Never a dull moment. Last week, this aging radical feminist found herself next to Paris Hilton on the msn list of "Women Who Make You Cringe." Apparently I made the list not for my hair extensions, darn, but because my book Get to Work argues, as Susan B. Anthony said, that housework could turn you into either a "doll" or a "drudge." (Yep, she said it. Here's the link to the interview with famed jounalist Nellie Bly.)

This week, I find myself in a category with faux stay-at-home-mom Caitlin Flanagan. How did this happen? The otherwise estimable E.J. Graff wrote an article in the Columbia Journalism Review intended to "obliterate the myth —perpetuated in story after story by our elite news outlets, especially The New York Times—that a great swath [sic] of working mothers in this country are either bolting the career track or dreaming of doing so." Will no one stop confusing the privileged few with "real" women of blue collar and low wage classes, Graff asks. Although the rich bitch articles seem harmless at first, she continues, publicizing their "choice" to opt out only relieves the larger society of its responsibility to completely restructure the workplace in order to accommodate the needs of women who must work or starve -- and their families.

Since, unlike the smarmy Times stories about the ex-artist pushing her stroller on the Upper West Side or the third wave feminist transformed by childbirth, I actually said that even these elite women were making a serious mistake, it's hard for me to figure out how I got to be part of the problem. Doesn't anyone actually read what they are writing about before they condemn it? anyway, I'm all for restructuring the work place. In fact, I recently suggested that it was time to resurrect that hoary old workplace restructurer Karl Marx. I'm just not enamored of restructuring the work place in order to enable women to bear more of the responsibility for the unjust family. Lisa Belkin reported something real and something that matters. The mistake in the Opt Out Revolution line isn't the opting out; it's the revolution! Some revolution. Graff thinks all these stories about how happy the mommies are pushing their twin strollers around the Upper West Side add up to a tidal wave of support for the most destructive gender ideology, and she's dead on. But if there is anyone in America who has pulled the curtain on the saccharine and retrograde tsunami of moral tales of sainted mommies and their go getter investment banking husbands, it's me. "Everybody Hates Linda," remember?

But Graff's piece makes a much worse mistake than picking on me. She and Joan Williams, whose report supplied most of the content for Graff, make an intellectual mistake that's hard to defend: they ignore the argument against them. Elite women do matter. It's not like they don't know the argument exists, because it's front and center in all the work of mine that they condemn. Here is a direct quotation from the article in The American Prospect that Graff herself cites: "As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes -- the senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference. Media surveys reveal that if only one member of a television show’s creative staff is female, the percentage of women on-screen goes up from 36 percent to 42 percent. 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. Think of a big American city with an 86-percent white police force. If role models don’t matter, why care about Sandra Day O’Connor? Even if the falloff from peak numbers is small, the leveling off of women in power is a loss of hope for more change. Will there never again be more than one woman on the Supreme Court?"

I argued for the importance of paying attention to elite women, because I knew about the argument that elite women don't matter long before I wrote Get to Work. (Note that no one ever argues that elite men don't matter.) Although I disagree, the contention was real, so, unlike Graff and Williams, I addressed it at length as you see. Elite women matter. Why does Graff think the entailed New York Times is spending so much ink telling elite women how they belong at home? Maybe Graff and Williams have an answer to my argument that elite women matter, but we'll never get to hear it, because they just pretend the argument does not exist. What intellectual or journalist just acts as if there were no argument against their key assumption?

