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.