Hirshman

I’ve just finished reading the article Lizardbreath links to at the TAP by Hirshman. There’s much to admire there, and more than a few lines that make me want to stand up and cheer. Still, it leaves me cold, and I’m going to try to sort out why.

What I like: an unapologetic and forthright attack on the limitations of the language of choice as a tool for feminism, and a revitalization of feminism’s judgmental past, and an acknowledgement that this language is largely powerless to deal with home and family issues, which are a crucial frontier for feminism today. I also like the frank discussion on bargaining within marriage, and the damned good advice* to date/marry those committed to gender equality (not simply men who are fine with a working wife for now, but unwilling to make serious career sacrifices later). I think this line:

If women’s flourishing does matter, feminists must acknowledge that the family is to 2005 what the workplace was to 1964 and the vote to 1920.

Is probably a bit of an overstatement—she gives short shrift to the old boy’s network/gender discrimination part of the problem—but it contains a fair bit of wisdom.

So, kudos for starting us down this road. So what’s the problem? There are a few:

First of all, the core assumption seems to be that women’s behavior must change, and men’s behavior is more or less a given. One sexual gender identity is given and unchangeable; the other is malleable for political purposes. I’m squarely in the “patriarchy hurts men, too” category, and the ideal that men need to be wealth-driven workaholics who can’t imagine slowing down their career to help with the family, let alone do something they actually enjoy with their career for less money, isn’t really that great of a deal for men, and it’s pure poison for gender equality. Wasn’t their just a study circulating around the blogosphere about egalitarian marriages being happier, with lower divorce rates and better sex? Not to mention most jobs—even prestigious ones like being a lawyer at a fancy law firm, aren’t always particularly enjoyable. They have their benefits, of course–money, power, and so on. But we’re better off if we can keep those in perspective.

It’s always telling what features of social life and individual psychology we assume are malleable and which we assume are not. While discussing marriage options conducive to family-workplace feminism for the upwardly mobile elite, Hirshman says “Because money is such a marker of status and power, it’s hard to persuade women to marry poorer.” Remember, we’re talking about elites…the kind of people whose marriage announcements appear in Sunday Styles. This abdication, combined with the challenge of finding equal or higher status men combined with a commitment to gender equality, is going to leave our heroines with dating pools the size of Maureen Dowd’s. A feminism that assumes overcoming arbitrary and reactionary social rules like “it’s fine for men to marry women with less money than them, but not vice versa” is outside of the realm of reasonable possibility is entirely too pessimistic for my taste, and unnecessarily so, given how much our attitudes about gender actually have changed in large segments of American and Western society in the last half-century, and how many people have already overcome presicesly that silly rule.

Hirshman sees a troubling sight—anti-feminism amongst the next generation of the elite—and responds with a vision of elitist feminism. Which is, I have no doubt, part of the appropriate response. But feminism and elitism coexist in an uneasy tension. The situation clearly calls for some anti-elitism as well. I’ve been told that happiness research currently holds that money does, indeed, buy happiness, but primarily to the extent that that money is making you not poor. At about the 50,000 dollar a year mark, increases in wealth don’t statistically correlate with increases in happiness. I’m no Benthamite, but this seems important to me. Status and prestige aren’t material things–we make them what they are. Perhaps if we all stopped reading the Sunday Styles, those 41 couples Hirshman interviews wouldn’t seem so special. Their status is to some degree in our hands. Hirshman explains her focus on elites:

We care because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the Times. This last is called the “regime effect,” and it means that even if women don’t quit their jobs for their families, they think they should and feel guilty about not doing it.

Since we’re already broaching the boundaries of choice feminism and talking about how people act and react in their private and personal lives, why not tell people to stop caring about this elite behavior? Better yet, let’s stop granting special status to people with fancy jobs at prestigous law firms. It’s not impossible—In fact, I’ve already done it, and it wasn’t that hard. I’m guessing many of you have too.

Which brings me to the close of this already too long post. One of the two candidates fo the worst bit in Hirshman’s piece (the other is when she compare domestic and childrearing work to the untouchable caste) is this:

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.

Here’s where Hirschman’s elitist feminism leads her to preposterous conclusions. Social workers don’t get rich. Neither do teachers. But they get by. Two of them can get by. By any reasonable definition of middle class, these professions can put you there. Middle class in 21st century America makes you preposterously, fabulously wealthy by any sort of global-historical standard. The idea that being in that middle is insufficient for personal autonomy and freedom suggests that an upper middle class lifestyle is necessary for that. Hirschman’s definition of feminist career choices is going to be inaccessible to a majority of women in the US, let alone the world. I would submit that the consumptive habits of the upper middle class are just as malleable as our gender norms, and well worth challenging, too. Being able to live without feeling deprived or poor on a middle class income is a learnable skill, and one that….wait for it….increases your freedom about how you spend most of your working (waking?) hours, which is pretty nice. I don’t want to be a lawyer at a big law firm because it sounds boring, stressful and lame. Being unable to afford nice cars and vacations and fancy houses in trendy neighborhoods and so on is suboptimal, but it seems a small price to pay for not working for a big prestigious law firm. That’s not very traditionally masculine of me, but hey, I’ve learned a thing or two from feminism myself. Hirshman, it seems to me, needs to be a bit more self conscious about the elitist identity politics coloring her feminist vision.

*No, I’m not trolling for a date. However, my next six Friday nights are wide open…