Mirror of Justice

My colleague Lisa Schiltz responds to our ongoing conversation (see here, here, here, here, and here) regarding Linda Hirshman's critique of the claim that staying home with the kids is a legitimate feminist option:

I was prepared to be outraged by her article, but I actually agreed with much of what she says.  I think it’s important to keep in mind that she is quite consciously addressing a very narrow band of women – highly educated, affluent women who are married, have a couple of kids, and are nearing 40 years old.  Those are the women she was studying; even though she addresses her “rules” to younger women, she’s thinking about them as women who are going to be just like the ones she studied in a few years, unless they start making some different choices.

I think a lot of the advice she gives those younger women is great career advice.   Hirshman is right to tell these young women that “glass ceilings” in the workplace these days are much more likely to be a function of choices they make about how much time and energy they’re willing to dedicate to their job, and strategic decisions they make about launching their careers than of lingering prejudice against women.  I also really appreciated her suggestion for the proper economic analysis of the cost of child care to a married couple.  It ought not be deducted from the woman’s salary to determine whether it makes economic sense for the woman to keep working;  it ought to be deducted from the joint salary of the couple.  Indeed, she sounded almost Catholic about her criticism of the former method of calculation, saying “it totally ignores that both adults are in the enterprise together."

And I heartily applaud Hirshman’s challenge to the “older” women – as she calls them: “the privileged brides of the Times.”  If women never rise to leadership positions in the public sphere, the unique genius of women that our Church articulates so forcefully will never have a chance to change the power structures in the U.S.  Hirshman wrote:  “If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rules will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference.”  I’d go even further, and say that if women who are mothers never rise to leadership positions in the public sphere, our families are going to continue to suffer from the mistakes our countries leaders have been making about all sorts of policy questions.  In the words of everyone’s hero, Mary Ann Glendon:  “[F]or the first time in history large numbers of women occupy leadership positions and almost half of these new female leaders – unlike male leaders – are childless.  Will this affect our goals and values?  Will it affect our programmatic agenda?  You bet it will.  People without children have a much weaker stake in our collective future.  As our leadership group tilts toward childlessness, we can expect it to become even harder to pay for our schooling system or for measures that might prevent global warming.  America’s rampant individualism is about to get a whole lot worse.”  I think some women with children really need to take up the challenge of working outside the home.  I think the ones that Hirshman’s talking to – well-educated, wealthy women who probably only have one kid who is now in school full time – are exactly the ones who ought to heed this call, and step up to the plate to try to make things better for other mothers who aren’t in a position to do so.

That all being said, I think Amy’s hit the nail on the head with the most important mistake that Hirshman makes – buying in to the notion that flourishing means meeting the standards of  success established by the current power structures – the very ones Hirshman criticizes.  In fact, Hirshman’s own research support’s Amy’s point, but Hirshman doesn’t seem to recognize that.  She says, “Half my Times brides quit before the first baby came.  In interviews, at least half of them expressed a hope never to work again.  . . . [W]hen they quit, they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work.  One, a female MBA, said she could never figure out why the men at their workplace . . . were so excited about making deals.  ‘It’s only money,’ she mused.”  So Hirshmann recognizes that women are rejecting current workplace environments for reasons OTHER than just the desire to be home for their children.  But then she ignores that, and, as Amy points out, challenges women to go back to those workplaces and gives advice for how to be successful under the criteria for success that those workplaces establish.

I agree, as I usually do, with Amy.  We’re all called to work, to participate in all sorts of ways in God’s ongoing creation.  Hirshman’s wrong to insist that ONLY the work we do in the paid workforce can contribute to our flourishing, but it’s also wrong to insist that, for women who are mothers, ONLY the work we do at home with the kids can be considered legitimate “work” to contribute to our flourishing.

I agree with your notion that we ought to have more respect for the different possible rhythms in a person’s life.  I’ve often argued that workplaces like law firms could be more productive over the long term if they could balance one contrasting cycle I’ve noticed between men and women.  About the same time that many women who are getting through the most intense early child-raising years have fresh energy to devote to their professional lives, many men are feeling totally burned out from intense career building years and end up careening into mid-life crisis affairs and other unproductive escapades.  I’ve only ever thought about this in terms of law firm productivity, but given this exchange on MOJ, I’m wondering if maybe we ought to also be encouraging men to channel that mid-life crisis energy into parenting their teenaged kids!

Finally, I also do think it’s true that sometimes, out of love, our own individual “flourishing” does have to be sacrificed for others.  I suspect that many of the women that Hirshman is talking to – and many of the ones who seem to have gotten so angry about her article -- did give up their jobs out of love – sacrificing for love of their spouses and their kids.  When they’re confronted with the fact that there is, really and truly, a cost to that sacrifice, they don’t want to accept that.  I think that’s what’s behind some of the vehemence of the reactions to things said in the “mommy wars.”