Getting it straight

Posted by Guest Blogger on Monday, 30 January 2006 11:12.

If you’ve noticed inconsistencies in feminist politics there’s a reason. It’s not that feminists are irrational or hypocritical or unintelligent. There is a deeper problem: the first principles on which feminism is based generate contradictory aims.

Poor feminists! They are locked into a belief system which can never pass the test of consistency because the starting point of their theory calls for opposing outcomes.

Homeward Bound

A good way to illustrate the tensions within feminist theory is to look at the article Homeward Bound. This was published late last year and was written by feminist Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of women’s studies.

Homeward Bound begins with the question of why women are not entering executive positions in larger numbers. Some feminists blame the “glass ceiling”: they believe that women are held back in their careers by male employers or by unfriendly work practices.

Linda Hirshman disagrees. In 2003 she undertook some interesting research. She contacted the women who had announced their weddings in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times in 1996. These were women who belonged to a well-educated elite and who had prestigious jobs.

To Hirshman’s surprise a large percentage of these elite women had opted out of careers and were pursuing motherhood and home life instead. Only five of the thirty women with children she interviewed were working full-time and half were not in paid work at all.

The women had not left full-time work reluctantly. Hirshman found that when they had quit “they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work” and at least half “expressed a hope never to work again.”

Choice or judgement?

Why then are women not equally represented in upper management? Hirshman concludes from her research that it’s not due to discrimination in the workplace, but is the result of choices that women are making to leave paid work in order to raise their families at home.

Which raises a considerable problem in how feminists are to reconcile their own theory.

Feminism is basically liberalism applied to the lives of women. The starting point of liberalism is the idea that what makes us human, as distinct from the animals, is that we have the capacity to shape the course of our own lives.

This principle was stated clearly enough by the famous liberal philosopher J.S. Mill, who wrote in his influential work On Liberty (1859) that,

“He who lets the world or his portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs his faculties.”

This principle makes two clear demands on us. First, we must retain an individual freedom of choice over what we do or seek to become. Second, we must use our faculties of reason and will to plan our own unique, individual life rather than accepting a merely imitative path laid down by tradition.

What, though, if women are naturally drawn to a motherhood role? Then the two liberal demands come into conflict.

On the one hand, if motherhood is what most women would naturally choose to do then it would be “illiberal” to deny them an individual freedom of choice.

But, on the other hand, if women are adopting a traditional role based on gender, they are following a “biological destiny” rather than employing their rational faculties to shape a unique, individual life plan as careerist women might claim to be doing. Accepting this would also seem to be “illiberal”.

Hirshman is not unaware of this conflict in feminist theory. She admits that women who stay at home are justifying their decision in terms of a “choice feminism” and that as soon as feminism accepted the legitimacy of individual choice “the movement had no language” to challenge what was happening.

Hirshman, though, cannot accept the choices that women are making. This is because the other side of the liberal coin is more important to her: the idea that “human flourishing” cannot be found in a traditional role within the family.

She provides us with the following quote from fellow feminist Betty Friedan to support her point of view:

“A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor – with or without makeup – is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity. Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals. Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from other animals by his mind’s power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the future to it. He shares a need for food and sex with other animals, but when he loves, he loves as a man, and when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different from his past, he is a man, a human being.”

Hirshman sets herself against the “choice” aspect of feminism, in which women can choose to be homemakers, and does so by returning to liberal first principles about what makes us distinctively human.

Having determined on an anti-choice feminism, Hirshman does not hold back in attacking the motherhood role. She tells us that the family,

“allows for fewer opportunities for human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust.”

Hirshman believes it is unjust for women to stay at home because it does not accord with liberal views of what it means to be human. There is nothing worse than injustice. Therefore, it does not matter that women are made happy by the motherhood role. Hirshman can write that the “privileged brides of the Times – and their husbands – seem happy” but still judge them to be doing the wrong thing because “what they do is bad for them”.

Hirshman is drawing, in a principled way, on an anti-choice logic within feminist theory which was expressed most stridently in 1975 by the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir who proclaimed that,

“No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

So the problem is this: how can feminism be consistent when its first principles generate both an insistence on individual choice but also an equally striking rejection of it?

[Note: conservatives don’t find themselves in this fix, because our starting point is different. Liberals pose things in such a way as to make individuals self-create their own value. Conservatives do not see individuals as creating what is good in man and nature, but as seeking to live by the good already existing as part of the human condition.

Therefore, it would not matter to a conservative woman that the act of creating a new human life was not a unique product of her own mind but part of a “biological destiny”. It would not alter the goodness or significance of the experience of motherhood.]

