“Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power need guidance, and they need it early. Step one is simply to begin talking about flourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots. This may anger some, but it should sound the alarm before the next generation winds up in the same situation. Next, feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy. It will require rules — rules like those in the widely derided book The Rules, which was never about dating but about behavior modification.”
“Fully 40 percent of highly qualified women with spouses felt that their husbands create more work around the house than they perform. According to Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling’s Career Mystique, “When couples marry, the amount of time that a woman spends doing housework increases by approximately 17 percent, while a man’s decreases by 33 percent.” Not a single Times groom was a stay-at-home dad. Several of them could hardly wait for Monday morning to come. None of my Times grooms took even brief paternity leave when his children were born.
“How to avoid this kind of rut? You can either find a spouse with less social power than you or find one with an ideological commitment to gender equality. Taking the easier path first, marry down. Don’t think of this as brutally strategic. If you are devoted to your career goals and would like a man who will support that, you’re just doing what men throughout the ages have done: placing a safe bet.”
“Worse, the behavior tarnishes every female with the knowledge that she is almost never going to be a ruler.”
Let’s talk about being a woman today. Let’s talk about choice and choosing where you want to be in life. Let’s talk about taking choice from a “man’s” hands and placing it in your own.
Notice what I said there: YOUR OWN. Not another woman’s hands to force you into making choices “for the good of those to come.” That is what Ms. Hirshman is saying in the above quotes from this article. She is basically stating that we must return to radical, militant feminist roots because things didn’t turn out as planned in the beginning…so we now need to condition the next generation.
What did change? Let’s look and see. Women have more sexual freedom. We can use birth control openly and without feeling guilty or downcasting our eyes. We can work where we please and can cry discrimination if we don’t like something (I want to hear a male, especially a white male, attempt that and see how quickly he’s laughed out of court) or if we don’t get our way. We can bash men left and right, expecting only to be treated with respect in return. We can get degrees to the highest extent any male can and we can use that degree. We are in the maths and sciences at greater numbers due to no one telling us that we just can’t do it. (And when I was told that I shouldn’t be in a higher-level math class from a teacher, I told him exactly what I thought of his comment and proceeded to outshine every male in his class on principle.) We can work outside the home when we have children or stay with them.
Are all of those things necessarily good? No, not necessarily. Many, indeed most, are. But women took the freedom of self a bit far and took it to mean mainly sexual freedom. Women have taken advantage of this bit of the feminist movement (to the delight of men everywhere) and have taken or left the rest of it at their leisure.
Should we begin demanding and forcing women into the workplace? No. Granted, I agree that some are doing it because they feel it’s the right choice based on any number of factors, including the fact that they made less money than their husbands or they just felt it was they way things “should be”. Just because a woman of “higher educational status” makes the choice to stay home with her child does not mean that she was brainwashed into thinking it was her only choice, the correct one. It saddens me to think that she isn’t giving women of our country and my generation enough credit to realize that we can make intelligent choices. Just because I believe that I would like to stay home and homeschool my kids should we ever make that choice (not on the horizon in any form, by the way) doesn’t mean that Neal has made that choice for me. (In fact, he’s more against the idea than I am.) My own mother did both, stayed home until I was ten and worked outside the home thereafter. I’ve had both worlds. Both have pros and both have cons. I can make an intelligence choice based on my own beliefs, my own system of thinking, and my own background and experience.
Saying that we need to cut women down because they are highly educated and still choose to stay home? Is going from one extreme on the scale of women’s rights to the other. I am not a strict traditionalist, by any means, and anyone who’s read this blog longer than two months would definitely know this.
But I do believe in the right of choosing your life paths and making your own decisions based on moral and ethical beliefs, past experience, and just whatever the hell you feel is right.
Telling me or any other educated woman that our choice is wrong? Is wrong-thinking at its worst. If no man can decide my homebound status, no woman is going to decide my working status.
