesting but a lot of them are drudgery. Childrearing is also not really socially validated, because if it was, more men would want to do it (although I don’t think social validation is the reason that women want to do their own child-rearing; it is certainly not the reason I do it). I also agree that it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, but I don’t think women who want to do these things should be belittled. Nevertheless, one person’s opinion on what those tasks are worth is just that, one person’s opinion. I won’t go red in the face trying to change this woman’s mind.
I’m sure that the anger about this article reached its white hot intensity with the following statement, “[these women] all think they are ‘choosing’ their gendered lives. They don’t know that feminism, in collusion with traditional society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose.” For a thesis, that sentence seems a little glib. Anyone unfortunate enough to have known me when Aislinn was 9 weeks old (and I had decided I couldn’t put her into full-time day care) was subjected to an absolutely endless explanation of why I was going back to work part time. I spent days and nights trying to find a way to justify myself to all the working women I knew, to my parents who had paid for my education, and to myself, because I had so much ambition that it was hard to put it aside. I used up hours of the lives of everyone I knew, trying to explain what I was doing and why I thought I was doing the right thing. No one reacted with anything other than support or suggestions about how I could get the most out of my professional life while still spending time with the baby. To say that my current role was “passed on” to me and I that cheerily took it on like a Stepford wife without any sort of introspection is insulting to me, untrue, and a crock.
Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed” because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.
Again, I agree. Everywhere I have worked, I have watched older men struggle with the socially correct way to interact with female colleagues. Some hold it in for a while, and then eventually blow, like when one of my bosses asked a potential future employee if she was planning to have kids any time soon (she didn’t get the job for other reasons, but she could have sued that company’s pants off, although apparently it only had a pair of running shorts left because it went out of business shortly after the incident). At my last job, I was often in the position of reviewing the work of four older (50 to 60 year-old) men. While I was merely performing my duty as a reviewer when I marked up their drafts and attached a list of questions, I could tell from the muttering that they sometimes thought I had “overstepped my bounds.” One other worthless coworker once brought me a piece of paper on which he had scrawled something that he wanted added to a report. I read it and said “Okay, type it up and send it to me,” which left him absolutely flabbergasted. Obviously he felt that since I was younger and female, I should type it up for him.
Right before our son was born, the HP and I met with a financial planner who was showing us all sorts of charts and figures of what we needed to save and how much insurance we needed, etc., etc. I finally stopped him and said “These projections don’t make any allowance for my income.” He said to me “Wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to work again?” I said to him “No, I can’t wait to go back to work when the kids are bigger.” He looked at me for a minute and went back to his spiel. I didn’t insist that he recalculate everything, mainly because I didn’t want to have to see him again. The worst part of the incident was that he was not an old man, he was my age, and he thought I should aspire to a life of leisure. Something is not right there.
I’m sure that the anger about this article started brewing at the end of this section, where Ms. Hirshman states “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.’”
Where do I go with this one? I wholeheartedly agree that housekeeping is indeed not interesting or socially validated and it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, etc. A lot of the parts of child-rearing are interesting but a lot of them are drudgery. Childrearing is also not really socially validated, because if it was, more men would want to do it (although I don’t think social validation is the reason that women want to do their own child-rearing; it is certainly not the reason I do it). I also agree that it should not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender, but I don’t think women who want to do these things should be belittled. Nevertheless, one person’s opinion on what those tasks are worth is just that, one person’s opinion. I won’t go red in the face trying to change this woman’s mind.
I’m sure that the anger about this article reached its white hot intensity with the following statement, “[these women] all think they are ‘choosing’ their gendered lives. They don’t know that feminism, in collusion with traditional society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose.” For a thesis, that sentence seems a little glib. Anyone unfortunate enough to have known me when Aislinn was 9 weeks old (and I had decided I couldn’t put her into full-time day care) was subjected to an absolutely endless explanation of why I was going back to work part time. I spent days and nights trying to find a way to justify myself to all the working women I knew, to my parents who had paid for my education, and to myself, because I had so much ambition that it was hard to put it aside. I used up hours of the lives of everyone I knew, trying to explain what I was doing and why I thought I was doing the right thing. No one reacted with anything other than support or suggestions about how I could get the most out of my professional life while still spending time with the baby. To say that my current role was “passed on” to me and I that cheerily took it on like a Stepford wife without any sort of introspection is insulting to me, untrue, and a crock.
posted by Shannon at 9:16 PM
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