The rules

Hirshman admits that “Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy”.

She lists a number of rules to get women out of the home and into management positions.

The first rule is that women should reject arts degrees and choose courses leading to high incomes. She suggests that,

“Feminist organizations should produce each year a survey of the most common job opportunities for people with college degrees, along with the average lifetime earnings from each job category ...”

The second rule is to treat work seriously. This means that women should not be so concerned with finding work which is socially meaningful, or intellectually rewarding or prestigious. Instead,

“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.”

The third rule is to avoid household responsibilities. Hirshman advises women to marry down by finding “a spouse with less social power than you”. Marrying “a pure counterpart,” cautions Hirshman, is “risky”.

The final rule is to have only one baby, as research shows that women with two babies are more likely to opt out and move to the suburbs.

Equality & caste

What impression do you have of these rules? Many people will think that the rules are overly mercenary, and too much based on the pursuit of money and power.

Hirshman does little to dispel such an impression when she says of child-rearing that,

“Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power and honor.”

So why does Hirshman place such an emphasis on money and power?

Remember that liberalism starts out with the claim that we are made human by our capacity to shape our own lives.

But what if some people have a greater capacity to shape their lives? Liberalism responds to this problem with a strong egalitarianism: everyone must be equally human and therefore everyone must have the same opportunity to shape their life outcomes.

However, as Hirshman’s mindset warns us, there will always be tension within the liberal view. After all, what really matters in liberalism is the enabling of individual will: this is what defines our humanity. And what gives us the freedom to enact our will? Hirshman’s logical answer is: not equality but power, and money too, since money brings power.

Nor is the idea that we should equalise human wills convincing in terms of liberalism when you consider that we are most free to enact our will when we have power over others. Therefore, having power over others might seem (unofficially) to be an important good within the liberal value system.

If this is correct it might help to explain why feminists often accuse men of acting to consolidate power over women; feminists are assuming that the average man is acting within the same mindset as themselves, in which the significance of our lives depends on obtaining power over others.

It might not be said aloud, but it is not uncommon for feminist politics to be inegalitarian. Hirshman’s article, for example, assumes that women “arrive” when they reach the executive suite. But it can only ever be the case that a small minority of women will be leaders in their field. It’s not possible for all Western women to be rulers at work. Some must be ruled over.

So what Hirshman is attempting to offer is “justice” (in liberal terms) for a small caste of women; most women will necessarily be excluded.

We have here, therefore, a tension within feminism which is unlikely to be resolved. The same principle which generates a concern for equality of will, also motivates feminists to campaign for money and power for an elite of women, as these are held to be the things which matter.

What, though, if you don’t make a liberal “enabling of will” the starting point for your politics? In this case, neither the breaking down of gender distinctions in the name of equality, nor the pursuit of money and power will seem to be necessary to a good life.

A conservative woman who values a love of family, of nation, of nature, of God, will not think it necessary to subordinate marriage and motherhood to a pursuit of money and power. She will not be caught within a political theory which leads her to such a view.

Tags: Feminism

Comments:

Posted by Amalek on Mon, 30 Jan 2006 15:10 | #

Betty Friedan and Rosa Parks. who emerged around the same time, were both Jew-commie plants masquerading as ‘ordinary women’.

Hirshman’s findings replicates those of a female academic at the London School of Economics who got into hot water with the sisterhood a few years back by insisting that most women looked forward to marriage and motherhood and worked for the money and companionship, not for a 40-year career.

Now the meejah is full of the caterwauling of thirtysomething career “girls” who suddenly realise they’ve left it too late to have nice husbands, houses and babies. Doh! The glittering alternative to boring domesticity they were trained to desire by spinster schoolmarms rationalising their own failure in that department suddenly seems less than alluring. A future of a cat, a flat and an assisted suicide beckons many a lonely female freedom fighter.

Lesbians or not, women are not really much cop at ‘solidarity’ among themselves—except in harems. I remember a sad piece by Kate Millett (and who was she, you might well ask), lamenting that even the militants of early Women’s Lib had grown apart and were dwelling in poverty, obscurity and estrangement from one another.

More than the whiggers, the single mums and pussywhipped middle aged men, these bourgeois white women—heads stuffed full of half-baked dreams of Really Being Myself and wombs empty—are the saddest casualty of the Enlightenment assault on biological reality. Taught to be ashamed of their forebears as evil and stupid, unable to nurture the next generation, they are like Churchill’s donkey: without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity.

