Forget about the butter.
It's safe to say Linda R. Hirshman would disapprove of how I spent my day yesterday. I did a week's worth of laundry. Bought some groceries. Tidied up in preparation for some houseguests. Took a stab at organizing the avalanche of papers on the kitchen table. Spent way too much time struggling to get my kids outside and away from the TV. And between household tasks, squeezed in work on a writing assignment.
It was, in other words, a fairly typical day for me, in the nine years since I quit my job as a newspaper reporter and became a part-time self-employed writer and a most-of-the-time at-home mother.
Hirshman, a former lawyer and retired professor of philosophy and women's studies at Brandeis University, doesn't know me. But her new book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, makes it clear she would see my laundry folding and grocery shopping as evidence that I am wasting my life and betraying women everywhere.
To say Hirshman does not look kindly upon at-home motherhood is an understatement. Her book attacks the notion that caring for one's kids is as valid a life choice as paid employment. Normally considered progressive for honoring women's individual wishes, "choice feminism," she argues, has reinforced gender inequality at home and at work. Women remain stuck with the bulk of housework and childcare while men, relieved of equal responsibility for those low-status tasks, are freed to run the country.
"Bounding home is not good for women and it's not good for the society," Hirshman writes. "The women aren't using their capacities fully; their so-called free choice makes them unfree dependents on their husbands. Whether they leave the workplace altogether or just cut back their commitment, their talent and education are lost from the public world to the private world of laundry and kissing boo-boos."
Hirshman urges women to ensure their influence in the workforce by following a set of strict rules: get well-paid jobs and stay in them, limit themselves to one child, demand their husbands do half the housework--in fact, marry only men who are certain to do their share.
The book expands on an essay Hirshman published last year in The American Prospect, a piece that ignited such an explosion of online hostility that Googling her name practically causes one's computer to quiver with indignation. Readers, from feminists to mom bloggers to the New York Times' David Brooks, took offense at her disdain for child rearing as a worthwhile occupation, her claim that a full life rests on a paycheck, her insistence that women are obligated to shape their private lives for the public good, her generally overbearing tone. "Emphatic note to Linda Hirshman: Feminists can say anything they damn well want (even 'Fuck you!' when we are so moved, which is not a random observation here)" said Sivacracy.net. "I found the article incredibly irritating and off-base," said Half-Changed World. "More tendentious lies," said Playground Revolution. In feminist and motherhood-politics circles, the essay dominated watercooler chatter for months.
Hirshman's argument is that women who stay home trade self-fulfillment for drudgery. And by becoming dependent on their spouses, they lose power in their marriages and endanger their own financial security, ironically limiting their future choices.
Besides, she insists, the decision to stay home is not as personal as it seems. For one thing, this seemingly free choice is in fact often triggered by cultural pressures and domestic demands. In addition, it carries public consequences: it deprives younger women of role models, increases gender imbalance in the workplace, leaves employers wary of hiring women. By opting out, women reduce female influence in government, media and industry, undermining the chances for enacting laws and policies favorable to women.
Hirshman shrugs off as "wishful thinking" the call for family-friendly workplaces that allow for more flexible balancing of work and family. Interestingly, hers is the mirror image of the defeatist attitude some women take toward getting husbands to do more housework.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Hirshman's manifesto is her dismissive attitude toward the satisfactions of spending time with kids. Raising a family "has obvious emotional and immediate rewards," she allows. But it lacks the "opportunities for full human flourishing" that high-powered careers can offer.
Here is where I, a mostly-at-home mother, might be expected to defend my choice. Here is where I insist that my decision to downscale my career had nothing to do with cultural forces or housework overload. Here is where I insist that, if at-home motherhood is occasionally frustrating, all doubts vanish when I gaze into my children's cherubic faces.
Instead, I'll freely admit that Hirshman makes some excellent points.
