1: I wouldn't worry. I don't think anyone wants to defend the last Hirshman piece. It was garbage held together by contempt and spittle.
Oh, god above I shouldn't be getting into it, but in those original Hirshmann threads I was bitching about the focus on her tone rather than her substance, not saying that objection to her tone as tone was necessarily mistaken. Someone can be both genuinely obnoxious and right about stuff (and then the same person can turn around and be significantly more obnoxious and somewhere between wrong and incomprehensible).
The ps was directed mainly to a comment Hirshman makes in the linked thread. And to all you other spittle-flecked feminists.
Reporting from the dirty-hippie front, I want to clarify that feminists argue about tone as toned by women all the time. Yea verily, even until the detriment of debate about content. More, most of us wouldn't even waste time on discussing Hirschman--other mock-prawns to fry, paradigms to deconstruct, truths to speak to power, etc.
Pretty solid ass-handing, of the you-have-no-data-and-the-study-you-cite-disagrees-with-you variety.
But, you know, I'm sure it's just because we don't like strong shrill harridans.
Would it help if I surrendered completely and let everyone kick me for awhile?
...in those original Hirshmann threads I was bitching about the focus on her tone rather than her substance, not saying that objection to her tone as tone was necessarily mistaken
Really? I don't know if I'm going to look myself, but if so, I didn't appreciate it at the time.
No, no, LB. I won't kick you. No one else kick LB either, because her tone is mild like Ivory soap.
So the surrendering completely thing isn't going to work.
I will protect you, LB! I have great tone today, of the shrieking virago sort, having just kicked the Sears "repairman" out of my house at full volume after he diagnosed my three-year-old washing machine as needing a "complete overhaul" without opening it up and looking inside. I will defend you against Those Who Would Kick! If I can make a 300-lb, 6-foot-plus man scuttle away in abject terror, I can take on the Boys of the Blog.
Labs, if you want to talk about my sex life*, there exists an appropriate forum; I live to entertain but there's a time and place for everything. Really, guys, since despite a few recent exceptions I'd mostly prefer not to comment here any more, can we avoid making me and my activities and my opinions subjects of extensive on blog talk? K thx bye.
*which has never at any time involved any kicking
I blame Ogged, him with his stripper-flaying friends.
None taken. Or you know, if there was, I probably deserved it, wretched thing that I am.
Wait, 19 was supposed to be a joke; maybe it would have been clearer if I called myself a little slut but even I get embarrassed sometimes. Labs, I am going to violate the sanctity of off blog communications and say once again that you are one oversensitive motherfucker.
Ohhhkaaayyy.
I have to punish you for this even if both parties consented.
which has never at any time involved any kicking
Dammit, I had a response to this where I said something like "intercourse is just really inept kicking," but it seems to have disappeared into an all new hoohole.
So you claim now, but I know that from 3:27-3:32 you were crying silent tears of shame that once again you'd managed to crush my tender soul beneath your oafish foot. Make it up to me by correcting a lacuna in my sexual repertoire.
Who even has baseball caps anymore? Yet again, Tia's aggressively submissive sexuality has sent me fleeing into the arms of Ted Haggard.
And he's 100% straight these days.
via the hairy-legged feminist law profs
eh. I've followed very little of this. The "hairy-legged" epithet still irritates the hell out of me. But, you know, never mind.
A new hoohole
A new place comments hide from view
Now google tells us no
(Now where'd they go?)
And says we're only dreaming
16, 19, 21, 25: We'd be glad to stop talking about your sex life just as soon as you let us get a word in edgewise.
The entire post was needling. Goodness only knows what he gets out of it.
Don't make me slap you with my cock, parsimon. I've dated my share of hairy-legged women, and I was making a little joke for the linked bloggers.
Hirshman certainly loses the argument with Schmitt.
I mentioned this before but this tapped post points an actual scary disparity driven by our government willingness to lie to people and our media's sleeping on the job. I generally think that people's voting isn't all that fact driven so I am not usually concerned about this kind of thing, but this seems different.
31: I don't wanna show off no more!
And with that, I am truly leaving. Toodles.
There will be no kicking, and also no holding of the manly feminists accountable for things that other people say, since it's a manly prerogative never to be held accountable for anything one doesn't choose to sign up for.
Besides, I haven't even *read* Hirshman's latest article.
Is this a with us or against us moment, by any chance?
Hey c'mon everyone! Kicking party at LB's!
Don't make me slap you with my cock, parsimon. I've dated my share of hairy-legged women, and I was making a little joke for the linked bloggers.
Yes. I should follow through on links before commenting, I Said.
Still not following up on all of it, hairy-legged, and -armed, women are perfectly sexy.
Whatever just happened here, I like Tia despite having argued about yoga. I do not know what this is all about, and it's likely not my place to know.
hairy-legged, and -armed, women are perfectly sexy ... I do not know what this is all about, and it's likely not my place to know.
And, for myself, I don't ask what it is about treasure trails and furry axillae ...
Not to be on-topic or anything, but I used to read Schmitt fairly regularly (well, as regularly as he posted). I have to admit I'm surprised somebody as thoughtful and earnest as he would deign to argue over this particular article. Why would he bother?
(And also, I don't follow LH closely enough to know -- is it possible she did not link the study because she genuinely doesn't understand the mores of online posts versus newspaper articles?)
Witt, I was similarly surprised, not that Schmitt was arguing with Hirschman, but that he had done a bloggingheads appearance opposite Althouse. That seemed way out to me. Or did I misinterpret? I didn't follow Hirschman's link.
I've only just skimmed the link Ogged provides and then surfed over for a quick glance at Hirshman's blog.
But.
(Don't hate me.)