Posted by Guessedworker on Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:48 | #

But, oh dear, what is the ethnicity of Ms Hirshman and does it have any bearing on her critique of gentile society. Of course, I am not accusing her of insincerity in any way. But shouldn’t she be arguing, for example, for more female representation in the Knesset (currently 20 female members out of 120)?

Btw, what happens to all those gentile surnames when aliya has been made?

Posted by Amalek on Mon, 30 Jan 2006 18:20 | #

There is more domestic violence among lesbians than either male queers or normals (married or cohabiting). Also there is less sex—‘bed death’ as the dykes call it—either within the relationship or illicitly. Many lesbian ‘civil partnerships’ soon dwindle down into joint-housekeeping friendships. An air of bitter joylessness hangs over this vanguard of the career-woman trend. No wonder most young ladies see the danger in time and row back—but not soon enough, or they’d be birthing three children each, not 1.5.

Militant feminism of the post-1968 sort—as opposed to the Pankhurst era of ‘equity feminism’—undoubtedly suited employers who wished to depress the labour market by hiring lots of cheap females and raise aggregate consumer demand by giving them more to spend. To this extent Women’s Lib served the same object as coloured immigration: both causes made useful idiots for international capitalism out of the Left. Victimology contributed to the coffers of PLCs.

But feminism had an even more sharply academic/Jewish tang than agitation for race-mixing. It keyed into the nagging, complaining, perennially dissatisfied phenotype of the secular-Jewish, semi-educated female with intellectual notions above her grasp.

It has become a cliche to say that outmarriage has rocketed because a Jew can’t stand the thought of getting hitched to a woman who will give him as hard a time as his momma. The professor of Women’s Studies is the reductio ad absurdum of that whiney nightmare, but one should not underestimate her ability to henpeck and browbeat even in an era where the wilder claims and pretensions of Ms-anthropy have been laughed to scorn. Consider for instance the shrew-hunt after Larry Summers’s remarks on why most scientists are men. This didn’t happen at Podunk State; it happened at Harvard, which purports to be America’s clou of intellectual excellence.

Posted by Marc on Tue, 31 Jan 2006 00:16 | #

Just out of curiosity, does Hirshman give any reasons why the family “allows for fewer opportunities for human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government”? Or are we just to accept this as fact?

Posted by Mark Richardson on Wed, 01 Feb 2006 07:28 | #

Nicely put Alex.

Posted by Mark Richardson on Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:48 | #

People wouldn’t say of a homeless man’s condition that he was “free”. We would say that he was impoverished or outcast.

In the same way, we shouldn’t say of a man who has forsaken his ancestry, his ethny, his sense of manhood, or his role as a husband and father within a family that he is free.

And yet this is what liberalism tends to understand as our emancipation; casting off settled, inherited forms of identity and connectedness, in order to live as a free-floating individual in terms of our own choices.

Alex, you are right that there is nothing wrong with the pursuit of freedom understood as most men once intuitively understood it. But the word has been captured to such a degree that once you hear the term “individual freedom” you know you are entering the liberal zone.

It’s a pity we don’t have a linguistic distinction similar to the Russian one you outlined above.

Posted by Lubemba Sisala on Wed, 30 Aug 2006 23:20 | #

guys, i have read, with distress adn warm-hearted humour, the comments you have posted about this very serious topic.
there are, unfourtunately, too many topics that can and proberbly should be picked apart by this seemingly educated woman.
for a woman of her stature not to understand that the foundation for any society does not reside in the institutions of learning that it governs, but in the communities that build it up. a leader is a leader based on the experiences and values that he or SHE is taught.

it is criminal, and yes, biblically incorrect to try and suggest that a woman who refuses to take care of her family is not providing a social and moral service.

if a man never learns to respect his mother, how will he respect any other woman?

it urks me that a woman of supposed intellect would not think before making such comments. i do believe that the right to expression is sumtimes taken for granted in the respect that people do voice opinions based on bais and not just that; HARMFUL BAIS.

