“Marry the slackers”
Dec 2, 2005 Feminism/Politics
That’s Laura’s advice on how to find a male partner who helps with the housework. It’s true — slackers have more time.
I didn’t mean to sound glib in my hurried response to the Hirshman fiasco when I said I didn’t feel like it had anything to do with me. I meant that literally. She’s hollering at elite women and I’m not elite. To me, it’s kinda like when someone uses me as an example of a Jew who chose not to circumcise. That’s crazy-nuts because I’m 1) a Jew married to a Christian; 2) a Jew whose Jewish father (my one immediate Jewish family member) never ever took me to shul; 3) a Jew who didn’t become Jewish until my son was four years old. Listen, if I’d had a bris, no one would have shown up. Well, they would have but they would have all looked awkward and confused and it wouldn’t have been much of a celebration. Which is to say for me to say no to circumcision was easy but saying yes would have been hard.
In the same way, it was much easier for me to come home and be a housewife for these reasons:
1. My feminist mother supported this as a feminist choice;
2. All the in-the-trenches feminists with whom I worked (i.e., the women making seven bucks an hour at the shelter) supported this as a feminist choice;
3. I was walking away from a job without real career opportunities;
4. I didn’t have an impressive degree with the accompanying obligations;
5. I really really wanted to be home with my baby.
I can see that for the “elite” it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame. I imagine the expectations are really different for women whose wedding announcements show up in the New York Times. I have no idea what those expectations might be but I imagine shrugging them off would be as challenging as an Orthodox Jew trying to talk her parents and inlaws out of a bris for their first grandson.
Where Hirshman’s argument falls short for me is that she lays the “failure” of feminism at the feet of these elite women instead of at the feet of the male policymakers who hold those powerful positions in corporations and government. Of course, that’s kind of pie in the sky, isn’t it? To ask the men in power to give away some of their power? Not very realistic.
I don’t know much about corporate America. What little I know about the business world is from growing up watching my dad run sales meetings and shout from podiums at conventions about “Visualize Success” and “Ordain Your Destiny.” From my vantage point (peeking from under a table in the back of the room) corporate America looked pretty lousy. All these men in suits hollering themselves horse and desperate to sell more More MORE. Years later I saw Glengary Glen Ross and boy was it familiar. All that desperate bravado. All those men talking about their balls.
That watch costs more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that’s who I am, and you’re nothing. Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here - close! You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can’t take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a sit? You don’t like it, leave.
I didn’t want that. I didn’t want a husband who wanted that. (Quick aside: The second or third time my dad met Brett he started ranting to him about sales. Get into sales, he told him. “There’s nothing like knowing your family’s going to go hungry to make you get out there and hustle!” he said. I leaned in from the backseat of the car — the two men in front, natch — and said, “I’m going to marry this man because he’s nothing like you, Dad. For me, that’s a plus.”)
Hirshman’s right that we need elite women to get in there and volley with Donald Trump but truth be told, I wonder how often corporate American changes those women so much that they don’t have a whole lot to give back to the rest of us feminists. (Anna Wintour, anyone?) It takes a woman of steel to live all that and somehow make it different for the next woman. I couldn’t live up to it and maybe those elite brides are also being realistic about their limitations.
It takes all of us, really. We make the changes we can while serving the values we hold most dear. I think the mistake feminism made is not recognizing that. And by feminism, again, I mean the institutional feminism of NOW and not the feminists I know and love in my own everyday world. Which leads to the next problem.
About five years ago I was thinking of going to grad school and I was thinking about getting my masters in an area where I could do early intervention. I looked at a couple of programs that might let me do that and one of them seemed like a pretty good fit. Then I found that one of the professors with whom I’d be taking a lot of classes had spent most of her academic career proving that stay-at-home motherhood was bad for women. Her conclusions were all about how it was a good idea to have kids in daycare and get moms back to work and pretty much I realized that this was not going to be a woman who was going to be supportive if I had to tweak my schedule to parent the way I wanted to parent.
I don’t fault her opinions and didn’t look hard enough at her studies to fault her research. But it’s an extreme example of part of the challenge in untangling the discussion. Women at home with their kids by definition aren’t creating policy, doing research (mostly — Miriam Peskowitz springs to mind), or fighting with corporate America to have their needs recognized. I mean, who works at NOW but women who are working. There’s not a stay-at-home mother contingent to remind them (NOW) that we’d like social security, too. (But our blogs — they’re important because they’re putting our at-home voices out there.)
