I got another letter the other day from a student at Dickinson University, asking me "if your book covers strategies for the women who have not been able to take earnest pride in their careers for they are stuck in dead-end jobs with kids, no father, no help, no health care, and whose mission every day is simply to survive." She continues, "what I was thinking when I was reading that article was what about the thousands of women who are walking through the doors of say, Wal-Mart every morning earning their $5.15/hour . . . who have babies at home with no father to help ... One cannot pull herself up by her bootstraps if she's got no boots. "

The answer, of course, is no, I am not directing my advice to unmarried Wal Mart cashier mothers. Had she read the book, rather than just following the common student strategy of asking me what was in it, she would know that my strategies are all intended to apply BEFORE women end up single parents at Wal Mart.

Youngsters are supposed to be idealistic, so I would normally not blog about it, but the student's naive question surfaced in a much more dangerous form recently in the lefty magazine, The New Republic on line. In a column with the illuminating headline, " A PLAGUE ON LINDA HIRSHMAN, HER CRITICS, AND HER SUPPORTERS" [I guess that covers pretty much everyone except the writer] one Lee Siegel blogs that "Hirshman . . . is writing for a very small, elite group of professional women. For most women, their job is something they would gladly have twins to escape." Then (is there a macro on the computer that produces "cashier at Wal-Mart" when you press it? I would think a columnist for the New Republic would have something a little more original in his bag of examples), Siegel continues, " I don't think a cashier at Wal-Mart is going to sit around wondering whether or not she should return to work as a ringing statement of strength and autonomy."

The youngster can't remember, but surely Siegel knows that the strategy of rejecting proposed social change because it does not solve every possible social problem is the wickedly effective strategy of the RIGHT. No welfare except for the really truly needy, remember? That's Reagan's phrase, not someone normally found in The New Republic.

So. No escape from the ball and chain of the gender ideology of boring, repetitious tasks, dependence on a wealthier man, and spending your social resources at the bake sale . . .
unless you also solve the problem of globalized late capitalism, single parenthood and American economic inequality, as manifest in the current version of the Walter Keane painting, the Wal Mart cashier.

This girl ain't takin that bait, thank you anyway. Even Marx knew you could not start a revolution with the lumpenproletariat. Help people with boots first. Problem is, even women with boots aren't using them very well when they "choose" to be barefoot and pregnant.

But I'd bet anything that Lee Siegel doesn't think we should stop giving Social Security just because it goes mostly to the well-to-do. The funny thing about this argument is that it's always used against feminism. Nothing can be done for any woman unless you do for every woman. As if women had some higher moral capacity which made them responsible for every single human soul on this earth. Why stop with the Wal Mart cashier? What about the impoverished and disease ridden millions of the third world?

Here's the dirty little secret Siegel didn't share: his "liberal" argument is a sure prescription for feminism's failure. If no one can liberate any woman until they liberate every woman, then the liberal men with their stay at home wives will be just as happily ensconced in the 1950's as the conservatives they criticize.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Gina,
I did not want to bother my readers by answering your questions, because even a passing familiarity with my work reveals that:
1. I never said teaching young adults was comparable to tending children doing most of their learning at school.
2. I repeatedly and explicitly said the work of child rearing and housekeeping should be shared between the adults, rather than having women do close to 70% of the labor, as they now do (whether they also work in the market economy or not).
3. Although religious believers can argue from common premises, I am not going to argue with people who argue by quoting the Bible. What am I going to say? God told me to tell you to go to work? Five thousand years ago?
I am not using this website to repeat what I have already said twice -- once in the American Prospect and once in Get to Work.
P.S.
I note that you changed your address server for your comment. What happened to your mailbox at vision.org?

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The producer for Leslie Morgan Steiner, who blogs at the Washington Post, asked me if I’d like to be a guest blogger, which led me to follow the discussion there for a while. Although I ultimately decided that I was not a good fit for that blog, which is mostly mommies whining about their bake sales and high priced nannies, it was interesting to see what the world looks like on such sites. There was also a harrowing article about another such site, UrbanBaby.com, in New York Magazine last week, which came to me, because the author quoted me as saying that the urban baby world looks a lot like the “problem that has no name” which launched the feminist movement forty years ago.

Reading about the mommyblogs left me with the following question.

“Rachel, Rachel, I've been thinking what a fine world this would be
If the boys were all transported far beyond the northern sea” (nursery song, anon.)

I have been asking myself if the members of this online community have indeed created a world, in which the men are magically transported to another realm. And is it a fine world?

I read on Steiner’s blog of room “moms,” great room “moms,” bad room “moms,” but nowhere is there a single room dad. I read of guilty working “moms” who want to quit their jobs for more babies, but the man in the picture is not interested in changing his life. I read that “nothing compares to the bond a mom has with her kids,” from a writer struggling to come back after 19 years out of the work force, but only a single post about the bond a dad has with his kids.

Not a fine world. The women cannot bear the burden of supporting their schools, earning a middle class living and staying connected with the world of work without sharing the responsibilities of making a family with the other adult on the scene.

Like Leslie, I get a lot of letters to this website, Gettoworkmanifesto.com. Recently a writer told me that when she struggled with “balance,” her husband told her to quit her job. Meeting the needs of the children and workplace was her problem. I’d think worse of him if I didn’t read the posts in which the women just buy right into that unjust assumption that the household is their responsibility alone.

Get to work. Men are not villains, but as the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, “whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good.” Men will not carry their share of the household unless they have to. Instead of worrying about balance, the women should invest in school, stay at work, and refuse to have more children until the men come to the home room meeting. They will never be free as long as they are willing to create and inhabit Rachel’s world, in which the men are as distant from the task of balance as if they were on an ice floe in the Arctic.

Posted by Linda Hirshman at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)