Continuing in the tradition of my delayed response time, I will now comment on Linda R. Hirshman's Homeward Bound, which came out at least a week ago and already received intelligent and enthusiastic reviews from Melfenblog.
There is so much I liked about this essay, that I kind of went around with it in my head like listening to music on a walkman. I liked how Hirshman gets up in the faces of well-educated women and tells them (err, us?) to take responsibility for their actions. By leaving the public sphere, elite women are essentially leaving society for others to manage. And you can't just go and do that! Put aside, for a moment, the arguments Betty Friedan makes (and Hirshman tacitly supports) about how home care work is not meant for mammals (because, oops, there are a lot of mammals who do have to do that work) and focus instead on why it matters that middle/upper class women are opting out. These women aren't acting in a vacuum. "A world of 84-percent male lawyers and 84-percent
female assistants is a different place than one with women in positions
of social authority." Women's so-called "empowering" choices are "bad for them," and are "certainly bad for society." What a big breath of feminist finger-wagging fresh air!
The bottom line, Hirshman seems to suggest, is that women are shirking the chance to have power because they don't think that they'll do a good job with it. "Good psychological data show that the more women are treated with respect, the more ambition they have." Aside from the other reasons why women leave the workplace (they want to spend more time with their kids, they hate corporate culture), what would happen if women really believed that they and power belonged together? It's a crazy idea but it just might work.
The rest of it, interesting as it is, is less so for Hirshman. Women want to be with their kids. The corporate world blows. Suck it up, she says. Well-educated American women with financial resources really have the world at their feet. Dirty house? Husband who won't take care of the children? Fucking figure it out, she says. Don't go whinnying into a well-upholstered domestic corner, clean as it may be. Yeah!
Well, it's not always that easy. For one, the kind of corporate career that Hirshman wants women to pursue really does take a heavy toll on their search for balance with their families. Yes, I know, the whole "balance" stumbling block. But, just to be clear, we're not talking about take-out Chinese food for dinner as Hirshman suggests. We're talking about 12 to 15-hour days. This means not getting to see your kids, with or without the dirty house and the take-out food. Women seem frustrated with this, and they have good reason. Not all of us can be retired Brandeis professors.
And, oh, by the way, corporate culture has little meaning. This was the frustration elite women expressed in their interviews with by Lisa Belkin in the New York Time Magazine's opt-out article from 2003. Many blithely pursued corporate careers and then left when their kids were born, citing matters of the heart. I remember how angry I was about those stupid Ivy-educated women who woke up one day and didn't like working at their corporate firm. You don't feel passionate
about your corporate work? Maybe you should find some work that you find
worthwhile. Certainly the world could use you.
But Hirshman has even less pity than I did. She doesn't seem to care whether women get their blood sucked out and then have kids, find themselves, and want to leave. One thing it would be nice to hear from Hirshman is a qualifier: it's not always power on its own that's so great. Maybe women need to see the larger good in gaining power before they go after it. Sure, being at home can re-ignite passion about life, but pursuing a meaningful career can do this too. To Hirshman's three rules: 1) Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, 2) treat
work seriously, and 3) don’t put yourself in a position of unequal
resources when you marry, I would add a fourth: 4) pursue work that you're passionate about. I'm not saying everyone has to be activists, or even pursue, horror of horrors, "social justice" work. But there seems to be room here for other kinds of meaningful work that these women aren't thinking about. And, to echo Hirshman, it's their responsibility to get their shit together!
To be fair, women don't just fall into home care because of the reasons Hirshman describes. They also do it because they want to be with their kids, and because an all-make workplace pushes them away. These are compelling complaints. But in the end, they are still complaints, and I remain firmly in Hirshman's camp. These problems really don't give anyone with such a great education any excuse. If you abandon your firm to be with your kids, it seems like you're leaving Hell to go to Chucky Cheese. There has to be a middle ground. And these women (us?) are smart enough and have enough resources to figure it out.
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