No wonder, then, that Hirshman has tunnel vision. Who among us doesn’t? I’ve been googling her (she’s got a dead-in-the-water blog) and can’t find much about her personal life — not that I’m sure I need to know about her personal life — but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say, here’s a woman who’s been teaching for a long time. Here’s a woman who’s clearly dedicated to her students. She’s got a daughter (read the first entry in her blog) and so this is what I’m going to extrapolate:
1. Hirshman loves her daughter (she says so right in that entry);
2. Hirshman wants her daughter to inherit a better world and clearly she feels an obligation to help make that happen;
3. Hirshman likely is (understandably) frustrated that the feminist passion of the 70s has cooled to the point where young women say things like, “I don’t call myself a feminist” while enjoying the opportunities created for them by the feminist pioneers who came before;
4. Hirshman might also be frustrated to see brilliant young women come through her classroom and then get “lost” to motherhood;
5. Hirshman is sounding a call to arms born of frustration, commitment and love for her daughter and the rest of the female world.
I don’t know what Hirshman did when her own daughter was small. I don’t know if she didn’t feel a pull to be home and so doesn’t understand how for many of us it’s got little to do with giving in to the patriarchy and a lot to do with our hearts. I also don’t know if she did feel that pull and fought it because she believed her obligation was to serve the greater good and is holding elite women to the same standard. (Reminds me of Gilman’s Unnatural Mother story again.)
I still think she’s missing the boat. But on the bright side, her call to arms is certainly making some noise and also hopefully it’ll get Miriam’s book some well-deserved press, which will broaden the discussion. But like I said, she’s not talking about me — I don’t have the opportunity to disrupt the corporate ladder any old how — so mostly I feel like a spectator. Interested but only on the margins.
(This entry was inspired by Becca telling me that Hirshman had a point and I felt like I was missing it and so I marinated my brain in the discussion for a bit.)
December 2nd, 2005 at 12:00 pm
Glengarry and Death of a Salesman both depress to no end. I know those men (the failures not the successes) and I see how corporate America treats them. Really, we are supposed to want to be a part of that ? Men or women ? Giving up working for all those years to be home with my kids wasn’t a sacrifice, I had no work that compelled me the way those girls did. I do think class is a huge component of this discussion. No one around me measured whether or not I was a feminist based on how I was dismantling patriarchy through my work. Of course, several people think I am void of a brain because I was a SAHM.
December 2nd, 2005 at 12:49 pm
I suppose I am one of those ‘elite’ women they are discussing (what an awful term), although I don’t yet have children of my own. Does that make me qualified to have an opinion?
Anyway, the piece of this puzzle that I actually think is missing is the men. I’ve talked to a bunch of them in situations similar to my own, and asked them their thoughts are about all this. The general comments were:
1) Regardless of what Maureen Dowd thinks, all the men I talked to valued (and weren’t threatened by) intelligent and successful women. They figured if they’re going to spend the rest of their lives talking to us, we might as well have something to say! And they couldn’t figure out why a successful woman would bemoan the lack of interest of men who didn’t get that.
2) Regardless of who works and who stays home, pretty much all the men who wanted to have children cared about spending time with them and being part of their lives. They expected to be an active co-parent, and not just delegate those responsibilities to their wives. They talked about telecommuting at least some of the time, about having flexible hours, etc.
Anyway, in my mind the biggest ‘needs improvement’ of feminism (and I do think we’ve made significant progress) is in creating work atmospheres and opportunities for both genders that allow us to be more actively involved with our children. I certainly don’t think stay-at-home moms are betraying their gender, or whatever those articles seem to be implying. But I do think that it is a loss to the family when men aren’t given similar opportunities to be involved in their kids upbring - and a loss for the workplace when women’s ideas aren’t represented.
December 2nd, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Dawn, excellent post… but these conversations exhaust me. In my view, feminism is about getting rid of all the expectations that are placed on us (all of us, not just women) based solely on gender. In that sense, a stay-at-home mom who is there because she wants to be has made a feminist choice. A dad who goes to work so he can support his partner at home with the kids is making a feminist choice if he’s genuinely doing it because it feels right. And a mom who goes to work while her male partner stays home is a feminist choice too - it’s about taking gender out of the equation. I’m not trying to pretend that gender is irrelevant, or that biology has nothing whatsoever to do with who we may become. In my queer family, we still find that people have gendered expectations of our roles based on how we present ourselves. None of this means that an academic can’t mourn a loss when a promising student decides to spend more time parenting than in academia. But if the support is truly, genuinely there to allow people to do things, try things, and learn things regardless of our sex and gender, then that - as far as I’m concerned - is a feminist world.
December 2nd, 2005 at 2:23 pm
This argument exhausts me. I literally felt breathless after finishing her article because my mind was churning out point/counterpoint arguments for everything she said.