Her primary target seems to be stay-home mothers. Now, while I'll go to bat for the amount of work that moms who work at home can, and historically have, done for the public good, and the related argument that one of the problems with the public sphere today is that we don't have the huge number of smart, ambitious, active women available to do volunteer work that we used to (deep breath), I *will* say that--anecdotally--my impression is that, by and large, the pro-staying-home arguments are, in fact, pretty goddamn insular and apolitical. And that this is a Bad Thing.
is it possible she did not link the study because she genuinely doesn't understand the mores of online posts versus newspaper articles?
Possibly, in which case she had the option to say so, instead of "I assumend [sic] TAP readers were capable of finding scholarly publications either on the web or online without further assistance."
46: Didn't we have a brief, pleasant, and enlightening conversation about that topic a while back?
the pro-staying-home arguments are, in fact, pretty goddamn insular and apolitical. And that this is a Bad Thing.
I'm not following this too closely, but I am skimming the Tapped discussion. Where are the pro-staying-home arguments?
i will say that even though I'm seeing it, I'm having a hard time believing that someone can be just that bad at interacting with other people. What an ass.
and, I hesitate to ask this, but what is a "gender gaping woman"? Sounds disgusting.
47: Ogged's not happy unless he's pulling our leg hair.
48: Anecdotal and impressionistic: the pro-at-home arguments I hear mostly focus on the "choice feminism" Hirshman (rightly) derided in her Get Back to Work argument. That is, feminism is "all about choices," so women can "choose" to stay home, and that shouldn't and isn't a political issue. It's purely a private choice. Then there's the argument that raising kids is important (true) and that producing smart citizens is important to the future of the world (true enough, but kinda a deferral of responsibility, if you ask me). Also the argument that "someone" has to be home, which elides the larger problem of why having a job is incompatible with having a kid.
Having said all that, my impression is that most so-called "stay home" moms of my acquaintance are not only doing unpaid domestic labor, but also some kind of something on the side: writing, volunteering in schools (i.e., working for the school district for free), running a small business, etc. Traditionally, of course, stay-home moms ran everything from the school board to the local center for retarded adults to their husband's law offices. So I really think that the argument is largely about media coverage and popular rhetoric, rather than what "really" happens. But it's valid to say that the popular rhetoric is highly anti-feminist.
But it's valid to say that the popular rhetoric is highly anti-feminist.
Because they're liberals, and liberals, as Ogged has explained, are annoying.
pro-staying-home arguments are, in fact, pretty goddamn insular and apolitical. And that this is a Bad Thing.
See, now, I think this is interesting because I think it says more about worldview and paradigms than people's actual beliefs. I don't think people suddenly wake up and decide they are political animals when the art and music program at Little Johnny's school gets de-funded.
I think they are political all along, it's just that our culture has successfully defined "politics" as something sufficiently adversarial, zero-sum, and narrow as to successfully exclude people who are interested in all sorts of things that might reasonably be called political.
Look, it would be lovely if everyone understood that we had 100 Senators and 435 Representatives and here's why and blah blah. But I don't agree that (for example) my sister is "apolitical" because she doesn't know that. She thinks about where to spend her money when she shops (organic foods, environmentally wise policies), she does countless hours of advocacy work for friends, and she donates to nonprofits. And yes, she consults trusted advisors when election day rolls around.
(All of the above should be considered a tangent to B's point in 45, rather than a response.)
45: B, if her conclusion had been simply that stay-at-home mothers were less politically aware than their husbands who work in DC, she might almost be defensible.
Instead, though, she generalizes about all women while curiously not noting the well-documented phenomenon of politically aware people voting because they think someone presents himself as honest or a straight shooter or as someone they would like to have over for a beer. Do all of these well-informed DC men decide rationally, or do they listen to the watercooler talk and decide that Kerry's probably weak anyway?
Either she's just not that observant, or she's willfully blind. There just isn't anything to defend here.
43 - Presumably Schmitt was irritated that the Prospect, which he works for, had given her a soapbox to stand on. I'm surprised Hirshmann engaged; I've seldom seen someone hang around online to get their ass kicked like that, though. Wow.
having finished skimming the Tapped post, I think Hirshman was arguing that if women were politically aware, they vote democrat. So, if 51% of women vote democrat, 49% aren't aware of their own interest. Schmitt might not've picked up on that b/c he's not attuned to crazy.
54: I said I hadn't read the thing. Is it not possible for us to talk about the issues the woman addresses without turning it into a referendum on whether or not she's our bestest girlfriend?
56: I'd go along with that as a not-crazy assertion.
Like you'd know, Mr. "toothy women make me think of blowjobs."
46: Ah, thanks.
47: Did we? I'm somehow not remembering it....
55: That makes a bit more sense. My own thinking tends to run to the "starve a fire of oxygen" strategy, but that isn't always applicable.
When you said 'Her primary target...' I took it to mean that you were intending to refer to something that Hirshman said, rather than a discussion in the abstract.
But yes, we can do without discussing Hirshman directly and focus on whether stay-at-home moms are politically active. My guess would be not if by "active" you mean "spending free moments chit-chatting about policy", but probably pretty active in churches and PTAs and local governance.
PTAs, yes; churches, maybe (but a lot of church activity is politically problematic, and I don't just mean that in partisan terms but in the whole separation of church/state sense). Local governance, again, my impression is: a lot less than you'd think.
This is based on the moms I talk to at PK's school, and the women I met recently who are active in the county women's political caucus.
It also might just be that well-to-do stay-at-home moms are in politically boring, politically homogenous areas. Legislation that made noise in my hometown: we put a stop sign at the bottom of a hill where cars used to speed.
Totally OT request -- Does anybody have a copy of the Candle Cafe Cookbook? I have to send the raspberry vinaigrette recipe to someone and have just made myself cranky looking for it online. (Yes, I own the book; no, I can't get at it right now.)
