1. freedom/autonomy 2. epistemology Well, actually 3: How do we get from here to the feminist utopia.
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it’s an old war, as old as the second wave itself. The phrase ‘The personal is political’ was inspired by Carol Hanisch who wrote, to paraphrse, “We come to learn our so-called personal problems (that we can’t have vaginal orgasms and have inferior clitoral orgasms) are not personal, but political and that means that there are no personal solution, only political ones.

In the new introduction to that essay, she laments that the phrase is very differently than she used or meant it. Most people use it as: “Your personal behavior is shaped by social structures. To change social structure, you need to change your behavior.

But Hanisch was schooled in a dialectical materialist framework. You’d not more tell a worker to fix capitalism by quitting his job, then you’d tell a woman to ‘fix’ patriarchy by quitting her personal patriarch and telling her to b/c a political lesbian.

In Hanisch’s era, the vituperative war was the Miss American pageant: Should they attack the contestants or should they attack the people who profited from it?

Hanisch took the latter perspective, which she caled the “pro-woman line”. There emerged an early split among feminists over exactly that issue.

Same split emerged over how to deal with ‘apolitical women’. Hanisch thought they should not berate them for being traitors to the movement, hangers on who benefited from the hard work of their sisters, but who wouldn’t get involved. Hanisch thought that feminists should try to understand apolitical women: what was going on that made them reluctant to join the ranks.

In Hanisch’s era, the issue was one of “false consciousness.” You have a theory that not only do men oppress you, but they do so and it can only work if you go along with it. “There can be no master without a slave,” as the slogan went.

Without an actual social movement, Hirschman is just shouting into the wilderness to tell women that they should behave like X, otherwise they harm feminism.

It hits home on two major issues:

1. autonomy and 2. epistemology.

A lot of feminists aren’t really interested in, as one woman put it, exchanging one set of asshole (let’s call them, the patriarchy) for another set (feminists who think they can define what feminism is.)

Most women who are feminists usually come to think of their feminism as simply about fighting for free choice. Naturally, if Hirshman is attacking their choice and telling them their real husband is feminism, she’s going to get some heat.

The classic liberal enlightenment position is that the individual knows her desires best. For Hirschman to suggest they are falsely conscious is simply absurd. you can hear people responding: how do you know you’re not falsely conscious?

What or who gives you the right to be the arbiter of what feminism is and how to be a feminist?

She was basically saying: You are slaves staring at shadows on the cave wall.

I apologize for being so late to the discussion, but I’ve been dealing with a round-robin of strep throat (first the kid, then me) so the blog world has been low priority.

Unfortunately, I think there is a vicious circle going on here—a self-reinforcing social phenomenon. We all make decisions within the context of a flawed world. Few of the decisions we make are clear-cut one way or the other. So we feel guilt and misgivings about the choice not taken. It doesn’t help matters when people feel the need to vocally self-justify their own decision by criticizing others’. Whenever I have publicly discussed the issue of staying home with kids vs. staying in the workforce, I have always been very careful to avoid language that seems critical of other people’s choices (such as “I didn’t want someone else raising my kids”), but there are still people who take it as a criticism. I think I have to go along with the divide and conquer theory—if we’re all sniping at one another, we’re too busy to start noticing what the real problem is.

People like Hirshman and Flanagan just pour gasoline on the fire in order to sell more books. Both of them deliberately use inflammatory language (saying that SAHMs lead “lesser lives” and that “something is lost when women work”). They are taking advantage of our insecurities for their own benefit. In other words, we’ve been had.

I hope this doesn’t veer too far into the substantive (if it does, please feel free to delete this paragraph), but I was discussing this whole flap over the weekend with my husband, and we got to wondering how the working world has altered over the last 50-60 years, in terms of time commitment expectations, because my sense is that we’ve all gotten the squeeze. After all, the stereotype of the happy 50s housewife who always has dinner waiting on the table for her husband assumes that he will be home for dinner most nights. Perhaps there is a labor economist or sociologist reading Crooked Timber who might have some insight into this question.

Because they are highly correlated. People who engage in activity X, are more likely to believe activity X is a good thing. Its not a 100%, but the choices reflect value judgements and vice versa.

The answer for harmony is simple. If no one had any more kids, there would be a lot fewer arguments in the future!

Here is the other component of this debate that generates heat under the surface—CLASS. This debate is carried on within an elite subculture that probably doesn’t represent more than 5 or 10 percent of the population: those whose occupations provide real job satisfaction and salaries that make it possible for a family to live the good life on one income. In this vein, the NYTimes runs stories about Yale girls who fanticize being SAHMs (with nannies and cleaners to help out) mornings playing tennis, book discussion groups for cultural entertainment, etc. The debate is set in their terms: shall I do 60 hours a week to make partner in that high-gloss law firm or shall I be a tennis mom lunching with the girls at the club?

The rest of us, who don’t have either of these options, look on with outrage. It amazes me that anyone should regard the “grim, depressing” picture I suggested in 42 as “utterly foreign”—this is the way it is for perhaps 90-95% of people in affluent countries and 99.99% of the human race. Setting up ultra-privileged women who have these choices as typical reinforces the entrenched idea that women have it really good and have nothing to complain about.

