Hirshman, cont.

It looks like feminists of various stripes are back to debating Linda Hirshman’s claim that women of a certain socioeconomic status who opt to stay home and raise their kids are traitors to the movement: Quisling’s for Patriarchy, if you will. To my surprise, Lizardbreath and a number of other very smart people endorse Hirshman’s argument. I’m more on DJW’s side, and I’ll go further: to me, the whole argument reeks of the dark side of so-called “second-wave” feminism. Despite the fact that second-wave feminism made crucial strides in opening up access for women to centers of male power–work that remains unfinished–much of its rhetoric of female empowerment contained class-, race-, and nationality-specific biases.

Hirshman’s argument, indeed, is full of noblesse oblige. Her view of upper-class women women employed at the highest ranks of high-paying, high-status jobs as the new “worker’s vanguard,” however, isn’t completely nonsensical. If we want to erode the cultural basis of patriarchy we need to denaturalize the gendered character of social roles, and some of those roles include partners in law firms and presidents of universities. But the same is true of devalorized social roles, such as “child caregiver.” Hirshman’s rhetoric affirms the valorization of “male” social roles and the devalorization of “female” social roles.

At the same time, many of her defenders are caught in a self-contradiciton at the level of gender essentialism. They reject gender essentialism: one of the major purposes of the women’s vanguard is to break it down. But they also assume that women who assume these positions will somehow be more inclined to implement Okin-style reforms of the workforce.

That may be true of some individuals, such as Lizardbreath, but I am far from convinced that, as a general matter, members of the women’s vanguard who achieve power and status will seek to tear down the very career structures that put them where they are. This line of reasoning only makes sense if we assume that such women have a kind of natural affinity with women who occupy very different socioeconomic roles. I haven’t seen a great deal of evidence that would support this claim when it comes to, for example, the behavior of highly successful women in the workplace towards other women.

In the end, I find myself in roughly the same place that I was last time around: Hirshman’s argument has the strategic effects–whether she intends it or not–of “divide and rule” vis-a-vis American feminism.

Why? Well, many families face a raft of difficult decisions about how to handle child-rearing in this country, decisions made difficult by the structure of employment. Many jobs remain structured on the assumption that their occupants are the only wage earners and make demands incompatible with family life. Those with more flexible hours seldom provide adequate pay to allow men and women to outsource child rearing to almost invariably poorly paid professionals. So Hirshman, along with her evil twin, forces self-identified feminists who have made different choices into the box of implicitly or explicitly criticizing one another’s decisions.

See my exchange with Lizardbreath in the comments section of DJW’s post, where I’m actually guilty of starting this line of argument and Lizardbreath rises to the challenge by, perhaps without realizing, accusing my family of setting back the feminist movement.

As Mrs. Coulter (of The Republic of Heaven) argued the last time around:

There’s been a lot of talk in the discussions of Linda Hirshman’s American Prospect piece about “furthering the goals of feminism.” Hirshman lays out very precise rules about how one does so, though I won’t bother to recapitulate them here, since I have already discussed them in an earlier post. Some prominent bloggers have also agreed with several of these prescriptions: high-earning power, and its corollary, the one-child maximum.

[….]

I guess my problem with this is that I don’t see that high-earning power for women, or even the more basic goal of putting more women in positions of power, is the one, true goal of feminism. As a result, I have trouble with the idea that wanting to be a teacher (or any other “female” profession) or raise a larger than one-child family is a compromise with my ideals in any way.

Hirshman’s argument is essential a recapitulation of a pure form of Second Wave feminism: feminist women should pursue economic and political power in the workplace by striving to fit male definitions of workplace success. The claim is that being a woman doesn’t affect your ability to do exactly the same thing as the high-achieving men of the world. Anything you can do, I can do better.

Then along came the Third World feminists, and the feminists of color, and others who pointed out that this viewpoint is centered on defining the goals and aspirations of white, upper-class woman. Others pointed out that it devalued traditionally female work by treating it as “beneath us” to perform (Hirshman writes that by caring for children, upper class women perform tasks “always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping and cleaning bodily waste”). Since combining work outside the home with children requires hiring someone else to care for your children, it is nothing if not demeaning of those people, usually low-status women of color, who we hire to care for our children. If it is demeaning for her to care for children, how can it not be demeaning for her nanny to care for children as well?