That kind of just displaces the issue, though. Like for instance, it chaps my hide that the PTO for PK's school raises shitloads of money for a librarian, art education, outdoor education, and so on--all good things--but that the focus is on "our" school, which is the best (test wise) and richest (purely by concidence, I'm sure) in the district. I'm totally being a hypocrite here b/c we've signed PK up for a different program in a different school, but it would be nice if the homogeneity of our particular neighborhood led some of us to look over and see that on the other side of town, parents can't afford to donate $150 per kid to the local school every year.
Her primary target seems to be stay-home mothers.
You're letting her off a lot.
Her last contribution, after Schmitt has gone and read one of the pieces she cites and concluded it's not really saying what she claims is,
Mark
we're even boring me. Have a nice weekend.
And that's it! Appalling.
we're even boring me. Have a nice weekend.
How I wanted Schmitt to reply with "Pwned!"
How I wanted Schmitt to reply with "Pwned!"
Yeah, that's about what it deserved.
56: In response to questions about why I engaged with Hirshman: It certainly wasn't that I was irritated that the American Prospect "had given her a soapbox" for her earlier article, as Snarkout suggests. I didn't really have a problem with the earlier article on stay-at-home moms -- though I'm a little more in the "everyone has to make the choice that works for them" school -- and exchanged some friendly comments with Hirshman on her bashing of the very annoying Caitlin Flanigan.
I agreed to do a bloggingheads with Ann Althouse, which was fine, and in passing I agreed with her criticisms of Hirshman's Washington Post article, and within a couple hours had an e-mail from Hirshman and a long attack on her blog (which has no comments, so probably no readers.) So I felt some obligation to actually spell out my critique, and then she replied, and so forth. I certainly didn't intend to get as deep into it as I did, and if she's now "bored," we can probably wrap this thing up.
You're so polite.
Thanks for the clarification.
I remember thinking right off from the beginning that Hirschman's point was pretty much destroye by the actual gender gap. She even seemed to be saying that it's women's fault that the gender gap is not always quite big enough to compensate for all the Republican guys and push the Democrats over the top.
She even seemed to be saying that it's women's fault that the gender gap is not always quite big enough to compensate for all the Republican guys and push the Democrats over the top.
That's what I thought too which is what makes it all so bizarre. Men are rational, informed actors who vote based on policy preferences. Women aren't. If they were all women would vote one way and no men would vote Democratic. It really only works if all of politics is seen as a battle between the sexes.
I agreed to do a bloggingheads with Ann Althouse, which was fine,
Now this is surprising.
I agree that blog discussions can become wearisome for folks, but saying "I'm bored now" right after someone has called you on an inaccurate usage of evidence or source material is Bad Form.
I just Googled over to Hirschman's 1905 article about stay-home moms.
[T]hese daughters of the upper classes will be bearing most of the burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping and cleaning bodily waste. Not two weeks after the Yalie flap, the Times ran a story of moms who were toilet training in infancy by vigilantly watching their babies for signs of excretion 24-7. They have voluntarily become untouchables.
In other words, the work of raising children is unclean and should be performed by servants. Reading it in context doesn't make things any better; this is the next-to-last paragraph, and the final paragraph doesn't take anything back.
Hirshman seems like acaricature of the Mommy-hating, family-hating feminist, with an enormous added dollop of upper-middle-class professional arrogance. I have no idea what the Prospect thinks it's doing printing that shit. It only makes sense to right-wing feminists who can afford full-time help. Not even to upper-middle class women who can't, or to rich women who like childraising. She isn't even just saying that childraising is burdensome and not always fun (true! true!). She's saying that anyone with other options who chooses to raise children is a bad person. (What she says applies to househusbands too, of course.)
Did you miss the endless threads where we hashed out that article?
In other words, the work of raising children is unclean and should be performed by servants.
That's a completely unfair summary: as so often, we're confusing describing something with endorsing it.
Maybe Hirshman's just tone deaf, but it's a pretty fair inference from "cleaning up baby shit is lowest caste" to "educated upper class women shouldn't be doing it." Why else bring in the words "caste" and "untouchable"?
Yeah. This is confused by the fact that lots of other people became convinced of reading the first article, and I only solidly came around to after the second article, that Hirschman really does appear to be an unpleasant person who hates everyone and is writing so as to be as offensive as possible.
But her personal unpleasantness doesn't itself make her wrong about anything specific. Even the pwning she got from Schmitt involved an acknowledgement on his part that the data she relied on for her statement that women are generally less politically well-informed than men was fairly solid -- she behaved badly and annoyingly in the discussion, but the worst thing substantively she did was claim the 'don't know' critique of the different levels of information was debunked by one of her sources, when it really wasn't. But on the other hand, it's not established either.
83: The way I read that, which I am not purporting to say that I know represents Hirschman's thoughts, bad nasty woman that she is, is that because doing 'shitwork' is unpleasant, that it is unjust for it to be relegated to any caste. Now, women form a caste that does the literal shitwork of baby-rearing, and upperclass women embracing domesticity embrace shitwork as part of their identity as women. That association between women and 'member of the shitwork caste' should be broken, and shitwork should be something people generally do when necessary, rather than a marker of any caste.
I may be a bad reader in this regard, and Hirschman certainly said it offensively. But that's what I took from the article, and whether or not it's what Hirschman meant, I think it's a good argument on its own.
81: yes.
B., I cited the words Hirshman chose to put at the end of her article. She was citing someone else, but without making any criticisms or expressing any reservations. What could she ahve said -- "Yes, stay home moms are unclean like untouchables, but there's nothing wrong with that"? Or "When untouchables do their untouchable jobs, they're being the best untouchables they can be, and should be praised for that. But certainly it's not for us to do those unclean things".
