Ann at Feminist Law Professors directed me to this excellent Katha Pollitt piece about the two leading generals in the Mommy Wars:
Caitlin Flanagan, scourge of upscale working mothers, meet Linda Hirshman, champion of same. You’ll like each other, you have a lot in common: a bomb-throwing writing style, a gift for oversimplification and a deep conviction that your life is the one true path to happiness and glory. […] Here’s another thing you two agree on: Whatever women are doing wrong is feminism’s fault.
In the article itself, Pollitt spends relatively little ink on Flanagan, instead concentrating on Hirshman, who Pollitt finds some good in – but still criticizes.
Hirshman’s weakness is her assumption that the social problem of women’s inequality can be solved if enough women make the right individual decisions. She mocks “the same old public day-care business that has gone nowhere since 1972.” But really, isn’t the stay-home vogue at bottom a response to the fact that society has failed to adapt to working mothers? Isn’t choice feminism itself a way of dealing with the whole complex range of resistance to women’s equality, by throwing up your hands and saying, Let each woman make her own tradeoffs? Unlike Flanagan, who wants women to give up the struggle, Hirshman wants individual women to fight harder and smarter, and that’s great. But it only goes so far. If better personal decisions could bring about gender equality, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.
I agree with this critique of Hirshman. But I’d add another weakness: her unkindness. Her writing – especially in the initial Prospect piece that made her a household name (well, among certain households!) – has a sneering tone which makes it unpalatable not only to many stay-at-home mothers, but also many people who are friends of stay-at-home mothers. Hirshman – and Pollitt- are right to say that feminism shouldn’t blindly condone all choices made by women. And one choice we shouldn’t condone is Hirshman’s choice to be gratuitously cruel to women who have chosen, or “chosen,” stay-at-home motherhood.
Pollitt also writes:
“Choice,” moreover, assumes people have, and know they have, real alternatives. But what if the “choice” is the forced, or at any rate predictable, result of a lot of previous choices you didn’t realize you were making?
This reminds me of this old cartoon of mine, which – despite the lame-ass drawing – is imo one of the best political cartoons I’ve done:
By the way, Pollitt – who is my favorite non-academic feminist writer – has a new book out. Anyone who wanted to take this as an occasion to hit up my Amazon wish list, please feel free. :-P
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Years ago, Marxist feminists and early radical feminists (referencing Alice Echol’s work on radfems) argued for a public policy of housework for pay. That was based on a particular theoretical framework. Marxists thought that all work women had done in the home needed to be commodified. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a progenitor in this regard).
Thus, it really depends on which feminism you’re speaking of. True, those were initiatives that didn’t come to fruition and there was much debate surrounding the Marxist approach in the mid- to late-70s. But, the point is that it’s perfectly possible to have a different perspective on housework/motherhood, a different way of pursuing the solutions (to a political problem – which Hirshman, ironically, treats as a personal problem while pretending to talk about collective political practice). And, by having this different view, one is still a feminist and the ‘choices’ the women in question make are still feminist and can be condoned as such.
Aside from which, It’s not clear to me that “we” can condone anything since there really isn’t a “we” to feminism. And, it’s even less clear to me that an amorphous “feminism” can condone anything since whatever is feminism is the voice of the individual making the judgement to condone or not condone. As individuals, there really isn’t much of a we — and hence the shouting in the blogosphere. :) It’s like some Gramscian struggle for the hegemony of an idea. Which, in this context, is extraordinarily anti-democratic since those with more resources and greater voice with maintain (an always tenuous) dominance of the ideas that circulate and the way they’re framed (e.g., not asking questions of Hirshman’s own ideological blindness, for instance.)
I find the whole conversation extraordinarily annoying on two counts:
1. No one seems to ever mention that LH’s study was initially speaking to her disappointement with a small minority of US women, those who attended elite universities.
(As my own research on elite working women reveals, “choices” are limited in interesting ways for these women and dropping out of the workforce is a matter of them finding the workforce fundamentally hostile to their values. This is, as Maia and others pointed out over at Feministe, a kind of resistance. In my research, I name it as such but that’s because it’s taking place in a different context.)
