Dear Linda,
You are a hero and an inspiration! As 36-year old feminist (I've been referred to as a femninazi), I have been dismayed by the "choice" issue and was so happy to read your article and subsequent book. I read it over coffee in one sitting and realized that I had fallen on the feminist wagon.

My question is of a personal nature. As I've said, I am a 36-year old woman with a BA in English Literature and a minor in Women's Studies from Vassar College. I [identifying information deleted] have always wanted to go back to school to pursue my original dream of being a doctor.

I have full confidence in my ability to take the rest of my perquisites, get all A's and, get into a med school. What I am not so confident about is whether or not this would be a dumb move for a woman that wants to always make at least as much or more than her husband and wants to have one child (always wanted one, but man do people get freaked about that.)

I am trying to take more cues from your book as I see the logic behind your philosophy and have always known that I will work until I die or am forced to retire. You say women should find a career and stick with out and not move around searching for the perfect career; however, since work/career is so important to me (what I do with 40-60 hours a week of my time had not only be meaningful to me, but also pay well too), I keep thinking about the career change option.

Please give me your thoughts on this. I understand that don't know me, but I honestly do not know a lot of real feminists anymore. All my college chums, except for three, have fallen by the wayside and gone home to go crazy with wash and climbing trees with the little ones or else simply show up to work and leave as early as they can to pick little Johnny up from daycare.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Once again, thank you for your courage. Finally someone stands up to both our conservative enemies and the liberal enemies within.

Career Clock Ticking

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A Little from Linda

Dear Clock Ticking,

You are not the only woman to ask Linda about a late career dream. Readers, take note. Pay attention to how you want to spend your lives as quickly as you can, as the prospects for medical school at thirty-seven or eight are daunting.

Realistically, by the time you make up the science courses you would need and go to four years of medical school, plus internship and residency, you will be close to fifty years old. Women live a long time, now, longer than men by several years, so fifty may be the "new forty." Nonetheless, I would be concerned about starting a professional career at fifty, including issues of debt from the extended education you would be undertaking. If you feel your life would be wasted if you did not realize this passion for medicine, then you might as well do it. Certainly the alternative of a wasted life is not desirable.
Otherwise, why not turn your existing talent and training to something related to medicine, like fund raising for a medical research enterprise or working for a foundation like the Gates Foundation with a real commitment to medical problems? You could do some good and be involved in the issues that interest you without the burden of starting over at thirty-seven.
L.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Linda,

After listening to you on [conservative talk radio], I wondered what would make a person with your education and background so bitter and hostile. Educated people that I've had the pleasure of working with in my career, I have found have the talent to keep their personal emotions from showing through in their presentations. I don't find this with you ... odd, I thought.
You are to be appreciated for your passion, but that gets in the way of an objective presentation if the purpose of the presentation is to inform, educate and persuade. When the emotions direct the current of the talk, it weakens it to the point of having the speaker labeled a fanatic or kook. I don't think that is your intention - but that is how you come across.
Also your talent for a condescending tone when confronted leads me to feel that you have problems with criticism. Maybe a past childhood experience is resurfacing somehow. A condescending tone is a rather childish style and technique when the speaker realizes they are losing the argument or losing ground or losing control of the situation. I think you have too much education to rely on that technique to be effective.
I came away from the interview feeling sorry that a person of your background, it seems to me, has things in her past that is sabotaging her message. While your content maybe acceptable, the delivery is lacking. I am sure you can site volumes of references where you have spoken at wonderful places and to learned people who just adore you and hang on every word as though it was written in stone .... but I am one who follows the path that says if the emperor has no clothes, someone needs to tell him to minimize his embarrassment.
Have a wonderful day

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A Little from Linda

Dear Dr. Freud:

Your letter indeed helped make my (wonderful) day. I know that someone who listens to talk radio must indeed be looking for a dispassionate analysis of social issues. Certainly, my hosts' tones are a constant inspiration to me.
I receive a trickle of these "you must have a terrible life" letters. I assume the writers mean that anyone who disagrees with them must be depressed from their present or crazy from their childhood. It's sort of the secular version of "you haven't come to God," which I get from my religious talk show listeners. What is missing, of course, is just the faint possibility that I might believe what I speak and write as a rational, educated human thinker, trained as a lawyer to tailor my presentation to the context in which I am arguing.
I thought I would take this opportunity to reassure my readers that I had and have an absolutely great life.
But you already knew that.
L.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Linda:

If only it were that simple! If the furor over your denigration of parenting were all canned fundamentalism, it would have burned out by now.

I'm a planning student, feminist/environmental activist and mother with a professional background in research management and economic development. My husband earns the money. I pursue our unpaid agenda. Should I ever find paid employment that allows me to learn and do precisely what I want to when I want to, accountable only to my evolving goals and perceptions, I will certainly take it; in the meantime, I'm free to work on behalf of other women.

Among those women is my five-year-old daughter. I agree that women aren't honored enough for parenting work under patriarchy, but this misguided assessment of its value is not truth. Because mothers aren't paid and are very hard to fire, there are many underperformers, but this, too, is not intrinsic to the work. I'd like to suggest that the problem for educated women is not leaving paid work, but failing to reimagine maternal passion as a source of power and a galvanizing force for change.

Precisely What I Want to Do
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Dear Precisely:

Sometimes the collective produces more wisdom than the individual. Here's a response that came in within days of your letter from another Asker.