Yes, I didn't read the whole thing, but the conclusion was awful in the way I said it was. And I realize that she wasn't actually endorsing the whole Hindu caste system, but it was a bizarre, obnoxious choice of metaphor to put in the conclusion.
Just as a heads up, they got ugly, and hostile, and there's still bad feeling simmering. If you look at the top of this thread where I'm cringing and whining, it's because of fear of reopening that bad feeling.
Go ahead and talk about it if you want, but expect that anyone who engages has a lot of prior stuff going on.
Sure, on it's own, it's perhaps defensible. And I certainly don't want to say that people can't drag good arguments out of other people's bad arguments, or that there can't be a worthwhile discussion sparked by a bad argument.
But that doesn't make Hirshman's argument as presented, good. It's in the neighborhood of something defensible, but that's just not at all the same thing.
84 and 85 are valid, and I'm going to try to remember that that's what you think, and I believe you when you say that's always been what you've been taking from this. It would be better if this wasn't going to need to be explained over and over, as it is when Hirshman is involved, but maybe the incendiary quality is where all the interest comes from in the first place, so that if people make sensible statements, nobody would care.
Hirshman's big mistake Schmitt pointed out was to ognore the gender gap. As I said in a recent thread, eny time a Democrat wins by less than about 5%, the woman vote was the decider. Schmitt pointed out that Hirschman ignored that fact.
Didn't read the article, but prosperous people of any gender or sexuality tend to be moderate or conservative Republicans. If the women Hirshman interviewed weren't very reliably liberal, I'll still bet that they were more liberal than their husbands.
To me the whole weak spot of opportunity liberalism is -- what do you think of the people who still end up in the lower half? Bringing individuals up into the middle class is fine, and getting individual women out of the drudgery of housework is fine, but someone is still going to end up doing that work.
For the record, at least half of my work career was shitwork, including a time when I would run errands for the secretaries.
LB, do you still check your hotmail? I tried to e-mail you at Unfogged but got a funny error (may have been a problem at my end). I resent, but am not sure you still check that address.
I resent
I read this first as "resent" in the sense of "resentment," which was kind of awesome.
59. there's perhaps a noncrazy way to argue this, but it would be a very long, complicated argument. Of course that's not the argument Hirshman is making. Her argument, as best I can tell, is based upon ignorance and arrogance. She seems to believe that if women read just a little more, then surely they'd all agree with her. It's this blindness to people's different value systems and beliefs that I'm calling teh crazy.
The thing is (and this is where I pissed people off a whole bunch in the last couple of threads) is that there are two different discussions to be had here. One is about Hirshman's flaws as a person and a scholar: is she misogynist, classist, an unfair arguer, and so forth. The other is a discussion about the issues she raises. In the last thread I was just saying that I didn't want to have a discussion about the first because I was much more interested in the second (or that's what I meant, globally. I'm not going to make claims about what I actually said, or accuse anyone who understood me differently of anything other than failure to read my mind.), and that I thought that the focus on the first rather than the second was made stronger by the fact that she was a woman, and disagreement with women tends to get personalized.
After this last article, I've come all the way around to thinking that she is, personally, really kind of an asshole. But I do still think that she's often an asshole with a point.
But that doesn't make Hirshman's argument as presented, good. It's in the neighborhood of something defensible, but that's just not at all the same thing.
This is true in isolation on each point, but she's consistently very close to what strike me as good, strong, and important arguments. She's writing in a way calculated to piss people off rather than to convert them, which is bad polemic, but I don't think she could get that close consistently unless she was thinking of the arguments I'm seeing.
Another way to say this -- one of the things that was happening in the last thread was that I'd say something, and you and others would say "Sure, that's reasonable and inoffensive, but it's not what Hirshman says, which is awful." I could have written an article hitting (what I understood to be) Hirshman's points, paragraph for paragraph, without making people nearly as angry as she did. But I couldn't have done it before reading her article, and I don't think her article was just functioning as an inkblot for me to release an argument that I actually came up with on my own -- my argument really did come from her article.
The same with this latest vitriol-laden screed. It really is horribly offensive. But she does say some true and useful things.
I don't know that I'd want to know her, but I'd still read something because it had her byline on it.
As for me, I'm not at all sure how to approach "do women think about politics enough" b/c I'm totally unsure what a person's duty to keep up with politics is. There's a knee-jerk instinct that says "just keep up with the basic goings on" but a little knowldge is a dangerous thing, and my experience is that's quite true in politics. With only superficial knowledge, one's likely to be subject to (conscious or unconscious) spin.
The only magic wand answer I can imagine is "teh better education system!" which teaches "actual critical thinking!". And a pony.
She's writing in a way calculated to piss people off
this is a minor point, but, really? My impression from reading the Schmittstorm is that this isn't at all calculated; she's just an ass.
What was frustrating about it was that our objections to what Hirshman said were being treated as though we were just objecting about her tone when we were making substantive disagreements with her actual (not intended) (and if you're now hearing a string of snarky comments about how 'intent' only matters when it's used to rescue Hirshman, you're totally on the right track) points.
I have absolutely no desire to rehash it all again, but that was the core issue, and it seemed to grow increasingly ridiculous that the only reason I disagreed with Hirshman is that I couldn't handle a strong provocative statement.
Because I'm such a shrinking little violet over here.
I think the hypothetical brought up by the existence of the gender gap is this:
If women paid more attention to News, they'd become more impressionable to spin, and more likely to vote the mainstream bias, which in the past election cycles, has been Republican. Therefore, is this something worth recommending?
(L.H. of course would deny this hypothetical, because it would obvious to her that everyone has the same perception she has and so if they'd just pay more attention they'd agree with her.)
