It's interesting that Ms. Hirshman doesn't talk about men staying home to raise children. Well, and she talks around it, by implication. I thought the most interesting bit (from my point of view) was this:

Every Times groom assumed he had to succeed in business, and was really trying. By contrast, a common thread among the women I interviewed was a self-important idealism about the kinds of intellectual, prestigious, socially meaningful, politics-free jobs worth their incalculably valuable presence.

My own experience is very old-fashioned: I put my spouse through grad school, and now expect to rely on my spouse's income while I take care of house and family, volunteer, and work at things I like. I am hoping to skip the traditional part where the spouse ditches me for a pretty young thing, of course. Still, the effect is that I have never assumed I had to succeed in business; that is my wife's job.

Thanks,
-V.

I thought the article was pretty terrible, a left wing analog to the Leon Kass piece that recently got scorn heaped on it at Crooked Timber. Both, one from the left, one from the right, are convinced that poor benighted women who claim they are happy are just dupes, and that women need to listen to *them* and start doing what they tell them in order to truly be fulfilled.

At an individual level, I think the Prospect article has some good suggestions about what a woman should do if she wants to keep her career and still have kids. But as a prescriptive piece about what women in general should do, I thought it was very weak.

I was interested to see Hirshman's comment about "marrying down."  My feeling is that people should marry whoever they want, for whatever reasons work for them.

However, it certainly can't hurt for feminists to remind women that there is a natural tendency on the part of women to marry men whose status in society is (or is likely to be) at least as great as their own - a tendency that made sense in the days when a woman's place in the pecking order was dependent on her husband's, but is a lot less necessary nowadays.  And that in most such marriages, expecting the man to share the domestic burdens equally is probably a vain hope. 

If they WANT to both have children and have an essentially uninterrupted career, 'marrying down' in some sense of the word is exactly what they need to open themselves up to.  For ambitious college- and professional-school-educated women, this might mean marrying men whose educational levels are roughly the same, but whose career aspirations are less stratospheric, and who'd actually kinda like a year or so of being "Mr. Mom" at intervals in their lives.

But what might be even better is for us to find a path to what Cornel West and Sylvia Ann Hewlett suggested a decade ago in The War Against Parents: we need a societal setup where both men and women could scale down to 2/3 of their normal hours at 2/3 the pay, without that much of a career hit since they'd still be there most of the time, but freeing one-third of each parent's time to be a parent rather than a worker bee.

Of course, for this to happen, we'd have to be in a much more worker-friendly society than we are now - one where health care didn't depend on one's employer, and where upwardly mobile professionals weren't expected to be in the office 60 hours a week for no extra pay.

But between now and that utopia, I suggest that feminists work on simply helping women see the career consequences that go with women's tendency to 'marry up.' 

I'm not sure I know what I think about every point she raises, and I doubt anyone will agree with it all.




How about agreeing with none of it?




Good grief. Progressives need an argument like this like a hole in the head. Even leaving aside the fact that this is more fodder for the rightwing noise machine, does anyone seriously think shit like this is actually going to improve women's lives?

The achievements of feminism that are real are the opening up of opportunity for women and removing the barriers to going into certain fields if they choose. Feminism is (or should be) about choice. If a woman wants a high-powered career, that should be a choice. If she wants to stay at home, that should be a choice too. If she wants something in between, that's also OK. The idea that only the first of these is legitimate is about as out of touch with real people's lives as anything I've ever heard.




It just goes to show that the far left is every bit as illiberal as the far right, as if there were any doubt about that.

Hirshman writes:

There are three rules.  Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don't put yourself in a positon of unequal resources when you marry.

Sounds to me like good advice for both men and women -- I have no problem with that.

The rest of Hirshman's piece was laughable, I felt.  You cannot change culture and society from the outside, it just doesn't work, whether it's women's issues or civil rights or any social problem.  There has to be a compelling human need addressed in order for these kinds of changes to take place.

If you look at social movements, from civil rights to unions to suffrage equal pay for equal work, and protection from sexual harrassment, the damage that took place as a result of not having these social contracts was not only evident to an "elite," but to enough people from all walks of life to make the struggle, something which first grew organically from within the groups affected, to something people could wholeheartedly support and which eventually changed our laws and our mores.

