It’s to your credit that you don’t wait for the millennium of gender equality within the family, that you offer advice for the world as it is. But in this world, you make choices, set priorities, draw invidious distinctions. In the world as it is, your proposal presupposes a ready supply of servants to do the domestic work you tell elite women to shun. The work won’t disappear, nor will the elite husbands of your elite women do it all, not in this world. It will largely fall to poor women. Does anyone doubt that? Nor will it become any less animal-like, unfit for intelligent, capable humans, less inimical to their flourishing, any less characteristic of a lesser life. But your complaint isn’t that it’s immoral or unfitting for poor women to do it. Far from it. And if, adventitiously, poor women lack the capacities – wealth, position, education, proximity to rulership – that make it so horrifying & immoral for upper class, Ivy League women to do it themselves, then is it more fit that they be hewers of wood & haulers of water? Your vision makes objective (or objectivizing) use of poor women as a means to other people’s ends, without adequately considering their own needs or projects.

An alternative, equally pragmatic feminism, one that takes the needs & capacities of all women equally into account, by pressing for measures to afford poor women better alternatives than domestic service in elite households, potentially comes into conflict with your feminism, by calling into question the easy solution to the problem of getting good help that it presupposes. It’s neither banal, nor naïve, nor dangerous, nor socialist, for feminists to demand that feminist ‘advice’ cast its net more widely than the concerns of upper class, Ivy League, society page young women, the ones who see as the logical potential rulers of the rest of us. Those Wal-Mart cashiers aren’t just some leftie’s boring, unoriginal rhetorical device. Like the vast majority of other women, they’ll never have their marriages announced in the Times’ Sunday Style section, much less become the “rulers” of any hierarchical society, but their capacities & projects & dignity are as worthy & as real as any woman’s, & any feminism that doesn’t start from that fact is dead at the root.

I publish this comment once again contending that feminism is "dead" unless it helps all women, although it is repetitious of the original letter and Lee Siegel (RIP) critiques, just to make the point for the thousandth time that most revolutions start with the middle class, or the proletariat at the least, people who have enough power to make change and enough disaffection from the caste system of power to know to want to make change. If all change has to wait for all change, there will be no change. This is the dirty little secret of the right, and I will say it until I die and then put it on my tombstone. So stop writing me about Wal Mart.This is the last such comment I will approve.