But LB's point in 94, which touches on what I was thinking, is that H isn't merely incendiary or rhetorically obtuse, there's a focus which is genuinely valuable. Without H's 2005 article, I would never have followed the links and comments which eventually brought me to this community. And maybe the heat, the degree to which feelings and differences among people who otherwise feel it all to easy to agree about everything, we happy few, are brought out and get cantankerous, is actually a good thing.
I don't mean this to continue the argument, but as an apology for what I did in the prior thread that annoyed you.
I wasn't trying to defend Hirschman (who I'd never heard of before the prior article) by creating the better arguments she would have made if she'd been the brilliant and yet concilatory writer and thinker I am. What I thought I was doing was recapping the arguments she actually made in the article. Neither your interpretation nor my interpretation is flatly literal -- we're both making deductions about the full scope of what she really meant from what she actually said. (For example, above, Emerson says "She isn't even just saying that childraising is burdensome and not always fun (true! true!). She's saying that anyone with other options who chooses to raise children is a bad person." And of course she doesn't say that at all -- he's making a deduction from her use of words like 'untouchable'. It may be a fair deduction in this case, and it's the sort of deduction everyone makes when reading. But the difference between someone who reads that Emerson's way and someone who reads it my way isn't that he's reading literally and I'm cutting her slack based on her presumed intent -- we're both reading things into the words that aren't literally there.) There are still some readings that are righter than others, but you can't literally distinguish between the 'actual' and 'intended' arguments as if you had an objective way of determining what the 'actual' argument was -- I thought my reading was the 'actual' argument (and still do -- I've just come around to also thinking she's an asshole) just as much as you thought your reading was.
I understand that my harping on your and others' aversion to her tone was annoying, and I do apologize. I was just stuck on not understanding what other than her tone made the alternative version of her argument persuasive to those who disagreed with what they saw in the article, but didn't seem to disagree with what I believed to be exactly the same arguments when I made them.
100 - But then any stupid article would have eventually brought you here. It was destiny.
Well, I'll bow out. If women and only women do the childraising shitwork, that's indeed castelike. The other elite dynamic is there too, though, in Hirschman and in people I've run into. Hirschman sure has an annoying way of expressing herself.
I also stand behind what I said about opportunity liberalism. If you have hierarchy, half the people will be in the bottom half, no matter how much equality of opportunity and fairness there is. Someone will be driving the trucks, and someone will wiping babies' butts.
That last sentence didn't work at all -- let me try it as 'I was stuck on not understanding what, other than tone, compelled people to interpret her arguments as bad ones when they seemed to be open to agreeing with (what seemed to me to be) precisely the same arguments when I made them.'
I hadn't seen 101. Hirschman also said that educated mommies were betraying feminism, which is bad.
Have I bowed out, or haven't I? I don't really want to keep this alive, though.
105: Again, she didn't say that, or anything literally equivalent to it.
But the difference between someone who reads that Emerson's way and someone who reads it my way isn't that he's reading literally and I'm cutting her slack based on her presumed intent -- we're both reading things into the words that aren't literally there.)
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. How is that different from when the Left jumps on Limbaugh for something he said that strikes people as racist, and the Right defends what strikes us as an unduly charitable interpretation?
I understand you, and appreciate the effort at restatement. And I'm coming back a little to the other view, that I was too sensitive to feelings, to hating the bad feelings and resentments. Maybe they are (sometimes) a sign we're talking about something important, that we need to think harder about.
OK, maybe not. I'm out, I hope.
It's not different, other than in who's 'us' (that is, I'm not in the same 'us' as most people here with relation to Hirshman's first article) and who's right. Neither the racist nor the defensible interpretation is literal, both require knowledge and reasoning imported from outside the text. It's possible for an accusation of coded racism to be false, and also possible for it to be true, but true or false it's likely not to be objectively determinable from the words alone.
103: Hirschman sure has an annoying way of expressing herself.
This, certainly.
I despise Hirshman and her tone is only half of it. The other thing is that she takes the results of a societal situation that makes it very very difficult, and unreasonably difficult, to combine being a parent (and particularly the parent who is pregnant gives birth and has the baby's food source in her boobs--I know breast pumps exist but they don't sound fucking pleasant) and she makes it all women's fault.. We're lazy, we're stupid, we have juvenile idealistic ideas instead of being prepared to make as much money as possible, we're betraying the sisterhood, we're not standing up to our husbands....Caitlin Flanigan does the same exact thing in the opposite direction, I can't stand either of them.
And look at the advice she gives!!!
"Taking the easier path first, marry down.""The best way to treat work seriously is to find the money. Money is the marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family. Almost without exception, the brides who opted out graduated with roughly the same degrees as their husbands. Yet somewhere along the way the women made decisions in the direction of less money. Part of the problem was idealism; idealism on the career trail usually leads to volunteer work, or indentured servitude in social-service jobs, which is nice but doesn't get you to money....There's no such thing as a perfect job. Condoleezza Rice actually wanted to be a pianist, and Gary Graffman didn't want to give concerts."
"If these prescriptions sound less than family-friendly, here's the last rule: Have a baby. Just don't have two."
" The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. "
I mean really. Who the fuck is she to judge? I'm worked at high paying job long hours job and making more money than my husband and believe me, I haven't done this little flourishing since the 8th grade.
There ARE collective costs to women staying at home. Absolutely. And I certainly deplore not being politically informed. And I certainly feel very differently about women who don't work after their children are young. But the way out of this trap is not smug lectures about how you have to completely throw away your asipirations for the sake of a sisterhood--from a woman who seems to hold most other women in utter contempt.
How about addressing the fhe fact that
A study out this week from Harvard and McGill University in Canada shows that of 173 countries surveyed, only five provided no form of paid maternity leave -- Papua New Guinea, Lesotho, Swaziland, Liberia and, perhaps surprisingly for some, the United States....Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd says that only 12 percent of U.S. companies offer paid maternity leave, even though 71 percent of all mothers work.