Hirshman claims no real benefits from her rules and plans other than, perhaps, more women will be on TV shows.  More women law partners, CEOs and politicians, in our present economic and cultural climate, will not, I feel, necessarily make life more meaningful or allow women to "discover and create and shape a future different from h[er] past."  But in any event, Hirshman's ideas will not work because they are imposed from outside and do not address the real needs of either women or men.

I have to agree with the other posters who commented that the sample being women of affluence probably skewed the results.  While it's interesting to look at the choices these women make, they don't really exist in the "real world".  Ask anyone, male or female, if they could maintain their lifestyle while working part-time (or not at all) would they do so, and most would undoubtedly say "yes, they would". 
That being said, I disagree with some of the comments in the articles.  It is unfortunate that childcare and homecare disproportionately fall upon the women.  In spite of the advances we have made in opening the workplace, women still are almost always expected to be the one who takes time off to care for the sick.  She's usually the one who gets called when trouble crops up at school.  And far from accommodating their female employees' familial responsibilities, many companies penalize them.  The women are perceived as unreliable and least likely to put in extra hours. 
Witness the kerfuffle with Neil French, and I quote...""Women don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to. They're crap."  He added that women inevitably "wimp out and go suckle something".
While men seldom have to base their career choices on whether they want to procreate or not, women often have to consider the tradeoffs required between advancing in their careers and having a family.

Feminism is (or should be) about choice.

I must be a pretty old-fashioned feminist (first wave? second?) because I think that's a foolish statement whether it comes from a man or a woman.  Feminism has always been about the issues no one really likes to mention aloud-- influence, personal liberty, economic/social status, basically how women function in society-- and the "choice" argument is simply borrowed from abortion-rights rhetoric in an attempt to soften the very real power issues at stake.  Let's be honest: when a woman's choices relegate her to the same essential functions as her predecessor from 150 years ago (with a bit more legal status, of course, that no one really expects her to actually exercise), then the choices aren't particularly meaningful, and certainly aren't either a credit or a help to their gender.  And if choices are only for women, then women in general will always pay a premium for the more extensive menu regardless of what they happen to order.  

People are of course free to make whatever choices they want, regardless of gender, but I think I'll withhold my pats on the back for women whose sole uses for feminism are to get educations they hope not to use & to negotiate a slightly less onerous domestic arrangement.

Several weeks ago, Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker gave an amazing talk at the Chicago Humanities Festival about the correspondence between building a domestic life and advocating for social justice. He pointed out that Voltaire became outspoken against the use of torture in France’s judicial system at the same time that he bought a house and began cultivating a garden. Having his own space to care for, Gopnik said, developed in Voltaire an empathy for the rights of others. An early version of “the personal is political,” if you will.

In other words, the same person can – and should -- have both domestic and public roles, and one reinforces the other. Hirshman degrades the former to build up the latter, which just sends us back into the same “either/or” spiral, in which any woman on one side of the fence snipes at the woman on the other side.

I disagree with her view that the public sector has been conquered by feminism. If that were true, there would be more opportunities for parents – and not just mothers – to share high-powered jobs so that they could use their intelligence at work and cultivate their home lives. If that were true, we would see more laws like the one in Britain that requires an employer to consider a worker’s proposal for flexible hours.

What allows for “full human flourishing,” to use Hirshman’s term? How about a system that makes space both for caring for people close to us (something an 80-hour work-week makes extremely difficult) and contributing to the wider world, through work, volunteerism and social activism? I’d be interested in that discussion.

In my humble opinion, women should have the freedom to pursue their goals in life without the shackles that have traditionally hindered them, be they cultural or legal.

Everyone should have that freedom, but unfortunately we don't make our personal decisions in a vacuum-- they determine the degree & importance of our engagement with the world outside our own homes.

But if they choose a traditonal mother/wife role, that should never be denigrated or dismissed as unfeminist.

Well, it's not exactly trailblazing or anything, and it still means economic dependence and loss of status.  Doesn't mean that they can't call themselves feminists, but the fact is that their application of feminist principles is almost by definition limited to their personal relationships.

I can't think of anything more ridiculous than a woman educating herself and experiencing the world, then deciding that she can find true happiness as a mother, but then having scorn heaped on her by other women who argue she's letting down other women by not striving to be a mover and shaker.