There are better ways to justify a desire to work outside the home, a preference for other forms of work over childcare, that do not require devaluing childcare as a general activity. The problem is that she doesn’t just say, “I don’t find childcare stimulating enough for me, so it’s not something I want to do full-time.” No, she has to say that it is insufficient for all women (but what about that nanny, again?).

And let’s cease and desist on all the stuff about how it’s “impossible to get by on one income.” It’s not impossible–there are certainly plenty of people who do it. It’s not easy, and not everyone who does it does so voluntarily. Plenty of lower-income people get by on two incomes equivalent to the income of one middle-income person, and how about all those single moms who get by on one income (yes, I know that many single moms live below the poverty level, but there are also many who do not)? Really, it’s a life-style question. That doesn’t make one life-style morally better than another, but it’s thoroughly bogus to claim that it’s simply impossible. It’s about as classist as you can get.

Ironically, I don’t think Hirshman has a terrible formula for evaluating decisions about how to live our lives:

A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world.

The problem is how she applies each of these standards. What does it mean to use “speech and reason in a prudent way,” to have “enough autonomy to direct one’s own life,” and to do “more good than harm in the world”? In particular, I think her understandings of personal autonomy and utilitarian principle are far too narrow.

This brings us back to my earlier question: what exactly are the goals of feminism? Here I agree that personal autonomy is good: I believe that feminism is about opening doors for women, ensuring that women live better, more satisfying lives. Women who are interested in positions of power and in achieving economic success should not be prevented from doing so, simply because they happen to possess a vagina. However, Hirshman conflates means with ends. The point of enabling women to achieve positions of economic and political power is not simply power for power’s sake: it is because those women wanted positions of economic, political, and social power. It is a positive externality when those women use their positions of power to improve the lives of women with less economic, political, and social power, or serve as role models for young people (girls and boys) who aspire to similar positions.

But feminism should not focus solely on placing women on the Supreme Court or as corporate CEOs. Feminism should be about improving women’s lives, and there is more than one way to improve women’s lives. Figuring out how to share the domestic sphere is a big part of that. There is no reason that domestic tasks can’t be shared, even if one partner takes primary responsibility for some tasks. There is no reason why a stay-at-home parent must also be responsible for all housework or all cooking. The assumption that she (or, more rarely, he) should be is gender-bias extraordinaire. Childcare is plenty of work–anyone who doesn’t think so should be left on their own with a toddler for a week.

So how can this be accomplished? For one thing, we could stop talking about what a shitty gig caregiving (to the young and old) is. Perhaps more men would be interested in taking it on if it wasn’t constantly painted as soul-crushing. Tom Sawyer certainly knew that the best way to get a fence white-washed isn’t to complain constantly about what a horrible job it is. There are certainly times when it is tedious and dull, but there are also moments of pure joy. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be honest about what we don’t like doing–because the appropriate way to deal with tasks hated by one (or both) of the partners in a relationship is to discuss and negotiate how to accomplish them, whether that means dividing mutually loathed tasks, one partner taking responsibility for what the other despises, or hiring someone else entirely to perform undesirable tasks. Hiring someone to do things you don’t have time to do or don’t like to do is a very different proposition than hiring someone to do something because it is “beneath you”.

I think it’s also important to value other forms of stereotypically female labor, such as teaching, nursing, social work, and other social do-gooder jobs that Hirshman seems to so despise. She argues that women should avoid them because they are low-paying and low-status. Yet many of these jobs are filled by women who lack the social status of the women she berates as failing feminism. Decrying them as crappy jobs does nothing to improve the lot of those who perform them–in fact, it makes it worse, because it perpetuates the notion that these jobs are unworthwhile. If they are unworthwhile, why should they be better paid? Even more, people bring to a job more than a little of their own social capital and prestige. If Ivy League grads suddenly shunned the medical profession, wouldn’t the status perception of doctors fall by whatever additional status that a Harvard degree conveys versus a state school degree? If elites want to become teachers, they improve the social status of teaching. The appropriate response is not to discourage elite girls from considering these social do-gooder professions, but to encourage elite boys to consider them as well….

Go read the rest, if so inclined.