2. ISTR that LH is an academic. Yes, visiting prof. Hers’ is the most disappointing piece of research on women that I’ve read from a feminist scholar I’ve ever had the unpleasure of reading. EThnographic researchers have a long tradition of managing to study people, neither condoning their behavior nor leaving it uncriticized. You get a sympathetic look into the lives of women — which was the promise of the Second Wave when you look at their work on the need to study women’s lives from the perspective of women. But, you also get a look at their lives and choices in a wider social context that reveals how those choices are made possible and constrained. Scholars that come to mind in this regard are Arlie Hochschild (Second Shift and Time Bind), Nancy Amerman (sp?) (Bible Believers), Judith Stacey (Brave New Families), and Marjorie DeVault (The Work Feeding the Family).
The above is from the Am Prospect article, which is another peeve I wrote about on the blog yesterday.
She’s a Liberal feminist, as is patently obvious from the way she leaves uninterrogated concepts in the second sentence (above). “Choice feminism” if it emanates from anywhere at all, emanates from the basic ideas of Liberal Feminism — and she is caught up in the very conundrums that any liberal feminist will inevitably be caught up. Not surprisingly, even without her rhetorical approach, she would still end up riding around a cul-de-sac on a unicycle. Choice femnism descends straight from the utilitarian moral tradition in philosophy — and so does Hirschman.
Good luck to her on her approach. It’s like untying the Gordian knot of choice feminism by tying it up in some more choice feminism. LOL
** Liberal, as Amp knows from reading Alison Jaggar, doesn’t mean Ted Kennedy ‘Liberal”, but philosophical (enlightenment) liberal to which even conservative politicians in the US largely subscribe — though one often wonders these days.
Bitch/Lab said in comment #1:
No one seems to ever mention that LH’s study was initially speaking to her disappointement [sic] with a small minority of US women, those who attended elite universities.
Well, I saw plenty of people write about the problem, see e.g. Amps overview here: (link)
See also the links in this post: (link)
and in turn, some of the posts that those posts link to.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work should speak for itself. The bibliography here is helpful to anyone who wants to learn more: (link)
And as far as your comment (also in #1) about “Marxist feminists and early radical feminists (referencing Alice Echol’s work on radfems)” it would be helpful to have actual names and work citations, so that the accuracy of your generalizations could be assessed.
In comment #2 you say: She’s a Liberal feminist, as is patently obvious from the way she leaves uninterrogated concepts in the second sentence (above) without explaining how you define “liberal femnism,” though you seem to be critical of it, and you do nothing to clarify this in your “footnote” when you say: Liberal, as Amp knows from reading Alison Jaggar, doesn’t mean Ted Kennedy ‘Liberal”, but philosophical (enlightenment) liberal to which even conservative politicians in the US largely subscribe — though one often wonders these days. I’ve read Jaggar too, and this makes no sense to me. I remember Amp posting about Jaggar here: (link) but that doesn’t clear anything up, really (though I will have to debate Amp about MacKinnon’s views some more one of these days, if the reading of her he expostulates there remains constant, because I think she is right about the ways that classic liberalism lets women down in many respects).
I’m not a fan of Hirshman’s recent work, but this sort of disjointed smear makes me almost want to defend her, I guess because it also seems like a broad based attack on feminism generally. You said some nice things about Carol Hanisch a while back, but as Heart explained here: (link)
you have been quite critical of Hanisch’s express views when you attributed them to others. Are there any feminists at all who you agree with substantively?
I think she’s right about classic liberalism, too. However, where I disagree with her is her failure to sufficiently distinguish between current-day liberal feminism and classic liberalism. This leads her to unfairly criticize contemporary liberal feminists for the failures of classic liberalism.
I agree with the general point of Katha Pollitt’s article, that if personal decisions were sufficient we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And Linda Hirshman is mean spirited, which has a way of erasing one very valid point that she does make regarding personal decisions: that women don’t claim their own territory. Whether it’s in the name of romance, the best interests of the child or whatever else is deemed to be more important than their own self-interest, women do not hold men accountable for family well being and female happiness the way that women are held accountable for family well being and male happiness. Wherever you look in any discussion on this subject, it’s always about women, and it’s all about women. And LH is saying, however unkindly, that as long as women along with everyone else makes it a discussion about women, very little will change.
