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Friends of
the MMO wrote to say they were looking forward to reading my comments on Linda
Hirshman's essay on the "opt out" controversy (Homeward
Bound, The American Prospect, 21.nov.05). The web is already teeming with critiques of the article, but I hate
to disappoint. Based on her interviews with 30 or so ultra-privileged
women for a proposed book on "marriage and feminism,"
Hirshman concludes the scarcity of women in corporate and political
leadership relates to the striking proportion (by Hirshman's estimate,
fully 50 percent) of Ivy League-educated wives and mothers who are
"letting their careers slide to tend the home fires."
Feminists, she argues, must take a more judgmental stance toward
high-potential women who missed the memo that public achievement is
more important than raising families.
Hirshman's dispassionate analysis of child-rearing as a shameful
waste of human capital -- and her uncompromising (yet unoriginal)
playbook for putting women on top -- managed to offend just about
everyone. Women who never plan to marry or become mothers objected
to Hirshman's proposition that the über-elite women she studied
-- selected because their wedding announcements appeared in the
"Sunday Styles" section of the New York Times -- are the "logical heirs of feminism," or those most
likely to use their power to overturn the status quo. Mothers, feminist
and otherwise, were outraged by her pronouncement that "child
rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting" and interferes
with women's full flourishing. Many bristled at Hirshman's contention
that after thirty years of feminist progress, gender inequality
in and outside the workplace is largely a product of women's lack
of focus. Others were put off by Hirshman's suggestion that altruism
is for suckers, and the only kind of self-actualization that really
counts involves maximizing one's professional prestige and earning
potential. (Examples of the range of criticism that ripped through
the feminist blogosphere when Hirshman's article first appeared
are archived on Alas,
A Blog.)
As mentioned in previous public comments, I had a long and interesting
phone call with Hirshman when she was drafting her article. What
stands out from that conversation was Hirshman's enthusiasm about
how fun and exciting it was to excel in her career, her pride in
her professional accomplishments, and how discouraged she was that
today's younger women seem indifferent to the joys of working hard
to get ahead -- although she did admit changes in the professional
workplace over the last 15 years make going for the brass ring less
attractive to anyone who wants a personal life. And while I disagree
with Hirshman's basic premise: women bear greater responsibility
for closing the gender gap at the office and at home; remaining
barriers to women's success in public life are mostly of their own
making; business and government have no incentive to relieve economic
and time pressures on working families; the quickest fix for
the women's leadership problem is training young women to make more
strategic choices about education, careers and childbearing -- we
do see eye-to-eye on other issues.
I agree, for example, "the belief that women are responsible
for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by workplace
feminism." Detractors of "workplace feminism" say
it failed to factor in the realities of caregiving, but its fatal
weakness was optimism. It's actually a little embarrassing to think
how easily we were persuaded that once qualified women had a chance
to prove their mettle in the professional and skilled labor force,
the bastions of male privilege would come tumbling down. (No such
luck.) Yet it's hard to see how Hirshman's proposed solution is
vastly different from the well-worn doctrine that the secret to
women's success is job preparation, occupational desegregation and
economic empowerment.
I also agree that mothers sometimes soothe the discomforts of their
inequality by falling back on the motherhood mystique, particularly
with the pep talk "being a mother is one of the most important
jobs in the world," and the tiresome fiction that men are hopelessly
unreliable when it comes to child care and housekeeping. (If you
don't believe me, check out Rebecca
Traister's interview with the co-founder of Total 180,
a perky new magazine for the professional woman turned at-home mom.
The magazine's editors trade on the title "CHO" -- Chief
Household Officer -- because "when women leave the workforce,
you feel like you've lost your identity," and apparently having
a fake honorific of one's own eases the pain.) If liberal feminism
failed -- and I'm not saying it has -- its greatest lapse was the
inability to invent an appealing language to challenge conventional
narratives of gender, work and family in everyday life, or to recognize
that one was needed. But there's also substantive evidence that
gender roles in the family -- and the mindset that professional
achievement is the one true path to full human flourishing -- have
changed more than Hirshman lets on, especially among younger couples
of garden-variety privilege. If Hirshman intends to write a book
on marriage and feminism, she ought to spend more time mingling
with the rank and file.
I positively applaud Hirshman when she writes: "Like the right
to work and the right to vote, the right to have a flourishing life
that includes but is not limited to family cannot be addressed by
the language of choice." The freedom to choose -- which positions
women not as self-determined individuals with inalienable rights,
but as informed consumers in a world of market-driven options --
is far too murky and diluted a claim when the problem at hand is
a shortage of social justice.
Beyond that -- well, nobody likes to be told she's living a "lesser
life" because she prioritized child-rearing over career-building
for a few years, or that her behavior is bad for her, "bad
for society," and "tarnishes every female with the knowledge
that she is almost never going to be a ruler." That the process
of caring for others may lead to self-awareness -- self-awareness
which can spark individual growth and development -- is not in Hirsman's
realm of possibilities. Frankly, feminism has been around this block
before, and it estranged many women with egalitarian sensibilities
from the cause.