Dear Linda,
Way back in 1966 I didn't have Aunt Linda to give me her bracing advice, so I went and did all the wrong things. Majored in art in college (oops), got married after junior year to an ambitious man who had just finished college. I finished college while doing all the commuting and domestic chores while he did none, because he said his law school was more important than my college art studies. Had a baby, guess who took care of the baby. Then we moved a million or so times whenever his job or mood required it, and each time I had to manage the moves and try to start my career from zero. 10 years later I was working 50 hours per week as a junior architect to his 40 as a partner in a big law firm. I was commuting 3 hours a day, breast-feeding the baby, taking care of 2 kids and the nanny, whose pay came out of my salary because she was doing "my" work. I felt bad that I had given up giving fancy dinner parties and working on a couple of town committees. When I told my husband I needed him to help he said if I was tired I should quit my job. It had been my decision to work, therefore it was up to me to solve my own tiredness problems. I did eventually divorce him, but after all the time-outs from work and a pattern of career changes I don't know how to get back to doing good solid work. Now I'm 61 and I have huge holes in my resume and obsolete skills. What advice do you have for the women who for 40 years did all the things you're telling us not to do? I will take your advice to get serious about work. I will cut way back on so many things that chew up my time: family, friends, house. I will give up idealistic imaginary pursuits in favor of finding a way to make a decent living.
Aside from the problems of the workplace and the men we live with, what are the problems privileged women like me have within ourselves? Why do women like me get seduced by the narcissistic notion that if you do what you love the money will magically appear? Why do we think we're smart enough to make full-time home-making really fun and creative and invigorating? Why do we think we have what it takes to make a good life even though we don't have a plan? Are we just too cool for practicality and serious jobs?

Thanks, Asker, I could not have answered Precisely What I Want to Do Any Better Myself.
L.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Linda,

I have read your work about women opting out with great interest and I wanted to thank you for raising a latent issue for a lot of educated women today.

Going back is tough. A lot of us women in our 30s, educated, with careers, married, with children often opt out and going back is so difficult, that we decide to stay out. We get either (1) paralyzed with fear or insecurities (e.g. after 3 years out of work, how can I go back to where I was before? Am I already too old?) or (2) way too comfortable/lazy to do anything about it (e.g. my husband makes enough money, why go back?). Working and building a career is tough and when we decide to give it up "for a while" we never realize how tough it is to get back in. If we can avoid it: we should not get out -even for a little bit. But this is the difficult part, how can we manage to work and have children and do all well, with so little support?

An Honest Woman
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A Little from Linda:

Dear Honest,

It takes a lot of courage to admit that once you step out of the ring, the barriers to stepping back in include two from inside: fear and laziness. I have never said that a lot of the women are victims of such mental habits, but a lot of the stories I heard in interviews had that subtext clear as day. "I just don't have the stomach for the politics and stress that go along with an executive position," as one stay at home mom put it on BloggingBaby.com.

If this is any comfort to you, it's not just you. Sequencing, which was made popular by one of a wave of backlash books in the 80's, "Sequencing," by someone named Arlene Rossen Cardozo, turns out to be a really unsuccessful strategy for dealing with the conflicting demands of work and family. According to an extremely informative article in Women's eNews in May, http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2728/context/archive, in a
2004 survey, the Center for Work Life Policy, a New York Think Tank, "found that 93 percent of women who 'off-ramp' want to work again, yet only 74 percent succeeded in obtaining jobs during the study and, among these women, only 40 percent return to full-time professional jobs. The rest are either self-employed or part-timers." That would be 29% who returned.

Even Cardozo, joining another Backlash writer, Terry Martin Hekker, whose husband famously left her after her fifteen minutes of fame as an advocate for devoting yourself to your husband, has now recanted and admitted that sequencing isn't a good idea. Her current advice, for what that is worth, is to work part time.

My advice is to put fear to work for you. The estimable Women's eNews article carries this warning from two current analysts: "'Women who sequence . . . face long-term financial costs, even if they only take a few years off,' says Erin L. Kelly, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. Women not only forego wages while childrearing, Kelly says, they earn less once they return to work and these wage penalties continue for years afterward. As a result, women often have fewer assets to support their retirement and are working longer. The number of women over 65 who are still working has increased 38 percent since 1980, according to the U.S. Labor Department. 'In today's economy, it is a risky strategy for women's long-term economic security.'

So Get To Work, Honest, rattle your network and if necessary start a little lower than you think you deserve. You may not need the money, now or ever, but life is long and, as your honest and articulate letter reflects, you have talents and capacities to use and give beyond the four walls of the single family dwelling.

L.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Linda,

I don't know if you believe in God & eternity spent in heaven or hell, but I do know this...I've never heard it said yet by anyone on their death bed that they regret not having spent more time at work.

A Proud Recycled Teenager
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A Little from Linda

Dear Teen,
Your letter is one of hundreds asking me: Have I ever heard anyone on their death bed regretting not spending more time at work? Like you, many of the writers worry about my beliefs in heaven, etc. I have no idea if tending to the modern nuclear family gets you into heaven or not. I do know that early Christians often abandoned their families and farms to follow the disciples and that celibacy is a high principle of the Catholic clergy. So there must be some people who don’t think the only way to heaven is to spend more time with your family.

Since it comes up so frequently, I will share my answer. I have never been at anyone’s death bed at all. I did visit my mother right before she died, and she was very clear in regretting that she hadn’t spent more time at the opera.

I suspect they aren’t deeply engaged in conversation at that point, but I have a list of people who, I would bet, would regret not having enough time at work. They are: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Mother Teresa, Pope John XXIII, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Jane Austen, Alexander Hamilton.

I could go on. But I won’t. Except to say that endlessly repeating an easily rebutted banal saying like this is unlikely to convince anyone capable of even elementary reason to change their mind about what constitutes a flourishing human life.

L.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 02:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)