Actually, Matt had a post on his personal blog commenting on the function of higher education, and I'd love to see him (or anyone) tie some of those ideas together with this topic.  Education costs money, and while the NYT-wedding-announcement crowd has always had access to it as both a meet market and a finishing school, we as a society don't actually profess to subsidize education primarily as a path to self-actualization.  There's an essential conflict between capitalism and feminism-- at least the "difference" or"choice" variety of feminism-- in that tangible returns on investments are expected, and giving a slight edge to future offspring isn't all that concrete a goal.  In all honesty, even an old lefty like me isn't particularly interested in helping middle-class women get degrees that might be of more practical use in lifting poorer women out of poverty.

I guess what you're saying here is that in order for feminism to be complete, then men have to give up more than they have and recent feminists are afraid to make that argument. I'm not knowledgeable enought about feminist politics to know if that's true or not, but I will say that 1. viewing gender politics as a zero-sum game is counter-productive and 2. the most important area of inequality remains childcare duties.

I don't think it should be a zero-sum game, but unfortunately that's how all issues regarding gender and race (and increasingly, class) are framed these days.  Certainly a more egalitarian social structure does minimize the traditional structural advantages of being a white, heterosexual, Christian male in the middle class or higher, and we can't really deny that.  BTW, in other venues I have long battled stay-at-home moms who have insisted that their husbands should be helping more with housework because their "job" is childcare-- my position is that a father should make childcare a priority outside of work hours because it is an investment in their offspring's well-being.  In other words, if their husbands are bringing home paychecks, they need to keep the house and share the children; to do otherwise is both selfish & overly sanctimonious.

But if a man decides that he doesn't want to stay home to raise the kids, shouldn't that be his right?

Oh, sure, but I doubt anyone will ever imply that he's a bad father for not wanting to... again, decisions aren't made in a vacuum.

After all, feminists are arguing that women ought to have that right. So shouldn't men have it as well?

This isn't about rights so much as the price paid for them-- women as a group all pay for flexibility/choices/whatever simply because some women exercise them.  I don't mind in principle, but I also know that until the day I hit menopause I will always be considered a flight risk in most work environments.  Always.  As far as men choosing childrearing, that's also fine, but while men probably pay heavier individual penalties for dropping out, I have yet to hear of men as a whole losing (or never gaining) ground in the workforce because some men stay home when the kids come.  By the way, we should be a bit more honest & call these choices "privileges" instead of "rights," because that's what they are in practice for most people.

Couples where both people work, don't want to give up their careers but can't afford a nanny or childcare have a real dilemma. But it should be worked out without a sense that either party is obligated one way or another.

That's impossible without a broader infrastructure that supports workforce & childcare flexibility, and we all know it.  I can't remember where I saw it (maybe Pandagon or Broadsheet), but someone pointed out that being a woman basically means wiping others' asses... it's an awful analogy, but it hits very, very close to home as well.  Of course one party is more obligated than the other in almost any decision-- whether it's the more traditional considerations of income & future prospects (advantage: male, in most cases) or a matter of household management abilities (I won't call this an advantage because it's such low-level stuff, but women usually claim greater expertise here), more often than not women are the ones relegated to the domestic sphere.  

Hey, you sound like me.  I'm currently helping to put my wife through law school.  We have 3 kids and she's a star law student who will soon be bringing in the dough so I can sit at home, take the kids to school, volunteer, read TPMCafe all day, and maybe write a book.  Why men don't volunteer for this route, I'll never know.

I'm not sure if you have kids, but it is hilarious when I take all 3 into the city (San Fran in my case).  People are amazed that I can handle a 1, 4, and 6 year old without a mother or grandmother.  I milk it to full advantage too as people will help me carry things, open doors, and even open the subway doors after they have closed.  Meanwhile the poor moms lugging 3 kids around are a mere afterthought.

I'm telling you gentlemen, forget the career, Mr. Mom is the way to go.  Sheer luxury, except for laundry (yuck!).  

By the way, my wife hated Hirshman's piece after I sent it to her.  I thought it quite missed the point as well.

Great post, though I may be biased, since I'm sort of a brother-at-arms on this issue, having quit my job a year and a half ago to do a minimal amount of consulting. 

I'm pretty sure that Times husbands are representative of nothing in society that's changing fast.  But they aren't really representative of anything, are they?