Posted by Lubemba Sisala on Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:38 | #

hey guys…n girls, i just read Ms, or as it turns out, Mrs…sumthing other than Hirshman’s retort.

in truth i must try to be fair and not attack her for her comments and rather reason out my own thoughts, otherwise i become her counter part of sorts.

her response to the soon to be global response has been nothing short of short-sighted. i do agree with the statement that she is “dillusional”. in a sense it is possible, after reading blogs from mothers who responded, to try and make sense of wat she is trying to say. the problem is that she cretiques an institution that, it seems she is personally very dissatisfied with.

i find it very odd that a mother, a MARRIED mother, would attack an institution of marriage in such a manner, would devalue the whole concept of motherhood.

i believe that feminisim has failed dramitically simply because feminists themselves arw dissatisfied with their lives and have passed on their on angers onto unsuspecting individuals and made them disillusioned.

i believe that Ms Hirshman is one.

for a mother not to love her children enough to understand why another mother would want to stay home to look after her own, is a sad state of affairs. i believe this is made worse simply because, she is, or rather has raised another generation of women who run the risk of carring her own misgivings and misunderstandings of motherhood and marriage who will seek to confuse and mislead more women.

i find it very odd that an intelligent woman like that can be so confused about an issue like this, and worse seeks validation for wat she presumes to be right wen history has taught otherwise.

should women have the choice; yes. should women be able to lead countries and economies? yes, they already do.

if she is not aware, there african and asian states that are run by women, and in case she was also not aware, theres a “small” country in Europe that has a female Chancelor.

it seems apparent to me that this lady does very little to hide her disgust for motherhood. i am perplexed at the typse of husband she must have, and wat thoughts run thru his mind wen he considers her comments. mayb he hasnt…or mayb he didnt understand them.

wat were her comments; “marry down by finding “a spouse with less social power than you”.” mayb he hasnt figured it out yet, or isnt smart enough to.

Posted by Jessica Fox on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:11 | #

The position of women in the executive suite today is an interesting topic. I feel that we have indeed come a long way but that we’re still under-represented in the work place.

Posted by Mark Ijsseldijk on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:43 | #

The position of women in the executive suite today is an interesting topic. I feel that we have indeed come a long way but that we’re still under-represented in the work place.
>Jessica Fox

Why do you find it a necessity for women to succeed in the workplace? Was the home just not good enough? How do you answer the data that says “as women have made more money relative to men, they have become less happy than before”?

What is your ethnicity?

Posted by Mark Ijsseldijk on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:50 | #

I feel that we have indeed come a long way but that we’re still under-represented in the work place.

Well, then you’re to blame. See, men used to work manufacturing and labor-intensive jobs. Y’know, the types of jobs that got outsourced starting in the ‘70s. And they could support families without their wives also having to work.

Retail and service are generally the woman’s sphere. If you cannot staff your own sphere of labor that’s your fault, not the fault of “evil male oppressors.”

Posted by Jessica Fox on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:08 | #

My Father was Irish though I never met him while my Mother was Jewish. I guess that makes me confused, right?

Posted by Q on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:58 | #

“My Father was Irish though I never met him while my Mother was Jewish.”

Hmm.. I can remember listening to Howard Stern a few years ago and a young man called in a said: I was diagnosed with a terminal disease and the doctor told me I only have six months to live. He then asked for suggestions of how he should spend his remaining six months? One guy suggested he take a trip around the word. Another said he should go to Las Vegas and max out his credit cards. Many gave the poor guy similar suggestions. Finally Howard Stern chimed in and said he had the solution. He told the guy to marry a Jewish women, that way his remaining six months would seem like an eternity.

Posted by CullTheDumbest on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:18 | #

Marc, liberals define freedom as flightiness, weightlessness. In other words, the only way to be free is to have an unsettled life.

Consider

. . . the PCL-R revealed that psychopaths are everywhere. Most are non-violent, but all leave a trail of havoc through their families and work environments, using and abusing colleagues and loved ones, endlessly manipulating others, constantly reinventing themselves. Hare puts the average North American incidence of psychopathy at 1 per cent of the population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics, business management … and journalism.

http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2006/06/28/is-bush-a-sociopath-or-a-psychopath-which/

What if an entire demographic carried psychopathy genes adapted to sneak by us in stealth mode and came to proliferate then rule Western Civilization? The symptoms are there.

Posted by danielj on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:31 | #

I feel that we have indeed come a long way but that we’re still under-represented in the work place.

And men are still not properly represented amongst human beings who give birth…

Posted by danielj on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:37 | #

wiggers does not have a h in it.

Posted by Frank on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:22 | #

“I feel that we have indeed come a long way but that we’re still under-represented in the work place. “

Women’s natural role in society shouldn’t be denigrated like this. True feminism would acknowledge the value women add.

Women today are expected to pursue careers AND raise families. Men increasingly stay single without the bother of a family. Women are also pressured into recreational sex as normal, without expecting the man to “do the right thing” and marry her in return. Women are victims of “feminism”.

One can no more ask a woman to live as a man than a snakehead fish to walk on land: it can do it for a little while, but its natural place in life is elsewhere.

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