Thank you so much for the ongoing discussion. I love Alas, and am so happy to have my column linked here. I’ve discussed the class dimension of the working man/stayhome mom “debate” quite a bit in other columns (ran out of space in this one). For example, in pieces on Lisa Belkin’s “Opt Out Revolution” article in the NYT magazine, which focussed on Princeton grads, and Louise Story’s front-page NYT article about Yalies already planning their stay-home lives. In my obituary column for Betty Friedan, I contrasted Hirshman’s mocking attitude to stayhome mothers with Friedan’s much kinder and broadminded approach. (All these columns are included in my new collection, “Virginity or Death!” ).
Belkin, Story and Hirshman all make the same mistake. They assume that the most privileged women, the ones with the most elite education, should be the most “feminist” ones — ie the most ambitious and the most committed to fulltime work without a break for kids. But these women tend to marry high-earning, even more ambitious men, have the most family money, the most ability to go back to an interesting job (or so they may think) etc. If your husband makes $400,000 on Wall Street (or whatever humongous sum Wall Streeters make), you can afford to ask a lot of questions about why you are working 60 hours a week at a job you don’t even like all that much. In Belkin’s article, most of the women actually wanted to keep working, but they couldn’t get a flexible schedule or other adjustments.
Why do these look to the most privileged women, leading the most conventional lives, for the next step in a social revolution?
I think early Marxist feminists argued specifically for paid housework and childcare, not radical feminists. (And ftr, Alice Echols is not a good source to which to repair for insight into the work of radical feminists.) In fact, radical feminists have pretty much consistently argued, and still argue, for a complete restructuring of the world of work (which places women at the center of the economy equally with men, not in the periphery), a complete restructuring of the economy itself (various approaches, but the idea of a gift economy, for example, is specifically a radical feminist approach which challenges exchange economies), and a restructuring of notions of family, i.e., rejecting the traditional nuclear family in favor of, for example, intentional communities of people of all ages who would share childcare, work, etc, which would make issues of paid childcare and housework moot. Most radical feminists have consistently rejected paid housework and childcare, other than as a temporary, bandaid solution to difficulties which only revolutionary change can resolve.
For the record, the most recent issue of Off Our Backs, guest edited by me, is on the subject of feminist motherhood and it includes some kickass articles; there will be more articles on feminism and motherhood in the upcoming issue because we had more good articles than would fit into one. Both of these issues are, I think, worth reading, and not just because I wrote for them and edited them. The Belkins, Flanagans and Hirschmanns of the world get an audience because of the way their views can be *used*, especially by anti-feminists, to create this illusion that women are divided and really deeply at odds and hating on each other, which is rarely, if ever, the case when it comes to issues like motherhood especially. Real women, writing about our ives, analyzing our own difficulties together, don’t draw that kind of attention, even when our work is incredibly good and rich, which is the really unfortunate thing.
And I think there certainly is a “we” to feminism.
And what Ann Bartow said.
Heart
But see, now this:
Steinem, for her part, could be plenty judgmental: I once heard her compare women who enjoyed pornography to Jews who enjoyed Mein Kampf.
Katha, here is where things break down for me with respect to what you write about the Second Wave/radical feminists in general. This really misrepresents Steinem. She may well have said something like this — I think we’ve all said things sometime that if we’d thought about it a bit, we probably wouldn’t have said it (not to mention, quoting this on the blogosphere where we all agreed a long time ago that whomever invokes the Nazis loses seems unfair, given that Steinem probably said this way pre-internet/blogosphere) — but she also wrote the classic essay Erotica v. Pornography where she defends what many would now dismiss as pornography. (And while I’m at it, Andrea Dworkin defended what Steinem was attempting to do in that essay and similar essays.)
There’s plenty for us to argue about. The ongoing misrepresentation of the ideas and work of radical feminists (and yes, Gloria Steinem was and is a radical feminist), especially Second Wavers, is so unproductive and useless (and I’m talking to Bitch|Lab here, and Amp, not just Katha Pollitt. So many feminists do this.)