There is unpaid leave, but that runs out at 12 weeks and doesn't apply to all companies.
(Obviously I am all for the option of the father taking leave instead. The reason I mentioned the biological effects above is that it's going to trend things in the direction of the woman staying home even apart from sexism...especially since you don't know what physical effect it's going to have on you. I mean, what's the C-section rate these days?)
Like Larry Summers, like Caitlin Flanigan, it's entirely an individual woman's responsibility.
In fact, it's perfectly possible to organize society so that taking 3-6 months off to care for an infant and working part time a bit longer doesn't permanently put you in a low-status career that's not going to fully use your education. My mom likes to compare this to the reaction to a huge % of the male American work force being deployed overseas during World War II....that was good for careers, because we made it good. Not that being drafted into the army is comparable to having a kid--one is voluntary, for one thing--but being a parent is an essential function in society and it's not unreasonable to expect a modicum of collective support.
None of this is directed at anyone here or anyone arguing that there are costs to women staying at home or women being politically under-informed. But she drives me up a wall, and her tone is only part of it.
I think that one comparison between military service and childraising is that soldiers and mothers were paid what it's worth, we couldn't afford many of them.
Also, I don't need to be lectured on my inadequate devotion to corporate America by a retired philosophy and women's studies professor at Brandeis.
Maybe Hirshman's just tone deaf, but it's a pretty fair inference from "cleaning up baby shit is lowest caste" to "educated upper class women shouldn't be doing it." Why else bring in the words "caste" and "untouchable"?
Because, to her audience (people like us; liberals who think feminism is, by and large, a good idea), "caste" connotes Objectionable Things. Saying "x is low caste," to my ears, doesn't mean "so rich people shouldn't do it"; it says, "caste systems are Bad, and inasmuch as x is low caste, we need to change that."
I also don't go along with what Katherine's saying about Hirshman's blame-the-victim thing. I see why people read her that way, but I think doing so is unnecessarily defensive. Frankly, it *is* a good idea, statistically speaking, to follow her advice: if your husband earns less money than you, one of the most popular reasons people give for quitting work when they have kids--"well, one of us had to stay home, and he made more money"--doesn't obtain. It's also a good idea to only have one kid. We know this stuff, and pointing it out--bluntly--doesn't mean "don't acknowledge the structural difficulties." It's kind of like the caste thing: yes, it makes me mad that this is the practical advice (though I rather think that telling educated people to be less hung up on marrying someone who's "successful" is a good thing). But it *is* practical advice.
If you want to read a whole lot of argument about Hirschman, including very many people who agree with you, the big battle at Unfogged was here, continuing here.
It's kind of like the caste thing: yes, it makes me mad that this is the practical advice (though I rather think that telling educated people to be less hung up on marrying someone who's "successful" is a good thing). But it *is* practical advice.
I thought/think it was good advice, too. But there are reasons we advice Dems not to follow advice from Republicans. If it's a valid point Hirshman's making, there's a pretty good chance that someone without her level utter contempt for a wide swath of women will make it.
118: Bah. First of all, people *have* given that advice; second of all, you've never heard of them, because they did so politely and were roundly ignored.
I agree with LB that Hirshman is in the vicinity of some good arguments, and that talking about the good arguments she is close to is more interesting than talking about her.
That said, when I really start to reconstruct her ideas so they make sense, they become things that all of us have been saying for a long time.
Try this: there are traditionally female jobs (running the house) and there are also traditionally female modes of social engagement (volunteering at the PTA or the local center for retarded adults, as B. points out in 51). Since these roles lack respect or deep political power, women need to abandon them in order to achieve equality.
Well, this is true enough. The big problem is that someone has to still do all these things. (This is Emerson's repeated point.) I think it is also crucial that these functions remain in the informal, volunteer economy for the sake of strong civic life. While the government has a lot of resources that institutions like local centers for retarded adults need, you do not want such places staffed solely by paid workers there for the check. There is a huge difference in the quality of care offered by paid caregivers and volunteers with a personal stake in the care.
At this point I feel like I'm back to saying something that often gets said. To put it crudely: Women can't play the role of women all the time. But society needs someone to play the role of women. So men need to start being women.
(After I say this, I generally note that I am at work as I type, and my wife is at home, and then I feel like a tool. Especially because I'm not even working.)
B, I am fully aware that if my husband were less ambitious than I was, and if I had one kid, it would help my career. Fully aware. I do not need you or Hirshmann to tell me this.
I grew up with 3 sisters, b, and I hate to think what my life would have been like if I hadn't. I would like to have two kids. I happened to fall in love with a guy who was as smart and ambitious as I was. The work I really love--and which is really important in the world--doesn't pay so well. So I am going to do what I am going to do. If Hirshmann thinks I am betraying feminism she can go f*ck herself.
Also, I like what Katherine said in 112, but I should eat my lunch and get back to work now.
118: Bah. First of all, people *have* given that advice; second of all, you've never heard of them, because they did so politely and were roundly ignored.
But you had and, insofar as you have the vagina I lack, you're the person whose knowledge we should be measuring.
you have the vagina I lack
Woah. Double reverse Freudian.
Saying "x is low caste," to my ears, doesn't mean "so rich people shouldn't do it"; it says, "caste systems are Bad, and inasmuch as x is low caste, we need to change that."
Just as a data point, I read "x is low caste" in the former sense, not the latter.
My single greatest problem with her is her treating the decision to stay home with a kid for 6 months, or work part time for a year, as precisely equivalent to getting your "Mrs.", marrying a rich guy, and never working again.
And while there are collective costs to women in not putting up with the crazy soulkilling high paying job, there are also collective costs to putting up with it. If there are enough employees who will work 70 hour weeks for high pay and either not have families or have their partner take care of that role, well then employers can demand that of their employees.
