What I’ve come to refer to as That Hirshman Article was published well before this blog got started. I wrote about it at Sivacracy.net; you can read my posts here, here, and here. Go ahead, I’ll wait! As you can see if you check out those posts, I am not a fan of Hirshman’s work. I might have been a little nicer in my first post if it had ever occurred to me that she would read it, but her subsequent e-mails to me were so awful that I doubt I will ever apologize. So it was with some satisfaction that I read these words at Dooce:
…”A couple days ago I got an email from a reader named Sara (hi Sara!) who asked if I’d comment on what law professor Linda Hirshman recently said on”Good Morning America”about how it’s a mistake for educated women to stay at home with their kids. It’s not a new argument, and my first reaction is: she’s trying to sell something. I understand the basis of her argument, that by choosing to stay at home with our kids instead of using our education in a professional environment we are waving our middle fingers at the work feminists have been doing over the last century. But I don’t agree with it.
“So I went and read some of her work online, and she’s always careful to point out that by claiming that we’re making a choice to stay at home we are only copping out, that somehow the choice to stay at home is invalid. Wow! As a mother I’ve never heard that before! My choices are wrong! She should write a book about how she knows which choice is the best one. Oh wait! SHE HAS!
“My reaction then, I guess, is that here is my middle finger and here is me waving it at Linda Hirshman. This IS my choice. It is mine. I want to be at home with my child, not because my husband said I had to want it, or because my mom said that I had to want it, or because I am blinded by society’s bias toward women and their role in the family. I had the option of going to work outside the home or staying at home with my kid and I made a choice. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything more fundamentally feminist than exercising that choice.
The real crime here is not that educated women are choosing to stay at home with their children, it’s that many women who want to stay at home aren’t able to because of their circumstances. I know how lucky I am to have options. And it is in those options that I as a woman have power, power to choose the direction of my life, power to wave my middle finger at anyone who thinks it is their right, their moral compulsion, or their obligation to a seemingly fascist ideal to tell me how to live my life.” ….
In fairness to Hirshman, if you follow the links from my Sivacracy.net postings, you will see that not all of the reactions by other feminists were negative. Some were more mixed, and others outright agreed with her. She defended herself from reactions like mine in this article at Inside Higher Ed.
–Ann Bartow