I guess I can kind of call myself the type of women she was profiling. When I got married at 26 my wedding could have been featured in the NYT if I had cared to submit it. I had an interesting sounding job (it wasn’t really that interesting but it sounded great on paper) in media and a couple of impressive sounding degrees. I also knew then that there was no way I was going to stay in that career because I wanted to have a family. And I will say that it was depressing for me to look around the office and have NO role modles of working mothers who were making it work. The job required very long hours, lots of travel (often at the last minute) and was just not at all conducive to having a satisfying family and personal life. I remember looking around the office once when I was about 24 and realizing that none of the 18 women in my office had kids. Only two were married. All the women in positions of power were single and child free well into their 40’s and 50’s. Not only did the younger women not have time for kids they didn’t even have time to date in order to meet a man to have kids with. But it was a vicious catch 22. There were no women there to fight for the type of changes that would have made it possible to stay there and raise a family. So in that sense I was nodding my head with Hirshman. There is a sort of safety in numbers. I might have been willing to stay and fight it out if I had known there would be other women also trying to make it work. If I had a boss with kids maybe I would have tried harder to imagine how I could do it too. But most of the women there tended to, if they got married, marry the power broker types who had enough money that they could stay home with kids and come back to work as freelancers once the kids were in school. If they married less successful men they would go for teacher certificates or get jobs in nonprofits where the demands and the prestige was lower. It was frighteningly predictable.
The reality is that “elite” jobs are not family friendly for anyone.
And those few women, and slightly more men, that stayed there and tried to make raising a family work around their job made tremendous sacrifices even if they had a partner at home full time. Maybe instead of saying more women should be willing to do that we should be arguing that less men should be.
Since my husband is not a power broker type I switched to a much less demanding and much less lucrative field shortly after getting married. I still don’t have kids but I at least can picture a way to fit a family into my work life. (Staying at home just isn’t an option for me since I live in the land of the 500,000 starter 1 bedroom and because of the field we both work in moving to a less expensive place isn’t an option either.) But there is no way I would get featured in the NYT Wedding section with my current, far less interesting sounding career. I didn’t drop out of the work force but I dropped out of the “elite” for sure.
But I really have to wonder if the advice about marrying much older or slacker men is really what she would tell her daughter? Screw love and ideals; just enter into a strategic marriage. Is it really feminist to switch from marrying someone because they can take care of you to marrying someone because they can take on the primary responsibility of caring for your kids? Is it feminist to say, we don’t need equal partnerships and work forces that support them we need male “wives”. I sure hope not.
December 2nd, 2005 at 2:47 pm
I just want to say one thing. When I decided to become a stay/work at home mom…I didnt give a shit how or if my choice would affect the “women’s movement”. I just cared how my choice would affect my children and their childhood. It has made things tougher financially at times…but the love and time my kids get from me, more than makes up for any 30-50 dollar toys they don’t get. My children are older now, 12 and 7. I’ve talked about getting a better paying job(I do in home daycare) and they beg me to keep doing what Im doing. I’ve told them it could mean more money to buy more things and they don’t care. They just want their mom taking them to school and home when they get out of school. That lets me know, I made the right choice for my family, whether someone else thinks so or not, is not my concern. I respect the women who make the choice to go back into the workforce while their children are young. It takes great courage and strength to do what they do. But the way I see it, women who stay at home and women who work out of the home…we balance eachother out. I think they are comforted to know that we are there keeping that option open for them, still making it acceptable for them to up and quit their jobs one day and become stay at home moms. Just as Im greatful for those women out there showing men that they can and will work just as hard, despite their sacrifices.
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:08 pm
I agree with Marisa and Amy that these conversations are exhausting, so congrats on getting such a long, well-thought post out there.
My main issue with current/modern feminism is the belief that if you’re not with them on every issue, you’re against them. I love the site ifeminists.com because it goes at it from a far more individualized, libertarian vantage point, but keeping up on some of the news there has actually made me more disenchanted with the NOWs of the world. I belive in my own ablility to decide what is best for myself, and even if an organization or government thinks they’re helping me out by telling me to do something else, I don’t appreciate that kind of help.
I’m not so sure I put that in the best way (as I said, these discussions frustrate me to the point that I don’t like to get involved), but I wanted to say thanks for putting it out there! Especially in such a way that I didn’t just immediately get frustrated and close the window.
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:13 pm
my thought is: who cares? What’s so great about corporateland anyway? Does anyone stop to think the problem is NOT that women are not working but that men still are? What a capitalist worshipping society we are indeed…
I think there’s a very basic unspoken and almost taboo piece that this “women who stay home are sell out” types don’t get:
Work Sucks.
Seriously.
I have met very, very, very few people who would continue to work (anything other than volunteer or their passion. and even then, on their own terms) if they were independently wealthy.
So my question is: What’s so great about work? Who cares?
December 2nd, 2005 at 4:54 pm
I guess I would sort of qualify as the “elite” — I am an attorney with degrees from big universities — though my family is not “fancy” in the EastCoast-WASPy sort of way.