Heart
Sorry– I should have said that that line I quoted in my last post was from Katha’s article that Amp linked to in his post.
Heart
Sorry to post three times in a row, but I’m thinking about this right now and it makes sense to say it. What happens, or one of the things that happens, when the work of radical feminists is forgotten/not understood/misrepresented is, we don’t get credit for ideas which were ours, for work we have done which was our very fine work. We get erased. We might, for example, come to Alas and find someone suggesting that dropping out of the work force is resistance, as Bitch|Lab did up there, as though that’s a new idea, as though that’s not exactly what radical feminists thought might be a good plan 40 years ago.
Here is one of a number of similar quotes I could post, but I’m at work, and I just happen to have this one saved off here at work. It was written by Sonia Johnson, a Second Wave radical feminist, just before she left to begin an intentional woman-only community, the Wildfire community:
****
The agony of motherhood in patriarchy is that we are prevented from mothering our children. Looking back after four children and 26 years of motherhood, it seems to me that the moment I had my babies, society tied my hands and feet, stuffed a sock in my mouth, and forced me to sit helplessly by while it systematically tortured and brainwashed and poisoned my children. Men have reduced mothering to feeding, clothing and comforting—and suffering because this is not enough…
It seems to me that mothering is the business of making the world amenable to children, seeing to it, for example, that every child born is immensely valued for being exactly who they are, making a world in which they therefore automatically love and cherish themselves, a safe, wholesome, healthful world, a world in which they can cooperate, not compete, can have time to be children, are encouraged to listen to their own voice so they will learn to have integrity and to rule themselves with wisdom and mercy, a world in which they can be themselves fully.
I want a world in which women can mother, not just bear children and keep them alive the best we can in a world that hates them because they are ours…
Patriarchy continues to define for women what we want, continues to control the discussion of mothering. Which of us would ever have thought of such a hideous idea as childcare centers, for instance. It simply would not have occurred to mothers to solve the problem of childcare in a way so profoundly unsatisfactory for both children and adults and ultimately for all of society.
Women, if we had felt powerful and had been setting the terms of our own debate… would have understood that the reason parents cannot care for children is that men’s world is organized insanely, from its basic life-negating values out through every aspect of life. We would have begun, as we have, to ask the world-changing questions: What do we value? How do we want to live? What kinds of work really need to be done? How many hours a day of work would that make per person? How could we organize society so that everyone’s needs could be met, only useful and healthful work would be done, and everyone would have time to live?
I dream of a world in which women are willing to take responsibility for reshaping the world. I dream of a world in which children do not entrust their lives to us only to have us, traitor-like, turn them over to the soul-killing, joy-destroying agents of patriarchy…”
****
I used this quote (from Johnson’s book Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution) in an article I wrote which will be in the next issue of Off Our Backs and entitled Join Us! The Motherhood Revolution. Well, I think it’s a good article. But my point right now is, radical feminists always pushed for radical, revolutionary change. Not paid childcare. Not paid housework. Not better childcare centers.
Heart
“Hirshman’s weakness is her assumption that the social problem of women’s inequality can be solved if enough women make the right individual decisions.”
No, the *strength* of Hirshman’s argument is her realization and willingness to say out loud that the social problem of women’s inequality cannot be solved without enough women making the right individual decisions. I don’t read her as saying that individual decisions *alone* will save the day. Rather, that there is a positive feedback loop between empowering individual decisions and improvements to the system in terms of achieving equality. The system has no incentive to change without such individual decisions. What’s the point of railing against the system when you continue to make personal choices that support and maintain it?
“Unlike Flanagan, who wants women to give up the struggle, Hirshman wants individual women to fight harder and smarter, and that’s great. But it only goes so far. If better personal decisions could bring about gender equality, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today.”
Again, personal decisions are a necessary, though not sufficient requirement for positive change. They are part of a synergy that can become either a virtuous circle (with empowering choices and a supportive system) or a vicious cycle (with disempowering choices and a neglectful/exploitative system).
“Why do these look to the most privileged women, leading the most conventional lives, for the next step in a social revolution?”