Second, Graff says, that “opt-out stories invariably focus on women in one particular situation: after they have ‘opted out’ but before any of them divorce.” Wrong again: Anyone who read my book would know that I selected my cohort at the moment they married, so they could hardly have either opted out or divorced before I identified them. 15% of them had not opted out. I criticize them harshly for their dreamy fantasy that they can just jump back into good jobs, but 50% of American marriages do not end in divorce, as Graff flatly asserts. What?? Two passes through Google and you would know that Graff's "latest census figures" are from a 2003 report, which said that if current trends continue, divorce MIGHT eventually hit 50%. TWO YEARS AGO, in 2005, the census bureau issued a report showing that divorce rates never exceeded 41%. Rose Kreider, the Census divorce number guru, whose old and superseded speculation Graff calls "latest census figures," has said publicly that the rate will never approach 50%. Graff and Williams and I obviously disagree about whether elites matter. In the end, they can have their opinions. But they cannot have their own census data! And where does that eighty hour week thing come from? It's like the internet hoax about the modem tax; it just won't go away. Even Fast Company reports that the top business managers in America don't work more than sixty-five or so hours a week. Doesn't the Columbia Journalism Review Employ a Fact Checker? Graff's article is also riddled with internal inconsistencies, like the assertion that the workplace is this hideous Dickensian world but no one is opting out. Or that the stories she criticizes for not telling people about the conditions at work or how unhappy the women are at home are the very sources she uses for telling people about the conditions at work or how unhappy they are at home. (Graff: "More than a third of the articles in Williams’s report cite “workplace inflexibility” as a reason mothers leave their jobs. Nearly half mention how lonely and depressed those women get when they’ve been downgraded to full-time nannies.")

And they cannot have their own census data about whether the numbers of mothers in the workforce has declined or not either. Graff says: "Their opening lines often suggest that a generation of women is flouting feminist expectations and heading back home. At the simplest factual level, that’s false. Census numbers show no increase in mothers exiting the work force." But six months ago, someone at the Bureau of Labor Statistics leaked the 2005 numbers and a report that shows that the opting out is both more widespread and longer lasting than previously thought to the Wall Street Journal. I now have the publicly available 2005 statistics the Bureau was using, although the Report is still being vetted, and, as the Bureau said, there has been no statistically significant return of married women with children to the workforce since the numbers started declining in the late Nineties. After the WSJ article appeared, I sent it to Graff's and Williams' select economist, Heather Boushey, asking her what to make of the new data. She never answered me.

I emailed to Boushey, because I have no investment in telling people things that are not true. If the new BLS numbers had a flaw in them, I didn't want to go around citing them. I certainly don't need them for my work to matter, because I am perfectly comfortable discussing the behavior of elite women. But so far none of the vaunted economists of the left have said a peep about them. Even though I got them with a single phone call to the nice people at the BLS. Hey CJR, there's a little journalism for you.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For a brief moment on msn today, my darling daughter reported, there was a feature called "Ten Women Who Make US Cringe," by Joanne Cronrath Bamberger. (Don't go there; apparently my fifteen minutes are over.) Alongside the usual suspects, like Paris Hilton, appeared your honorable servant. (Goodness, had I known I would have given them a picture from the red carpet. ) Wondering how I wound up in such well-toned company at my advanced age, I did a little research into the cringing author. Surprise! She went to a state law school, but, ten years later, was no longer practicing. She quit and stays home with her babies, mommyblogging on something called PunditMom. She considers herself a professional writer, producing such immortal tomes as a monthly column on Prelude Kids for an airline magazine and aspires to publish a book.
Since I have written substantial articles on how people who take the taxpayers' money for their legal educations and then quit to stay home with their kids should give back the cost of their education, and that mommyblogging is not a substitute for a paying, competitive job and that every other stay at home mom in the suburbs thinks she's a professional writer and have actually published several books, it's understandable that I make her cringe. It is my intention to make Joanne Cronrath Bamberger cringe. As for the rest of "us," I leave it up to them to decide whether to join Punditmom in her cringing.
But I did notice something interesting about her cringe group: five of the ten women were on the list because we had written about the state of feminism in western culture. Which is where, airline magazine or not, Bamberger and hundreds of millions of other women and girls will make their lives. And NONE of her heroines had. Three of the five were conservative -- advocating staying at home, which is what most of the noise has been in these backlash years. Sheila Jeffreys, a Professor from Melbourne, is the other radical in the group. Although I don't agree with Phyllis Schlafley, Caitlin Flanagan and the like, at least we all care about the future of women in western culture and are willing to put our opinions on the line about it. Obviously we came too close to home for Joanne Cronrath Bamberger.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 01:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, so I have been a little MIA lately. I have not been baking cookies, as many of you suspected, however. I am working on a project, which I hope will become a book, on American women as citizens and voters. I have been wondering whether the intense privatization and moral relativism I found in the stay at home moms would affect their political behavior as well.

