Posted on 06/20/2006 3:34:11 PM PDT by wagglebee
NEW YORK, June 20, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Linda Hirshman, a feminist US writer on cultural issues, has told the world why she thinks staying at home with the children is an occupation “not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.” She complains at length that the feminist movement, while making some gains in public life through legal activism, has largely failed in the one area where it counts most: the family.
She upbraids women who stay at home for failing the feminist agenda, saying, “They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings.”
Writing in the November 2005 edition of the American Prospect, Hirshman admitted that the real intention of the feminist movement was not “equality”, but to destroy what she calls “the unreconstructed family” of a husband and wife rearing children. She writes that the goal was to see as many women as possible abandoning family life for high-level professions and politics.
Hirshman a committed radical, was a member in the 1970s of the feminist lobby, the National Organization for Women (NOW), a donor to the pro-abortion political organization, EMILY’s List, and a professor of women’s studies.
But, she complains, the movement has “stalled”; while the “public world has changed…private lives have hardly budged.” Childrearing is still seen by both men and women to be the natural purview of women. She writes of her “shock” to discover that among those professional women whom she called the “logical heirs of feminism”, large numbers were leaving their careers to opt for childrearing.
“Marriage is essentially unchanged,” she laments. “The real glass ceiling is at home…Looking back, it seems obvious that the unreconstructed family was destined to re-emerge after the passage of feminism’s storm of social change.”
She writes, “this represents not a loss of present value but a loss of hope for the future -- a loss of hope that the role of women in society will continue to increase.”
Some of the women she interviewed confirmed her worst fears: they liked being mothers. One declined to be interviewed because she could not leave her activities with her daughters: “We’re all in here making fresh apple pie,” she said.
Another, an “an Ivy Leaguer with a master’s degree” described her at-home activities: “I take my [3-year-old] daughter to all the major museums. We go to little movement classes.”
The article ignited a blaze of online outrage from feminists and traditionalists alike. Bloggers and editorials in print and online editions of a number of magazines have run comments blasting Hirshman.
In an op-ed at the online edition of the political magazine, the Huffington Post, Ann Coulter wrote that Hirshman and those who think like her, are “expressing an intolerant world view that women who don't work are losers.”
“Hirshman isn't just expressing an opinion about what she thinks is best, she is saying that any woman who makes a choice different from what she espouses is unequivocally ‘wrong.’”
Coulter writes that feminism is losing its sway in public because it focuses on “problems that hardly exist…while spending precious little energy on issues that indisputably have a negative impact on women: pornography, sex trafficking.”
“If [feminists] spent a fraction of the time on these issues that they spend trying to get women to get their men to vacuum the living room, the world would be a better place.”
"Morality does not arise from religion, but from within, IMO"
I agree with you. I call it Natural Law.
She's pruny and she's looney, and she's skinny and a ninny. Life's a bitch for women who started shaving at ten.
Because it is lies. Nothing but lies from the left.
There is nothing better for a woman to do than to raise her children well. God gave it to us, and it is for us to do; not someone else. It is a solemn duty and responsibility. And the most rewarding thing one can do.
Her mother was probably a liberal who didnt pay attention to her and she feels this is normal. I guess she raised herself.
She's not truly for freedom of women. She's only for what she thinks is right for women. If a woman decides to stay home and raise a family, it shouldn't be any of her business! The woman should have the freedom to do that without being called names by another woman or having her intelligence insulted.
IMO, it is bullying behavior in an attempt to make others come into line with her form of feminism. If you don't think and act the way we do, we're going to call you names and jolt your confidence in yourself until you do!
But then who would rear the children of the intelligent educated womyn?
Afterall, Frau DOCTOR-PROFESSOR Hirschman wants the next generation to be raised in its entirety by stupid, uneducated people, so they can grow up despising intelligence and education, with values to match.
Maybe she should re-think her position?
At least she's not preaching to the choir...Like (ahem) most of us...
Leftists are such psychotic cases; baskets full of paranoia, neuroticism, issues, unhappy lives.
This one better watch her step; she is angering a lot of American women with her garbage!
I just saw the headline and was going to ping you.
ping
(ducking)
Oh, that had to hurt.
So just what is running through the minds of these 'ladies', ladies like her if they deign to have children at all, when they drop off their little darlings at daycare or instruct the nanny on the days' activities? That they are talking to 'wastes', that these caregivers are somehow inferior or subpar, little peons? And if they feel that way, why leave their children with these people? Or is it the children who are of so little value that it hardly matters? Then how (in her way of thinking) do these children grow up to be the talented, intelligent, educated adults like her, like she thinks herself to be, at all? Wow, she just stepped right in it. Not that she knows or cares.
Another liberal socialist slips up and tells us what they all really think.
No danger of this woman having to worry about a husband and children. Fortunately, she won't be passing her loony ideas on to any offspring, burdening them with her unnatural world view.
Wrong! at the risk of wasting my breath (or finger motions, at least) morality CANNOT come from "within" a person. If it did, the world would be a much, much better place than it is or ever has been.
Second a truly (note I said truly) religious person, at least of the Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Bahai, or Jain persuasions (and I may be leaving a few belief systems, with which I am unfamiliar, out), will NEVER be a "punk".
The best and most important job in the world is that of a mother... and the most influential too. True feminists understand that. This woman and her ilk are idiots.
I got interested in what Ms. Hirshman actually said and actually thought, and frankly, I think she's getting a bum rap.
Whatever. Somebody's got to take care of little kids and somebody's got to clean the house -- but if the husband and the wife both have important jobs, why should it be the wife?
My husband and I both do a lot both inside and outside of the home. He finds the money I make useful, I find the money he makes useful. He finds the housekeeping I do useful, I find the housekeeping he does useful. He thinks I am a good mother, I think he is a good father. We're happy with the way we've worked things out.
It's not the type of thing we even talk about anymore -- just that, I remember what it was like when I was young and in law school and wondering how I would ever be a lawyer and have kids, too, and I remember a woman judge telling me, "just do it, and it will work out." She was right.
I think that's what Hirshman is really saying, be true to yourself, don't pretend to be something that you're not, and you can make it work.
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