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.