Double reverse Freudian.
The real Freudian slip would have been if Tim had transposed knowledge and vagina in 123.
My single greatest problem with her is her treating the decision to stay home with a kid for 6 months, or work part time for a year, as precisely equivalent to getting your "Mrs.", marrying a rich guy, and never working again.
See, I know she didn't literally say that those two things were precisely equivalent (using 'literally' here, well, literally), and I don't believe that's what she meant. Whatever Hirschman meant, though, I think it's true that decisions like that tend to have larger consequences than people believe they will when making them. You can work part-time for a year and then go back to work full time, but often people don't, and it's not necessarily because they were planning not to all along. Once you set up a pattern where one career in the family is necessary, and the other is discretionary, if a decision comes up that's going to help one at the cost of the other, it's hard, not impossible but hard, not to sacrifice the career that's already on hold.
(And I say that as someone who stayed home with a kid for six months twice.)
One thing not to lose sight of is Hirshman's contempt for upper-class women who essentially drop out of high-achieving and highly selective professions, of their revolting unseriousness given the opportunities they've had. She may have developed this feeling from teaching such people, I don't know. I do know it's hard not to feel some of her contempt, and remember that it seems to almost always be directed particularly, and maybe almost exclusively, at upper-class women. The language she uses infuriates a lot of people she may not have in mind; people like us.
One thing not to lose sight of is Hirshman's contempt for upper-class women who essentially drop out of high-achieving and highly selective professions, of their revolting unseriousness given the opportunities they've had.
And I may have overlooked her rhetorical excesses partially because I can think of people who fit that description and who I share Hirschman's feelings towards.
I'm completely aware of the potential costs. All too aware. This whole issue is one of the main sources of unhappiness in my life and tension in my marriage right now. In some ways having these set of issues is a luxury, but it sucks, and I'm sure it's not only for professional women that trying to balance having a job and a family difficult. And the only articles on this that get published are ones about what women should do to solve this problem. I've got Linda Hirshmann thinking I'm a bad feminist because I will probably take time off, have two kids, and I want to work in public interest jobs that pay a bit less well than my husband--even now I make less than I would at a huge firm...of course, she was a professor at Brandeis, but I should suck it up and make as much money as possible...I've got Caitlin Flanigan thinking I'm a bad wife because I lived in a different state from my husband for a year for career purposes, was away from home all last week & weekend writing a brief, do less than my share of the housework and cleaning, don't put out enough.....Of course, she's a successful writer published in the New Yorker and has paid help for the childcare and housework, but for me to want a career is just ego.
I have had it with them. They are both equally parts of the mindset that got us in this situation: this is a problem for 23-40 year old women who want to have children, maybe to some extent their husbands, and no one else. And they don't even practice what they should preach. I've also had it with magazines who only publish articles on these issues by people like them, because they're "provocative."
"I can think of people who fit that description"
I can think of maybe one.
this is a problem for 23-40 year old women who want to have children, maybe to some extent their husbands, and no one else
I didn't read Hirshman's go-around with Schmitt very carefully, but I don't think that's exactly a fair reading of the earlier piece. I took her to be saying, in unnecessarily incindiery terms, that going to the opposite extreme--hoping for structural change but making the choices that work best for one's own family in the meantime--isn't working and that change won't happen unless women make choices in their personal lives that force change.
Writing that makes me realize even more that it's a subtle distinction for which incindiery rhetoric is particularly ill-suited, but I think it's there.
Yeah. I don't want to be defending Hirschman, personally, at all. But there's a sense in that with respect to this set of problems, it really "is a problem for 23-40 year old women who want to have children, maybe to some extent their husbands, and no one else." No one else is suffering significantly from it. Other people should care, of course, but it's not all that surprising that they don't -- we're the ones holding the shitty end of the stick now, and if it's going to change, we're the one's motivated to change it.
Looked at from that point of view: given that women of childbearing age and those who care about them are going to have to be the driving force for change here, so what can we do individually to effect that change? Solutions like the ones laid out in her article: marry someone who's structurally likely to be supportive, have fewer rather than more kids, be suspicious of career decisions that involve giving up professional status and financial rewards, start looking like good advice from the point of view of leading a more equal life.
132: I think that's the subtext, which was why my initial reaction to the 2005 article was positive. From the very first, reaction to her piece has tended to globalize her assertions out of what may be a fairly limited, if portentious context.
Katherine: I hear you, and the rhetoric is incendiary. But if my interpretation, or qualification is right, it should be possible to remember she's not talking about you. Public interest law is not becoming a housewife, after throwing-over a big-firm associate's position, quiting as an investment banker because of having no interest, and never having had any, in the work.
134: Weddings in the NYT is a very efficient way of finding such people, apparently. I have no idea how many such people there are, but the disproportionate damage they cause, the setting-back-the-cause quality they have no matter how few, makes it seem plausible to me. I don't know any either.
I don't know any people like that yet, but I assume that's because I'm young, and people haven't started dropping out yet.
"So on the one "Solutions like the ones laid out in her article: marry someone who's structurally likely to be supportive, have fewer rather than more kids, be suspicious of career decisions that involve giving up professional status and financial rewards, start looking like good advice from the point of view of leading a more equal life."
Yeah, everyone's life can suck, but it can suck in ways that are more proportionately similar for men and women. Hooray for feminism! Please. I know women who aren't having kids and are doing the career track--it is not going to change things for the rest of us any more than the opposite extreme.
23-40 year old adults who want to have kids are first of all not the only ones affected...second of all, even if they are, why is a liberal arguing to me that no one else should care if it doesn't affect them personally? What I'm asking is why politicians, including Democratic politicians, tend to think that the way to support families is not to be too pro-gay and oppose violent video games, instead of trying to being U.S. family leave policies just a tiny bit closer to conformity with the rest of the developed world.