Because they are the ones who have the material and social resources to advance to the point where they can make system-wide changes, not the maids or the factory workers or checkout clerks.
Again, personal decisions are a necessary, though not sufficient requirement for positive change. They are part of a synergy that can become either a virtuous circle (with empowering choices and a supportive system) or a vicious cycle (with disempowering choices and a neglectful/exploitative system).
In numerous countries (Italy, Russia, Spain), women have largely opted out of child-having and are instead working full time in a proto-Hirschmannic Utopia. But the societal changes have not followed — only population declines.
It seems counterproductive to focus on individual choices first, or equally, when countries with much lower fertility rates and much higher female labor-market participation have failed to become gender-equity paradises.
What Hirschmann is asking women to do is “sacrifice” what will make them happiest under their current set of 0ptions, with the desired end result of changing society so that future women will have a better set of options. But that’s both not fair to current women, and not even necessarily better for future women, since nations that have taken that route aren’t doing all that great anyway.
Richard, that assumes (as Flanagan and Leslie Morgan Steiner do) that the choice to opt out is really a choice. It’s often not, moreover many women who are SAHMs are not totally or even mostly happy about the fact that they must opt for one of two extreme lifestyle choices. They often leave because they cannot reconcile work and personal demands, not because they don’t want to. The advantage at least some high achieving women have is to demand concessions from their otherwise intractable employers, which then slowly work their way through the workforce. 15 years ago in my profession part-time workers were treated as pariahs, but enough valuable female workers demanded it that it is now common and we are not treated as pariahs. Part-time status is not without its pitfalls and frustrations, but one thing that irks me greatly about LH is her dismissal of us part-timers, as if our work isn’t really an accomplishment.
That’s just one example of what can happen when women stick their necks out for better terms and conditions — I mean, why not? They can always quit, a fact that I have come to understand can be quite liberating.
“In numerous countries (Italy, Russia, Spain), women have largely opted out of child-having and are instead working full time in a proto-Hirschmannic Utopia. But the societal changes have not followed — only population declines.”
Italy, Russia and Spain have their fair share of SAHMs. What you are describing is not a “proto-Hirschmannic Utopia”. A society where men and women shared paid work and unpaid childcare and housework equally would be a proto-Hirschmannic Utopia.
Also note that Italy, Russia and Spain have other social problems (patriarchal ideologies in Italy and Spain, social/political/economic upheaval in Russia) that further exacerbate the situation for women. If you want to compare across countries why not consider those bastions of stay-at-home-motherhood – Iran, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Japan? Isn’t this exactly the place where the “choice” to stay home got women? As economic dependents of men to be exploited, abused, neglected at will. To be disenfranchised politically, marginalized and exploited socially and economically.
When you compare apples to apples, there is a strong correlation between the economic participation of women/mothers and the health and wellbeing of women *and children*. So, the reality is exactly the opposite of what you are positing when you say that “But that’s both not fair to current women, and not even necessarily better for future women”.
Heart Writes:
My point was not that what Steinem said was wrong (although I disagree with it). It was that Hirshman was wrong to characterize her as wishy washy and uncritical, as a kind of feminist smily face (in distinction to Friedan, whom Hirshman prefers). I used the porn example to show that Hirshman is wrong: Steinem could be plenty judgmental about other women. I don’t have a problem with that.
With all due respect, resorting to Nazi analogies was lame long before the blogosphere existed. This one was particularly ridiculous because there ARE women who enjoy porn (and consider themselves feminists!), but there weren’t any Jews who enjoyed Mein Kampf.
Italy, Russia and Spain have their fair share of SAHMs. What you are describing is not a “proto-Hirschmannic Utopia”. A society where men and women shared paid work and unpaid childcare and housework equally would be a proto-Hirschmannic Utopia.
No, a society were men and women share paid and unpaid work equally would be a Hirschmannic Utopia. I added “proto” because those countries aren’t there, but have the Hirschmann ingredients that she thinks will get us there — more (although certainly not all) women electing labor force participation instead of (and not even along with) motherhood.