Which may not be troubling to Hirshman, since she seems to delight
in taking an unpopular position. In a
follow-up article on women who squander their academic careers,
she gleefully reports: "When my American Prospect article was
linked over to some of the many Stay at Home Mom Web sites, it generated
a lot of commentary like 'fuck you,' 'you make me want to vomit,'
'oh, puhleeze,' 'she's only looking for a book contract,' and similar
well-reasoned responses." I won't be an apologist for Hirshman,
but I think once the defensiveness dies down, we need to renew the
dialog on motherhood and women's leadership. As Hirshman notes,
individual choices aren't made in a vacuum, and -- whether we like
it or not -- the decisions mothers make about cutting back on paid
work do have an impact on employers' perceptions of other women
workers. But rather than getting embroiled in another blame-fest,
I hope we can come up with a more sympathetic articulation of the
nature of the problem and how to solve it.
I have more to say about Linda Hirshman, but first I'd like to talk about robots.
I've noticed
that when science fiction writers and filmmakers imagine a robotic
future (in stories and films such as A.I., I, Robot and Bladerunner, for example), they invariably envision
a world where robots and androids specialize in three of the most
durable social functions: sex work, soldiering and child care. The
possibility we will one day have the technical know-how to manufacture
an artificial race of life-sized, super-interactive sex toys is
fascinating, but the subtext is that science and technology will
eventually liberate flesh-and-blood folk from menial servitude.
That this new world order might involve mass production of an underclass
of machines that look, reason and act like real people is one of
the central moral tensions of such futuristic fables. That child
care is grouped with sex work among the dangerous, degrading and
low-status labor we'll presumably hand off to the humanoid set at
some future date seems especially salient, since both are linked
to women's reproductive capacity and, until better days, are predominantly
women's work.
The idea that "the
family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks
-- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities
for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or
the government" did not originate with Linda Hirshman, nor does it end with her. Its deepest roots are in the Western philosophies
that nourish the ideals of democratic societies, but in the late
1960s and early 1970s, radical feminists compared housewifery to
prostitution, proclaimed that women could only be liberated if they
disconnected from their biological and social roles in human reproduction,
and sought to abolish traditional family forms. One of the reasons
radical feminism never gained traction -- and liberal feminism did
-- is that even though radical feminists identified bearing and
caring for children as the source of women's oppression rather than
their glory, they generally rejected the possibility that marriage
and mothering could have authentic value in women's lives. So perhaps
the overriding problem is that the most flexible political philosophies
at our disposal are still too androcentric to help us theorize a
world where women's liberty and equality would not depend on communal
living, artificial wombs or nannybots.
In the words of psychologist
Jean Baker Miller:
Humanity has
been held to a limited and distorted view of itself -- from its
interpretation of the most intimate personal emotions to its grandest
visions of human possibilities -- precisely by the virtue of its
subordination of women.
Until recently,
"mankind's" understandings have been the only understandings
generally available to us. As other perceptions arise -- precisely
those perceptions that men, because of their dominant position,
could not perceive -- the total vision of human possibilities
enlarges and is transformed. The old is severely challenged.
Women have
been in a subservient position, in many ways like that of a subservient
class or caste. Thus it is necessary to first look at women as
"unequals" or subordinates. But it is immediately apparent
too, that women's position cannot be understood solely in terms
of inequality. An even more complex dynamic follows. (Toward
a New Psychology of Women, 1976.)
The paradox of modern
feminism is that we've waffled between the view that motherhood
is the most important job in the world, and the conviction that
the family offers fewer opportunities for full human flourishing
-- which is why we can understand both extremes as valid
positions, even when experience belies the dogma. What we need is
a theory or an agenda capable of embodying the "complex dynamic"
Miller speaks of -- which is not that men's motivations are typically
more clear-headed and results-oriented and ambitious women ought
to follow their lead, or that women's outlook is naturally more
relational and mothers' family work should be valued for its own
sake and what it adds to the society.
A better starting point might look something like this:
All men and women
are rational actors situated in a relational world, and should fully
share all the opportunities and responsibilities of social life.
In other words, we need
something truly radical -- not just a fusion or a reconfiguration
of known ideologies, but a serious reworking of how we think about
men's and women's reproductive and economic roles and how they could
share the world and all the work in it. Something a little more
catchy than "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."
Since very few mothers and fathers will ever have access to "money,
power and honor" on Hirshman's terms, I suggest we concentrate
on the values of freedom, equality and justice.
There are all sorts of
moving parts to this debate, some of which I've addressed in earlier
commentaries, others I plan to tackle as time goes on. But as
a gesture of solidarity to my underachieving sisters everywhere,
I'll add this final thought: Women who want to lead, should lead
-- and we must make it more possible for them to step into their
potential. But most of us will settle for leaving the world a little
better than we found it.
mmo : december
2005
Judith
Stadtman Tucker is the founder and editor of the
Mothers Movement Online.
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