My post on the Linda Hirschman article brought some grumbling in the comment section and plenty more here (hat tip: Crooked Timber). I should hasten to add that another, obvious reason I hestitate to be judgmental about anyone’s personal-as-political choices is that as a gay non-parent, I hardly have to face the lifestyle tradeoffs and gender negotiation that a lot of straight women do. The issue of unwaged housework is important and worth discussing, but for me it’s somewhat an abstract issue.
I don’t exactly agree with Hirschman but think there’s a smarter point in her article than people are giving credit. Namely: that even if individual women choose career, homemaking/childrearing, or some combination of the two and are happy with their decision, collectively their choices are adversely constrained by the expectation that they will shoulder domestic work on top of a career or instead of it. I like "paul"s defense in 11D’s comments:
The feminist movement of the 1960s-1980s was reasonably successful in battering down barriers to women. Unlike women of her generation, the women she surveyed have had many more opportunities available to them. Yet, a much larger proportion of these women are choosing to drop out of the halls of power than are their male counterparts.
Why? It is no longer the case that women have substantially fewer opportunities available to them by law and custom. Are women and men intrinsically different in their tastes and capabilities? This is probably not a good place to begin, given the pervasive effect of society on conditioning people’s tastes and abilities. And it appears that these women have already demonstrated their abilities, at least so far as they can be measured by schooling.
Perhaps the differences in the constraints that men and women face have something to do with this. That seems like a promising place to start. For one, the expectations that individuals feel with respect to career and family responsibilities, from friends, family, in-laws, colleagues, employers and society more generally differ systematically by the individual’s sex. Second, people’s expectations for themselves, shaped by many things including what they think they can achieve, differ systematically by sex. This seems to become more pronounced with age and experience, and reflects the lack of women at the top. So the situation suffers from positive feedback: fewer women at the top leads fewer women to try, etc., etc.
Not only have most American workplaces barely adjusted to the general lack of a full-time stay-at-home parent, few American families have made the necessary adjustment, either in expectations about what needs to be done or the division of labor between the sexes. By and large, this lack of adjustment falls much more heavily on women than on men.
It may be, as 11D writes, one doesn’t have time for the revolution. It may be that Hirshman, among her other toe-stepping, ignores that a large number of women really do have a greater desire for the work of parenting. But I think she may be right that policy solutions will only chip at the problem, that a larger personal-is-political, collective bargaining would be needed to achieve more gender equality.
By the way, this discussion reminds me of a question John Keith posed a little while back: "Has the increase in dual-income families (with the number of working women increasing from 30% to 60% over the past sixty years) actually caused a higher cost of living?" I’d be curious to see some empirical study, but it seems likely that the answer is yes and that some of the increase of dual-incomes has been zero-sum. Housing in constrained markets inevitably gets bid up by what people can pay (am I missing something?) but consumer goods do not. Yet another factor making the current partial division of labor by gender unsatisfactory to many.
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