Get out of my face. Get away from me with your “return to judgemental feminism” philosophy. Realize that I HAVE a significant other who accepts and supports the decisions we make TOGETHER.
In my life? My marriage will be a partnership, not me making selfish decisions because “I’m a woman and I’ve been oppressed for so long that I deserve the right to make choices without thinking about others.”
We have all seen how well this works and it isn’t pretty. Let’s get our heads out of our rears and take a stand on what our own personal choices are. Let’s know why we made a decision and be able to back it up firmly so we can tell people like this that our decisions are firmly rooted in thought and discussion. Perhaps if more people thought that marriage was indeed a cooperative effort and less a me vs. you, man vs. woman ordeal, we wouldn’t have the divorce rate we now have.
No one has the right to force me into a decision. So realize this: When I make one, it is one that I myself am content with. And if someone else doesn’t agree with it or doesn’t like it, they have no right to call me a sell out or an anti-woman.
Women tout hating the way men have treated women, as stepping stones to get where they are going, yet this feminist is calling women to treat men the same way. Equality? I think not. She wants to set up “Rules” for women to follow, which will just create automatons of a different sort than the 50s housewife. We’ll be mindless wenches, following the “women’s creed” and bashing men more than we already do. Equality there, then? Again, I think not. Stating that women have to follow rules created by women is no different than men saying we have to follow theirs. There is no equality in mindless lemming-ness.
Equality is definitely called for but…calling women to be selfish and self-centered? Is not the way to equality. Let’s face it, we need more discussion between the sexes and fewer calls to arms for the “sisters” to push men down and trample on them more.
Pushing one person only leads to having them push back harder. And then where will we end up? No resolution, no change. Back to the beginning of antagonism and hostility.
If it didn’t work the first time, what makes you think it will this time?
(As an aside, in case you don’t know me well enough or can’t glean my point of view of the world from other pages on my blog, I am very pro-female. But I’m also pro-male and push for the equality women say they want, not the male-bashing I often see. I want all to give women credit for being able to think on their own and men credit for being better-natured about gender-bashing than women are.)
Further reading (AKA articles I’ve skimmed over a bit and haven’t finished reading in-depth yet):
1. More of Ms. Hirshman’s POV as a follow-up to her previously linked article, with comments from rational people on both sides of the issue
2. A fairly balanced story with comments from Hirshman and from mothers
3. An interesting article that calls to mind a question I’ve been asking for ages. If women have triumphed in the so-called “sexual revolution”, then why do we have to make ourselves still look like a man’s ideal (Playboy, 36DD, small waist, perfect hair, makeup to hide all flaws, and “Oooh”ing over every thing a man does all day, every day) in order to get their attention? I know very few, if any, men who really want a “real” woman and most go for their “ideal”, forgetting that beauty is often not even really skin deep (unless you’ve got the makeup spackle or airbrush handy) and that a perfect figure is no substitution for an honest person with integrity. (Sorry for the mini-rant. This has been a source of irritation for me a bit lately.)
4. An educated stay-at-home mother’s POV (with a bit of graphic imagery of her opinion of Ms. Hirshman)
Well said. I could almost leave it at “I can’t add anything more to this well thought out post,” but I want to show I’m thinking about what you said, heh.
Men have a ways to come as well. I get depressed when I see magazines like Maxim, etc. (not the least for giving into the stereotypes those magazines push at times). Because they basically encourage men to be base, to be wrong and act like it’s right. Men shouldn’t want this stereotype, and women shouldn’t want to be it either. And how sad is it that this idea is increasingly bought into as the way things are? I’ve given into that thinking before, and hate it.
And I particularly hate the reverse discrimination advocated in the quotes you used from this article. Equality is about balancing things out where they should be: not tipping the scales the opposite direction.
But yes… I have very little to add to your post. Because I agree wholeheartedly.
Exactly. Equality, to me, means being equal, not pushing one person down and standing on their head while you try to make things better for you and only you.