Oh, she's not always right. Once in a while, my children actually are cherubic. My departure from full-time work was partly inspired by a genuine desire to spend more time with them, fear of missing their childhoods, anguish as I dropped them off at daycare. Moreover, I didn't like my job and had become convinced that Americans placed way too much importance on work. (Hirshman calls this disillusionment with work the lefty's reason for embracing the "hyperdomesticated family"--the liberal flip side, in other words, of conservatives' respect for traditional roles. She discounts both views.)
But as Hirshman would predict, maternal feelings and job dissatisfaction weren't the only reasons I left.
Cultural forces also played a big role. I can't say I felt much more social pressure to quit than I did to pursue a career. But the two options were fighting a titanic battle in my head. What tipped the balance was reading best-selling child-care manuals warning that if babies don't spend most of their time in the company of a loving, unchanging adult, they are basically doomed. In the years since, I've become skeptical--even outright cynical--about most child-care advice. But as a nervous new mother, I was terrified.
The other factor in my decision was housework. And here I can see Hirshman nodding along with a little self-satisfied smile.
My husband has always been good about household chores. Before our children came, he did fully half of them. But after the kids arrived, responsibilities gradually shifted. After all, only I could get up in the middle of the night and breastfeed the babies. And during my maternity leaves, I was home all day anyway--why not throw in a load of laundry now and then?
When I returned to work after my second maternity leave, we were left working two high-pressure, long-houred newspaper jobs while caring for two children. (Hirshman: "Have a baby. Just don't have two. … a second kid pressures the mother's organizational skills; doubles the demands for appointments; wildly raises the cost of child care …") Our daycare center closed at six p.m. sharp: we'd speed back and forth, pass children off like batons, occasionally haul babies into the office and set their carriers next to our desks while we pounded out deadline assignments. And that was on an ordinary day. An illness, an out-of-town trip, a birthday party--any additional duty would trigger outright panic and chaos. This is crazy, I kept thinking. Families weren't meant to operate like this. So when my husband found a new job and we moved, I seized the excuse to quit.
Here's where, in my imagination, Hirshman's self-satisfied smile twists into an outright smirk. Why was it me, not my husband, who quit? Why was it me reading the scary childcare manuals? Why was it me who stepped up to assume responsibility for easing the household chaos?
True, my husband was more devoted to his job than I was; his work ethic could arm-wrestle mine to the table in two seconds. But that, too, could be influenced by culture. If it's just a matter of personality, why, among single-income families, is the man's work ethic almost always stronger the woman's?
Some would say it's the result of biological gender differences. Evolutionary psychology--the idea that modern behavior reflects the way humans adapted to living conditions hundreds of thousands of years ago--is sometimes used to show that women are programmed to be more home-focused (though anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has argued that evolutionary psychology also can be used to show mothers as ambitious in their own right). The relationship between nature and nurture is complicated and little-understood, so it's hard to disprove this theory. Hirshman herself doesn't do a very good job of refuting it. She points out that plenty of women aren't hausfraus, so that can't be their "natural" inclination. Yet Hirshman's whole premise is that affluent women are chucking their careers in droves--is it because those careers are "unnatural"? Let's hope not.
It's probably better to argue that, as far as behavior goes, genes do not equal destiny. There's plenty of evidence that environment plays at least as important a role in determining people's behavior. For instance, even among those who believe evolutionary psychology predisposes men to be promiscuous philanderers, few would argue that therefore marriage is a pointless institution. On the contrary, marriage may well counteract and civilize those "natural" tendencies (though recent studies have shown infidelity increasing among wives). By the same token, even if "natural" tendencies help explain why in one-income couples it's usually the man bringing home the paycheck and women doing the laundry, we should assume those inclinations can be overturned by a culture that encourages men and women to participate equally in both workplace and household. Given how much our environment has changed since our cave-dwelling ancestors were divvying up the chores, an egalitarian society might make for healthier and happier modern lives.
You're welcome, Linda.