But there's some evidence that more and more fathers are taking the route you have, opting to stay home or downgrade their careers to play a greater role in raising their children. 

My son's pediatrician told me that she has seen a 40% increase in the number of fathers staying at home in her practice.  And since I left my idealistic non-profit job for part-time consulting, I see more and more fathers like me on the playground on mid-week afternoons.  

But for men as much as women, the trade-off here is one that may follow us for the duration of our careers.  I make about the same as I did working full-time, for the moment, but with a much less certainty that my career will pan out in the long- or even medium-term.  For those who might have had the kinds of careers that lead to the society pages, it's probably more stark: staying home may derail that kind of path forever.

So is it idealistic to stay home?  I hardly think so.  First, for any parent, it's pragmatic: the less time you spend working, the more resources you have for parenting and family life.  And the less overextended you are (though I bet we don't feel less overextended often).  Second, as far as I am concerned, it's utterly selfish: every minute more I get to spend with my rapidly growing toddler is worth whatever costs I may bear for it later on.

I don't agree with everything in Hirshman's piece, but man, it is a breath of fresh air after all those NYTimes opt-out revolution fluff pieces. A few comments to the comments above:

1)Of course we should pay attention to what happens to the elite women. Firstly, their expensive educations become an utter waste. Secondly, we desperately need more women in powerful positions in this country -- more women judges, business leader and politicians would be good for America, and like it or not, they are most likely to come from the highly educated elite. These are the women who have the best chance to go out there and break glass ceilings so other can follow. Thirdly, those NYT fluff pieces have enormous psychological impact not just on elite women, but all women, because those opt-out moms are held up as an ideal.

2) I don't like to second guess people's life choices. But when we look at the choices made by most families in the aggregate, we can draw inferences about our society's values and priorities. It is mostly women who sacrifice their careers for their family rather than the other way around. Why do you think it is so? If we really value a stay-at-home parent so much, why is it that not that many men, especially men with high-powered jobs, make that choice?

3) Context is everything. I love to cook. It is a wonderfully relaxing and creative hobby for me. But I would hate to live in a society where the onus is placed on women to do all the cooking. Even if I spend the same number of hours cooking the same food, it would be oppressive drudgery rather than a pleasure. Same with childrearing duties. it should be a joy as well as a burden. But by assuming that it is right and proper for the vast majority of stay-at-home parents to be female, we are continuing to code childrearing as woman's work, beneath the notice of men. We may praise the moms for all their sacrifice and point out all the intangible benefits they recieve. But praise and intangible benefits are cheap to bestow.

In short, i think Hirshman is really onto something. I'm sick of all this post-feminism "Hey, we might be acting like stepford wives, but we're choosing it this time!" stuff. Note: I'm not denigrating people for their choices. Their choices are a reflection that there is still a massive power imbalance between the genders in our society. 

I don't see why everybody dislikes the article. It seems pretty clearheaded to me.  If you want x, do y and z. The article was also interesting how it explicitly pointed to "the rules" as a similar type of strategic advice for a different domain.

Hm. My experience is a trifle different. When I sit in the park watching my daughter play, I get a lot of funny looks, because I'm, you know, a guy in the park with the kids. And I must say I can't bring myself to ask for phone numbers to set up play-dates.

Still, as I tell people, if my boss is going to be wildly irrational and prone to temper tantrums, I'll choose the four-year-old any day.

Thanks,
-V.

Oh, yes. It's a guy thing, I think, but perhaps also an I'm-not-gay thing (perhaps less so in Ess Eff).

The other thing is that the whole stereotype thing has been worked up over the years as a defense mechanism--oh, poor dopey me can't change a diaper properly, can you do it honey? Now that some of us don't mind changing diapers--well, now that some of us are willing to change diapers, anyway--it's hard to believe we can do it right.
Of course, I can also wash dishes properly, it turns out. I can't cook, but I can knit. My wife is a great cook, but can't knit and isn't patient with the little ones. We're both average at laundry. Oh, and she makes more money than I ever could. Hmm, maybe it turns out that people are different one to another, and don't always follow the statistical trends? Maybe I can write a NYT article about that!

Thanks,
-V.

While sarcastic remarks are nice, you didn't address the point.  Do you think those people don't have a right to be pissed off about it?