Events conspired to make my obscure academic interest very relevant, of course, when Senator Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy for President. Her advisors, James Carville and Mark Penn, had been quite vocal asserting that her eventual electoral victory would rest heavily on the disproportionate support of female citizens. Since I had a computer full of research on women's political behavior, I indulged in some speculation on how some women would react to the reality of a serious female candidate. The article, "You've Come A Long Way, Maybe," appeared in the Washington Post, on the web Saturday and in print on Sunday.

If you read it you will see that I used a handful of conversations with DC area SAHM's to give a little color to the extensive political science data I had gathered. Although it is interesting that the women I interviewed turned out to look just like the studies said they would, the article then continued to tell the reader that the statistical data reflects that women are not as interested in politics as men are, do not know as much about politics as men do, and do not read or listen to the media where political information is dispensed as much as men do. The Center for Civic Education says so, the University of Michigan says so, the Pew Trusts say so and every study by reputable political scientists since Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter's pathbreaking book from Yale, "What Americans Know and Why It Matters," came out in 1997, have said so.

ASU political scientist Carol Mueller had concluded years ago that this ignorance and lack of interest would lead to volatile, emotional and impulsive behavior in the polling booth. Accordingly, I speculated that a successful Clinton campaign would have to be shaped to the reality of female political behavior, including equal parts of deploying a very privatized and domestic persona and making sure that the Mighty Republican Wurlitzer machine did not turn her into the person no one wanted to sit with in the cafeteria.

Ink still wet, careless readers from across the country assaulted me for making predictions based on a handful of conversations with Maryland Mommies. Apparently most readers, male and female, are incapable of taking in information that comes in any form other than reported conversation even when the studies cited appear in the same article or even on the same page as the dialogue. The wealth of research might never have appeared.

Worse, the most poisonous of the criticism about relying on anecdote came from another academic, one Ann Althouse, who opens her eponymous blog, each time by telling everyone that conservative critic Terry Teachout thinks she's "divine." (Maybe divinity strips you of the capacity to read the full text of a 2000 word article, but it's not a characteristic I anticipate from people making a living from the learning trades.) Here's Althouse's take on my article: 'Women don't decide elections because they're not rational political actors... [T]hey vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality.' Linda Hirshman editorializes in the Washington Post. She interviewed some woman about Hillary Clinton . . . " True enough, but nowhere in any of the rest of the post does she so much as mention any of the above described research, which makes up at least half of the article that got her so upset (she implies that I advocate repealing the Nineteenth Amendment). In a pile on on bloggingheads.tv.com,Althouse and Mark Schmitt, a lifelong policy wonk and political intellectual, who should know better than to read just half an article, can be seen cackling away about how DC area voters won't decide the election anyway. No kidding? Really? And here I thought the five people I talked to WERE the missing Florida votes from 2000.

Well, Althouse and Schmitt have a high old time, howling over how anyone could be stupid or misogynistic enough to think that a campaign to voters who don't learn or care about policy disputes would look different than a campaign to the millions of males immersed in copies of Newsweek and Time. The absolutely weirdest part of the entire performance art was Schmitt, who works for the New America Foundation and writes about nothing but politics all of the time and has written about politics all of his adult life, nodding mindlessly while Althouse asserted that it's too early for any sane person to get interested in the election of 2008. Maybe goddesses have some hypnotic effect on policy wonks that has gone unnoticed until this time. One blog of Venus?

Meanwhile, of course, HRC is doing EXACTLY what I said she had to do -- campaigning as a mom and warning her opponents that if they tried to demonize her like they did to John Kerry, she'd "deck 'em." Not forty-eight hours after I predicted that development in the Washington Post, the New York Times caught up with Robin Toner's Political Memo, "Women Feeling Freer to Suggest Vote for Mom.".

I'm sorry that Ann Althouse -- and all the other wishful thinkers on the blogosphere who believe that women act just like men in the political arena -- don't like the message or think it's a betrayal of feminism to report the data. I continue to believe that drugging ourselves with empty talk of gender gaps is no substitute for hard political research and analysis. And I guess Hillary thinks so, too.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)