3/4 of Americans over 25 don’t have college degrees. Of the 1/4 that do, most graduated from crappy colleges you’ve never heard of and the jobs they do, even though they’re now blessed with fancy titles, are basically sales, bookkeeping and secretarial work. They work because they have to and, even if they make the best of it, enjoy the commeraderie of the office and take pride in their jobs, (rightly) regard work as a burden rather than a benefit. Why is it so hard to understand the resentment of blue-collar males who see women as privileged because they don’t have to punch the clock at 8 am or spend their days laying tar on roofs and are outraged at feminists for what they regard as pushing for even more privileges for women? Why is it so hard to understand the defensiveness and guilt of non-elite SAHMs whose only realistic options in the job market are boring, dead-end jobs that hardly pay enough to cover the costs of child care, transportation and a decent office wardrobe but feel pressed to work because their families are pinched financially and because “housewife” has become a dirty word? Why is it so hard to understand the resentment of non-elite working women, manning the check stands at Walmart or sitting in carrels taking phone orders when they read about these Yale brats vexed decisions about whether to be high-powered lawyers or tennis moms? Read this, empathize, imagine what it’s like for most people and it’s easy to see where the heat comes from.

These are not a few seriously underprivileged people out there in some urban no-go area or rural poverty trap or some strange Fundamentalists living in another world—they’re perhaps 90% of the population and most, correctly, regard themselves as middle class. These are the Nascar Dads and Soccer Moms who own houses in the suburbs, drive better cars than mine, and vote—regular, normal people. The fact that they’re largely dismissed in this and other discussions, that their “worldview” strikes us as “foreign,” is a large part of the sad story of why progressives have such a hard time getting a hearing from people whose economic interests they represent.

Whether or not homosexuality – or ANYTHING - “hurts” society depends on what a person values about that society. There is no reason why a person cannot decide “I think the most important thing a society can do is give everyone has their fill of M&Ms” – and such a person would be CORRECT in seeing anything that interfered with an adequate social supply of M&Ms as being “harmful” to society.

Obviously, for reasons that I dont agree with, many people DO see homosexuality as being harmful to society because they of their own values. When you say they are “Wrong” you are simply making your own value judgement about what YOU think is important in a healthy “society”. The things YOU value about society are not hurt by gay behavior, but thats all you can say without advancing your own subjective ideas as objective facts.

Yeah, but thats always the case. There is no purely “idealogical” persecution – it is always backed by a link between the forbidden ideaology or ‘private’ behavior and real-world consequences. Religious persecution also makes caims regarding he objective danger that heretics and assorted non-believers pose to the faithful. Same with political persecution of “counter-revolutionaries” and “subversives” – the names themselves comes from the harm they supposedly do (hold back the revolution / subvert the natural, correct, order).

I am really suspicious of people who try to portray second and third order societal effects as though they were obvious truths. What she is doing is isloating a few variables in the much more complex equation of society and making an argument from them – in the process she is almost certainly ignoring other important variables that effect the final outcome as much, or more, as he ones she is looking at.

I think insecurity certainly plays a part. For the working mother, you wonder if your child would do better in school or have more free play time or a better social life if you were home with them, or if you are missing out on the important moments in their life, or if you are simply losing touch with your children while you’re at work.

If you’re a working mother like me, who doesn’t have a career but a lousy job, you wonder if it’s worth it. Then you remember that your husband’s job doesn’t offer medical benefits, so even if he made enough money to pay the mortgage and feed the family, you would need to work.

If you’re a stay-at-home mom, you might miss out not just on developing a career that might be fulfilling, but on having your own resources and skills, maybe improving your social life. You might feel like you never stop working if you are a SAHM, because there’s always more laundry and sweeping and more meals to cook, and maybe financial stress.

In short, no matter how many choices women have (if indeed women are actually free to make those choices for themselves, which I don’t think is across the board true), there is never a choice that is solely positive. Caitlin Flanagan angers me because she married wealthy and contends she is a SAHM even though she is clearly earning an income, and seems to be oblivious to the fact that her life is out of reach for most women. Linda Hirschman angers me because she diminishes the importance of tasks like running a home or raising children (both of which, btw, need to be done by parents whether the mother stays home or not). And neither one of them is taking a stand that would work for my life, so I’m being attacked by both sides, and I don’t feel like I have many options as it is.

Human beings are not well-adapted to existing in chronic self doubt

And yet I wonder whether most women don’t live in that state? I often feel that I do, and my friends speak as if they doubt and blame themselves at every step.

So [meta-point here]: the reason there’s so much heat in this “debate” is that by enforcing assumptions 1 & 2 the “debate” pushes the main issue—gender equality—just below the surface, thereby forcing all sides to twist their arguments to fit the cramped space of the debate. The argument ought to be about equality and autonomy on one side [the autonomy to live without the constraining forces of gender norms] and on the other side, the natural-ness of gender roles and another version of autonomy [the autonomy to live out one’s gender-prescribed proper role without interference].

But instead, because we don’t want to talk about all that—questioning gender tends to make people uneasy—we’re stuck arguing about the very narrow and frustrating question of what wealthy moms with husbands who work enough for two should do vis a vis their own career or lack thereof.

Because women on both sides of the divide have made a large sacrifice and bitterly resent the women who didn’t invest in a future that would have made their struggle, possibly, a little easier.