Wow, this American Prospect polemic on feminism’s current crisis is really, really fascinating. Argument in a nutshell: to the extent that feminism has molded itself into a movement of individual choice and of women’s rights, it has ignored the true insight of women’s liberation that the family and the private sphere is the locus of many of women’s challenges and the obstacle to their equality. Even if one doesn’t agree with Linda Hirschman’s points, the observations are great. Like her look at life chances of New York Times Wedding page brides and grooms:
Every Times groom assumed he had to succeed in business, and was really trying. By contrast, a common thread among the women I interviewed was a self-important idealism about the kinds of intellectual, prestigious, socially meaningful, politics-free jobs worth their incalculably valuable presence.
Or, this:
these daughters of the upper classes will be bearing most of the burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping and cleaning bodily waste. Not two weeks after the Yalie flap, the Times ran a story of moms who were toilet training in infancy by vigilantly watching their babies for signs of excretion 24-7. They have voluntarily become untouchables.
Of course, the ideological division that Hirshman diagnoses just rephrases the split in the bourgeoisie itself, between those who trade in money and traditional power and those who are invested in cultural and humanistic betterment. Half of the gay men I know can be mapped in one camp or the other. And as someone who tends toward the latter, I don’t know that I have much room for being judgmental about the kind of ideological-turned-material subjugation that marks contemporary gender inequality. But lately feminism as a political movement has surprisingly little to say about such a basic thing.
In other post-feminist news, the Times has the goods on Pharma sales’ recruiting pipeline in college chearleading squads. A few years back the Onion invented a National Organization for Pretty Women. The reality surpasses the spoof.
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