The idea is to have individual private choices become the motivator for large-scale social change. But I am suggesting it doesn’t work that way. You have to have the system in place first, so that it can become the individual person’s decision to work/stay home/have kids/ remain childless/ etc.
The Hirschmann approach is all very Lysistrata, where the men/government will give the women what they want if the women can just all choose to not give the men what they want. Or suggesting that women would have been admitted into the workforce sooner if they had all gotten together and refused to do housework in 1906.
They are nice fantasies, but they don’t model very well how societies have actually changed.
This discussion is really intersting – especially since it regards one of the debates going on in Sweden today:
Here in Sweden we have an election year and one of the suggestions is that all parental leave will be divided equally between the parents. What will happen is propably that we’ll get a compromise where a third is bound to the father, a third to the mother and a third to be divided according to the parents’ choice. Unfortunately the compromise will propably lead to less paternal leave – since it will be seen as normal to have the father home 1/3 and the mother 2/3 of the time. (I might also add that the average age women now give birth to their first child is when they are thirty. We too opt out.)
This is how it looks today:
Parents have the right to stay at home with the child 480 days (16 months). The parents decide how the 480 days are divided between them except for 60 days that can only be taken by the father (the so called daddymonth). Whoever is at home will recieve parental pay equal to that of sick pay (about 80% of your income) for 390 days, the rest of the days you recieve 60skr a day.
Women also have the additional right to stay at home seven weeks before delivery and seven weeks after delivery.
Parents to children under 8 år also have the right to shorten their normal workload with up to 25%.
The community is obligated to provide subsidised childcare for all children aged 1-6.
“This one was particularly ridiculous because there ARE women who enjoy porn (and consider themselves feminists!)”
There are also many women, whole organizations full of them, aiming to deny women the right to an abortion and they consider themselves feminists. You have written about some of the self-proclaimed Feminists For Life. I find it hard to believe believe you really hold the opinion that there has to be 100% unaminous agreement amongst self-proclaimed feminists before feminist analysis on the benefit or harm to women as a class of people can be assessed on a given topic.
When Playboy put actress Jessica Alba on their cover without her permission and she threatened to sue them, Playboy’s response (through a spokeswoman, of course) was eerily the same as yours, point out that other women like Claudia Schiffer, Paris Hilton, and Goldie Hawn were okay with appearing on the cover so quit your whining and complaining, Jessica. I don’t think there’s a more dismissive and unproductive response to any woman’s criticism than to point to other women and say, “Well, she likes it.”
Samantha, Katha wasn’t saying “there has to be 100% unaminous agreement amongst self-proclaimed feminists before feminist analysis on the benefit or harm to women as a class of people can be assessed on a given topic.” She said nothing about ruling feminist analysis out at all.
However, it is possible to do a feminist analysis on the benefit or harm to women as a class, without resorting to saying “women who disagree with me are like Jews who favor Hitler!” It is the Jewish Hitler fan comparison, not the general idea of feminist analysis, which I suspect Katha disagrees with.
Unless you’re of the “feminists who don’t share my opinion on porn aren’t real feminists” camp of analysis – which I trust you’re not – the comparison to Jewish Hitler fans fails because there is no legitimate disagreement among Jews of what to think about Hitler. In contrast, a lot of dedicated, smart and admirable feminists do disagree about pornography.
“I added “proto” because those countries aren’t there, but have the Hirschmann ingredients that she thinks will get us there”
Are you kidding? Negotiating equal childcare and housework responsibilities with men is one of the main ingredients of what she argues will get us there. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
“They are nice fantasies, but they don’t model very well how societies have actually changed.”
The fantasy is that the system will change all on its own, without any motivation or incentive, without the sustained work of individuals, both at the personal and political levels.
Katha wrote:
I think that Brownmiller pointed out, in In Our Time, that this sort of mistake – specifically about Steinem being a softy, and Friedan being more militant and harsh – is pretty commonplace. This seems to have more to do with stereotypes about Steinem’s and Friedan’s looks than with anything either of them say or do.
