feminist discussion of the day: Get to work!

I'm not unreservedly endorsing Linda Hirshman (the feminist author of "Get to Work," in which she argues that adult women who do not have jobs are betraying other women*), but I really enjoyed her response to having been named one of MSNBC's "Women Who Make Us Cringe" (thanks to Feministing for the link):

We cringe makers include “The women who . . . forget that women have won the right to chart their own course, even if it’s as a homemaker.” That would be, say, Phyllis Schlafly, who “stridently urges women to be homemakers, and homemakers only” and Linda Hirshman who “argued that women who leave the work force to stay home with children basically are turning their backs on other women.” Does this make sense? If it’s a mistake to be a homemaker only, then I cannot make editors cringe by trying to steer the next generation of women away from it. If it’s not a mistake, then why is Schlafly on the list?

What is going on? The editors are actually saying there no such thing as a mistake, where women are concerned. The only thing that seems to save a thinker from the cringe list is to repeat the meaningless nonsense that the only thing that matters is choice. Choice feminism is not feminism. As I said in my book, “Get to Work,” choice matters, but if all that matters is choice, then there is no right and wrong. If there is no right or wrong, then there can never be significant social change, because how would you argue for it?

I enjoy seeing an author in a mainstream publication, in colloquial language, debunk this atrocious "you go, girl!" atmosphere, the proponents of which insist that anything women do is great**, which is infantilizing, logically impossible, and contrary to the original purpose of feminism, which was the full inclusion of women in civic participation (from which would lead reproductive and other important rights).

In summation: In a world in which our radical feminists are standing up against relativism, wow, maybe our radical feminists aren't that radical at all.


* The reason I don't wholeheartedly endorse this is because of the classist implications of an educated white feminist telling other women they have to have jobs in order to hold up the feminist banner; this rather ignores, I think, the fact that for a great segment of society, work is not fulfilling, career-oriented, intellectual, or creative. While everyone loves to argue about the Ivy League alumna who quits the law firm to take little Dylan to baby yoga, I'm not sure how drudging for thirty hours a week at Wal-Mart (never 40, because then the company would have to offer benefits) for substandard wages and no health insurance really assists the cause.

** As a female entrepreneur (I ran a dotcom in the early '90s), I was terribly annoyed and embarrassed by rhetoric congratulating "women entrepreneurs" for opening businesses, any kind of businesses at all, such as the kind in which you make small goods or are a sales agent for a larger company and are charged with selling small goods to other women, and you might make an extra few thousand dollars per year, with no ability to even subsist off this business yourself, much less employ others. Now this type of small business may very well still be quite worthwhile for you and yours, but women have been peddling small goods for, oh, thousands of years. They did it in medieval times and in Victorian times. Nothing new there. What's new and interesting and feminist is women's businesses actually creating jobs and contributing to the economy, and women leading large companies. When I was a member of the National Association of Women's Business Owners, I met a woman who had started an interstate trucking company. In the 1960s! When women couldn't even legally get credit in their own names! She was there to get an award and she was, as you might imagine, intimidating. I'm tearing up a bit right now even writing about it. Also during that time, I knew a woman who ran a tech-support outsourcing center, who introduced herself to a man at a country club as the owner of Such-and-Such company, which she had just moved to the area. He smiled and nodded and politely asked her about how the move was going. She said she had just bought a building and he looked like he'd just been hit in the head: "Oh, you run a company!" Congratulating women for starting any kind of business at all (when we only congratulate men on the actual merits of their businesses) is sort of like feeling obligated to clap for any old thing the five year olds manage to play at the piano recital -- oh, look, you did something! It's embarrassing.