Well, I really DO have to actually work now...
"If it's going to change, we're the ones motivated to change it."
True, but others will have to be involved. Until others change, nothing will change for career women or women generally.
Sure, it's like any other situation: for anything significant to change, everything has to change. It just comes down to finding places to start pushing.
The change she's pushing for is not for the better. I think the tremendous costs to parents and well-being by going the route she suggests are worse than any gains for women. Women who make partner aren't going to suddenly restructure the way firms work such that it's not miserable for other women to make partner. The US feminist movement has a godawful record about neglecting issues like family leave compared to Europe.
I mean, this is the same population affected by the abortion issue, and that's seen as a constitutional right that the Democratic party has an obligation to fight for.
I don't think Hirshman even wants better family leave policy. It would just make it easier for women to slack off on their career path.
The change she's pushing for is not for the better....Women who make partner aren't going to suddenly restructure the way firms work such that it's not miserable for other women to make partner.
This I think gets towards the heart of it. Hirshman is arguing for changes that will benefit a small subset of a specific class of women. Fine. But then she goes further and argues (or at least implies) that women who don't act in a way that benefits that small subset of women are betraying women at large. How this different this is from early claims that certain people were unAmerican in not supporting the war is not at all clear to me.
120: I'm not so much saying that women should stop doing those things as that we've structured the world in such a way that those things not only aren't valued, they're no longer even on the radar. My own personal solution is for everyone, men and women both, to have work lives that stick to a 40hour work week and are accomodating to things like "I need this afternoon off for X" once in a while.
121, 133, et al: I hear what you're saying, but I think there are two things going on and that it's worth differentiating between them. First, LB's "marry someone who's structurally going to be more supportive" is, I think, not quite the point: H is saying (and ime, she's correct) that "supportive" isn't enough. I married a supportive guy, and so did you, and yet here we are in the more financially dependent position. H is saying, polemically, and probably correctly, that we should put ourselves in positions where we're not asking for support, but where we (like guys) don't have a "choice" but to work--b/c only then is someone (men, society) going to pony up and take care of the kids and house. Kind of the "afflict the comfortable" model of change.
The second is the "if she's saying I'm a bad feminist" for not going that far in my personal life thing. Well, I admit that she is. And I think that you and I feel the same way, or we wouldn't be agonized over our personal lives right now, nuh? On the one hand, H is being intellectually consistent with this: you and I are pretty comfortable, materially (I'm assuming your situation is roughly parallel to my own--you can afford to be underemployed), and so hey, afflict us too. On the other hand, the backlash against this sort of thing ends up overwhelming her message (which is unfortunate), and arguably a better way to achieve change is to articulate the problems structurally rather than pointing fingers. Personally, I think we need both the calm explainers and the bomb-throwers. I also think that while the defensive "fuck off, I'm doing the best I can and I don't need your guilt trip" backlash is understandable, that it's got more to do with the extent to which women like us *already* have our inner Hirshmans telling us we should be doing something different. I'm not sure if what we really need is a more understanding public voice, or a more understanding private one.
Here, we're getting into real disagreements -- not where Hirschman's rhetoric is getting in the way, but where the two of you are disagreeing with something that I think is a fair interpretation of what she says.
I think it's right that the opportunity to engage in a public life, and exert power in the public sphere (the workplace, academia, government), is a good thing, and something that should be available to women to the same extent that it's available to men. I think it's also right that the underrepresentation of women in positions of power is self-perpetuating; the fewer there are, the harder it is to get there. And I think that while there are many things that have created that underrepresentation, one of them is the culturally mediated tendency of women to make choices with respect to privileging domestic responibilities over public work that are going to make it hard or impossible, in our society as currently constituted, to get into positions of power.
Now, this argument only has force so long as you think that equal representation of women in power is a good thing globally, rather than merely for the few women in those positions. I think that it is, and so that this argument isn't about requiring sacrifices from many people in order to benefit a few, but I understand that we aren't in total agreement here.
145, para. 2: Yeah, the word 'structurally' in my comment was meant to do all that work -- not just someone who's a good guy, but someone in a position where treating your career as important is necessary.
Oh, I want power all right, I just don't want to exercise it in ways that don't involve much money...And I've had more success than I would have expected, though I've hit a rut lately.
I think it's an intrinsically good thing for women to have more power but to get it in the way she suggests sacrifices other equally intrinsically good things such that I think it's a wash, at best (and actively worse than the status quo if you take her perscriptions completely literally: everyone should marry down, have one kid tops, and make as much money as possible whatever it takes). Certainly not a way to the real solution to the problem.
120: right, that's my solution too with the necessary adjustments for kids--I think both people are better off working 40 hour weeks than 1 working 80 and 1 working 0. And if you work 80 and have children I just don't see how your partner works 40.
I'm not really agonized in the way you suggest, quite. It's not feminist guilt that's making me unhappy--it is specific things I want to do and can't...the jobs I want and can't apply to because I live in the wrong city actually pay worse than the one I have now, and if there's pressure from my husband it's in the "suck it up and take the money" direction--though obviously he wouldn't be psyched if I just up and moved to another city; obviously that won't work. I'm mad because even before I have kids the whole thing is frustrating specific personal ambitions of mine.
Yeah, this is one of those things where I'm not sure what Hirschman meant to say, but I'd think that privileging money over 'serious work you want to do for professional reasons' is a mistake. The only thing is that within a marriage, it's hard not to treat the career that pays the bills as more important than the career that doesn't -- if you're not very vigilant, the latter gets treated as a hobby. If you can take the low-paying route and stay committed to it, I can't see that there's anything less feminist about that.