But Hirshman is right about a lot of things. Yes, domestic work--even caring for cherubic children--is often boring, repetitive, demeaning, unfulfilling, isolating. Yes, my financial future has become unquestionably less secure, my future employment prospects dimmer, than if I had always worked full time. And, perhaps worst of all, I find I am now the primary caretaker of the butter.
"Never figure out where the butter is," Hirshman warns--her metaphor for "never take primary responsibility for managing the household." It's based on a passage by writer Nora Ephron in which a man opens the fridge and asks his wife where the butter is, while looking directly at it.
"'Where's the butter?' actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember when we're out of butter," Hirshman writes, paraphrasing Ephron. "Next thing you know you're quitting your job at the law firm because you're so busy managing the butter."
Staying home with my children required me to morph into a reluctant household manager, responsible for most of the quotidian details of family life: shopping for birthday presents and school supplies, arranging to get the dishwasher fixed and the taxes prepared, making school lunches and remembering which kid won't eat ham and which won't eat turkey, keeping track of appointments and playdates and Little League games and the never-ending flow of school papers … countless tasks, tiny and thankless and so nearly invisible that the only time they even enter my husband's consciousness is when I forget to do them.
Some mothers grab their "Mom's Organizer" books and efficiently take command. I, on the other hand, resent the role too much to do it well, am constantly disorganized and overwhelmed. Many days I wonder how I wound up devoting so much of my energy and skills to this stuff. Yet one reason I hesitate to go back to outside work is that I know the household tasks won't go away, and I have let myself become the one most qualified to do them. I'm afraid I may be in too deep to get out of them.
Meanwhile, if newspaper journalism is undergoing difficulties lately, I'm fairly sure my leaving my old job is not one of the primary causes. Still, Hirshman has a point: a newspaper with one less woman reporter becomes a tiny bit less representative of women's interests and perspectives. The difference might not be visible (although Hirshman cites surveys showing "that if only one member of a TV show's creative staff is female, the percentage of women onscreen goes up from 36 to 42 percent"). But multiply it the number of women quitting journalism, add women quitting government and medicine and entertainment and law and education and science, and it doesn't take much to imagine public life becoming more homogenous, less dynamic, and not particularly beneficial to women.
"A world of 84 percent male lawyers and 84 percent female assistants is a different place from one with women role models in positions of social authority," Hirshman writes. "If role models don't matter, consider how an all-male Supreme Court is going to feel. We are about to find out, I fear. Highly educated women's abandonment of the workplace is … a sex-specific brain drain from the future rulers of our society."
So was I duty-bound--on behalf of myself, my gender, my whole society--to stay in my old job? Well, I can't quite make that leap. I have a bit too much appreciation for the rights of individuals to shape their own lives, a bit too little appreciation for my old job. But Hirshman's point is hard to deny.
For now, I don't long to return to full-time work. (Indeed, Hirshman mentions that many at-home mothers she spoke to have no interest in returning to their careers. Though she means to show that they've lost their drive, she unwittingly hints that, contrary to her own thesis, these women find sufficient satisfaction and fulfillment at home.) And I don't share Hirshman's conviction that professional achievement is an essential element in a full life. And although Hirshman pooh-poohs even the enjoyable times with small children as being beneath the intellect and dignity of a grown woman, I cherish the memories of the good days with my sons--the carefree afternoons at playgrounds and beaches and pick-your-own orchards, sharing their adventures and celebrating their all-too-fleeting childhoods.
But so what if Hirshman underestimates motherhood's pleasures? I am not so offended that I can disregard her all-too-familiar account of its perils. Four decades after Betty Freidan published The Feminine Mystique, a recent survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed women still bearing the bulk of domestic responsibility, and it's worth asking why.
Hirshman's is simply the latest take on the frustrations of modern motherhood--last year's high-profile example was Judith Warner's Perfect Madness--and the trend suggests that, despite their presumed array of choices, mothers are not entirely satisfied with their lives. Rather than taking umbrage at the parts Hirshman got wrong, perhaps we should be figuring out what to do about the parts she got right.