“but there weren’t any Jews who enjoyed Mein Kampf. ”
That we know of. There are some non-white folks who very much enjoy and defend white-supremacist literature. The problem with this “it’s all a matter of opinion” argument is that you’ll have to give the same weight to the Flanagans and Hoff Summers that you do to Freidan and Steinem. Just because some of the oppressed class like their oppression doesn’t mean that it is not oppression.
Actually, the comparison was between Jews enjoying Mein Kampf and feminists enjoying pornography, not Jews liking Hitler the man, which is an important distinction when you figure in how some feminists say they don’t like Larry Flynt but defend Hustler as a form of art.
Also, it’s not an isolated incident relating only to this thread but a woman-scapegoating tactic of Katha’s on pornography, and only on said subject so far as I can tell, I’d like to see go the way of the dodo.
http://www.centerfornewwords.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=46
“Also note that Italy, Russia and Spain have other social problems (patriarchal ideologies in Italy and Spain, social/political/economic upheaval in Russia) ”
You know, I’m really tired of ideas of this sort getting trotted out routinely. I don’t know Italy, but yes, Spain does have a patriarchal ideology……and so does the US, and the UK and all those other English-speaking societies. As I’ve said dozens of times by now, that ideology might be different in some aspects, but it’s not somehow “worse” (neither is it “better,” but that’s for a different discussion).
I’m tired of people talking about my culture in ways that come from what they’ve heard or they assume or, hey, “everybody *knows* it’s true.” Yeah, just like all those other things that “everbody” knows are true, but are actually complete myths, such as the idea that in the Middle Ages, most people thought the world was flat.
Just look at what’s going on regarding women’s rights and issues of sexuality in the US today and tell me that you haven’t got a problem with an extremely repressive patriarchal culture. I confess I haven’t actually done a point-by-point comparison with Spain, but my guess is that most women are currently in a somewhat better position there than in most parts of the US regarding reproductive rights & sexual freedom.
Bean,
As the recipient of several nasty e-mails from Hirshman, including one in which she threatened to tell my Dean on me (yes I can document this; I blogged about it here: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002469.html and here: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002468.html ) I have to say I find her “less than courteous” to a fairly extreme degree. Today she basically called me a liar at Feminist Law Professors here: http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=685 I have some e-mails out to people who should be able to confirm my version of events, for whatever that is worth, including the law prof who introduced us.
The idea that “elite” upper class feminists need to be judgmental and critical towards women who do not follow Hirshman’s ordained path, which of course Hirshman herself did not follow, is one I simply can’t accept, even if she makes some valid points about power and economic vulnerability.
I must say that is one of the better comics on the subject I’ve seen yet. It manages to get the point across without being so one-sided as to alienate anyone who doesn’t already agree with it.
I wrote:
This could be taken as a snarky, backhanded way of me saying that I think Samantha IS in that camp. That’s not what I meant, at all, and I hope nobody took it that way.
I apologize to Sam for my poor writing, and for the unintended snarky tone of my post.
Thanks, bean. Too bad I don’t have a best-selling (or at least controversial) treatise in me. Those who savor my verbal obnoxiousness will just have to keep hanging around here. :p
Amp, I don’t know why you’re so down on this particular cartoon’s drawing. To me, the only weakness in it is that the man and woman don’t age, though the child does.
So are you the same as Creative Destruction? If so, when you comment on other blogs, do you submit two comments, one under each identity? Why? It just makes it look as if more people were saying the same thing? What am I missing here?
Creative Destruction is not an personal identity. Both CD and Alas are multi-author blogs. If you look carefully you’ll see that the article is under the same by-line on both – ‘Ampersand’.
Why two blogs? Different focus. Alas is a feminist blog. CD aims to bring authors with widely disparate viewpoints together. Both blogs aim for constructive and courteous argumention. Being all human, we don’t always succeed in either place.
I don’t know if this is helpful at all, but I think of it as being similar to a syndicated columnist whose work appears in more than one paper. So although the two papers may be very different, the column is the same in each one.
I think that cartoon’s really interesting, particularly in this context. The unequal pedestal heights are just assumed in the first panel. Of course, Hirshman’s point is that this is partly a results of decisions made by women, such as marrying older, richer men, and that by making different choices they can arrange things so that they have the advantage.