Anyway, when my daughter was born I took 6 months maternity leave (about half paid), then went back to work 3 days per week. It is a very unusual situation in my industry but there are 2 other women attorneys (both moms) in my office who do it. And it is an example of how corporate America is, very slowly, adapting so that women who want to stay working when they have children have a choice beyond “all or nothing.” Which I think is a good thing.
In fact, it is the rate at which educated women are quitting their corporate jobs that has some employers, however reluctantly, taking notice and trying to do something about it. Because one difference from 30 years ago is that today lots of corporate employers hire educated women, train them, come to depend on them for 3 or 5 or 10 years, and then lose them because the jobs aren’t compatible with motherhood. Which is expensive and disruptive, two things corporate America doesn’t like. If my law firm can keep me, a known quantity, even at a reduced pace, that is better than kissing their training investment good bye and starting from scratch with someone they don’t know. And for me, it keeps one foot in the corporate world so that if I want to return and ratchet it up someday, I can — which would be much harder with 5-10 years missing from my resume. So maybe Hirshman shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss part time work as worthless to the “feminist” cause.
I also feel the pull some (many?) women feel to be at home with their children a significant amount of time should not be so quickly dismissed by Hirshman. Was I “indoctrinated” by the “patriarchy” into feeling like this? I really doubt it; it is just who I am. Maybe men need to be more free to act on such feelings, too, since most men I know would love to be at home with their kids more.
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:40 pm
Feminism should be about choice, and all of us respecting the choices of others. Period. Why is it more “feminist” to work out there, and not mold the minds of another generation? Because those women somehow feel threatened by the choice of another? Stupid. Be who you are, and believe in it. And everyone else’s opinion, politically correct or not, be damned. You alone know who you are, and who you’re called to be.
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:25 pm
I agree with Becca, but I don’t know why. My mind keeps getting so jumbled about this stuff and I’m not nearly as good as you are at sorting it out. That’s a good gift you have, by the way.
I just read it and knew it didn’t send me furiously wanting to refute her. But don’t ask me why, exactly. If Becca posts about it, maybe I’ll know.
God I’m so frickin’ lame.
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:00 pm
I think we have to remember that the types of ‘high-powered’ jobs under discussion aren’t just random corporate moneymakers. These are the lawyers who write our contracts. The doctors who take care of us. The politicians who make our laws. The research scientists who decide what we should be studying and how. These are things that are valuable to all of us, and that help shape the society we live in. And if women are underrepresented in these fields (whether through their own choices or not), then to me that is a loss. Raising children is vitally important work, and that is certainly undervalued by society. But those types of jobs are important too, and to me a fundamental part of feminism as it should be is the idea that women should share the roles that shape how we live our lives. And I would argue the converse as well: that men should help shape their children, and that it is important to create a society that allows and encourages that.
December 3rd, 2005 at 12:28 am
So how does a lesbian giving up an academic career to parent while her partner brings home very feminist bacon from the Women’s Studies Department fit into this b.s. paradigm anyway? Where’s the patriarchy I’m giving into? The man who robbed me of my potential? Hirshman’s critique is just way, way too simplistic on so many fronts.
Good talk-back, Dawn.
December 5th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
Omg.. talk about being a hypocrite.
The schools should teach ALL PEOPLE regardless of SEX the same things. Thats what equality is all about. This woman is only about being PRO woman.
Making lots of hypocritical statements throughout her entire “speech” kinda makes me doubt her understanding of the word feminism. It actually has nothing to do with ONLY women as the name might lead you to believe.
From dictionary.com
“Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.”
Personally I assign whatever I feel like to whomever. This doesnt mean that ANY woman has to comply with what I might or ANYONE might think. IT STILL ALL BOILS DOWN TO CHOICE.
YOU CHOOSE.
December 5th, 2005 at 5:45 pm
She sure provides a good guide for women to be able to pursue a career in todays world, but offers LITTLE of value to true equality.
She even has suggestions on how to marry poorer or dependant people to have them act as “househelp” easier.
Clearly this woman has not one IDEA about what equality between the sexes mean.
December 5th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
“Will there never again be more than one woman on the Supreme Court?”
How about an unemployed HOBO in the supreme court?
I thought the idea was to represent the people?
How about 50% women 50% men, then of thoose a very few super rich, the middle income people (big group) and then the low income and uneducated (BIG group)… how about letting THOOSE into the supreme court?
How about you being a hypocrite… Equality clearly shouldnt be considered for all cases and all people right? Hobos in the supreme court.. clearly not….
No.. just white, rich bitches like you I presume.
December 5th, 2005 at 5:58 pm
And oh my god this woman is ugly.
No wonder she needs power and money… talk about compensating.
http://law.wlu.edu/faculty/history/hirshman.asp