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.