The whole concept of the employment treadmill should be questioned — many women and men stay in jobs they loathe because they and we operate without a safety net of access most notably to health care. So a given in most relationships is which partner (if not both) should be walking on the treadmill. Maybe our goal should be making the treadmill walking less important for all families.
Furthermore, I know that LH is a professor so I am doubtful that she has a firm grasp of other types of employment, but after all these years it dawned on me, as it should have a long time ago, that devoting time to one’s job often does not lead to the type of advancement that LH apparently yearns for women to obtain. Indeed, if you talk to life skills or professional coaches they would probably tell you that what holds women back isn’t just time spent away from work — it’s their emphasis on things like being part of the team and not claiming and demanding credit, not networking, not being willing to take professional risks, and so on. I am guilty of a lot of this, and so are many men, but probably not proportionately as many.
As much as I believe that LH is making a few valid points, I do see that she is starting from a point that accepts that it’s natural to box women (and men) into a view of success and power that is itself often inimical to social advancement. I do not see women who succeed in those terms wanting to change them so as to make their own success seem less important. Carly Fiorina is Exhibit A of this type of LH icon. Carly was often quoted as saying that she saw no impediment to female success. I don’t think more Carly’s are going to make my duaghters’ lives better than mine is.
“Furthermore, I know that LH is a professor so I am doubtful that she has a firm grasp of other types of employment, but after all these years it dawned on me, as it should have a long time ago, that devoting time to one’s job often does not lead to the type of advancement that LH apparently yearns for women to obtain. ”
Many of the people who don’t “get” LH seem to think in terms of individual dots instead of statistical distributions. The idea is not to make each and every woman into a president or CEO, but to have equal representation at every level of the social heirarchy. The reason why women are disproportionately at the bottom levels of the social/economic system is because of their disproportionate share of childcare/housework responsibilities that disproportionately keep them out of the upper levels where public power and decision making resides.
“Indeed, if you talk to life skills or professional coaches they would probably tell you that what holds women back isn’t just time spent away from work — it’s their emphasis on things like being part of the team and not claiming and demanding credit, not networking, not being willing to take professional risks, and so on. I am guilty of a lot of this, and so are many men, but probably not proportionately as many. ”
All of this, to the extent it is true, is linked to the relatively lowly position of women in the workplace, lack of role models, lack of a sense of entitlement that comes with seeing people like yourself in positions of power. You can talk to life skills coaches who propose band-aid treatment of surface symptoms or you can work towards changing the roots of the system as LH is suggesting.
Since I’ve been working full-time for almost 20 years ago and have managed somehow to do this with three children, I think LH has nothing on me. I am reporting what I see in my office setting. I can honestly say that whatever ails me has less to do with the amount of housework I do (negligible) than with traits that have a lot to do with female socialization, and which also, in my experience, prevent women without children from succeeding as much as well. It’s a multifaceted battle. It’s not all about child care.
“It’s not all about child care. ”
If you look at it from a historical and global perspective, a lot of this other stuff (active discrimination, different socialization, social prejudices and expectations) is a derivative of the disproportionately larger responsibility that women have had for bearing and raising children. What is at the root of the social/political/economic marginalization of women? If we look at the millenia of global history, there are only two things I can think of as root causes – 1) greater physical strength of men combined with the use of violence to achieve power and access to resources through battles and raping and pillaging, and 2) greater responsibility of women towards bearing and raising children, combined with the incompatibility of this work with gaining access to public power and resources.
It is only recently that things are changing so that women can control their fertility and combine having children with gaining access to public power and resources (it might still be difficult, but at least it is not impossible). Also, physical strength is not as linked to power and resources as before.
To the extent that women bear disproportionate responsibility for childcare/housework, to that extent they will be marginalized in social/economic terms. There are always individual exceptions you can point to, but I am talking about statistical distributions.
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Hello,
I loved the cartoon very much. I’d like to put it in my blog for the “International Women’s Day” if you give me permission.
Thank in advance.
Regards
Müjde Dural
Turkey
No problem – feel free to use the strip on your blog if you’d like.
Dear Ampersand. thank you very much, I’ll write your name as a source of course.
Loves from Turkey:)