Women at Work

The Feminine Mistake

Are We Giving Up Too Much?

by Leslie Bennetts

Voice, 384 pp., $24.95

Off-Ramps and On-Ramps

Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success

by Sylvia Ann Hewlett

Harvard Business School,

320 pp., $29.95

Get to Work

A Manifesto for the Women of the World

by Linda R. Hirshman

Viking Penguin, 112 pp., $19.95

The War Between the State and the Family

How Government Divides and Impoverishes

by Patricia Morgan

Institute of Economic Affairs, 158 pp., £10

Old-fashioned Marxist feminism has lost whatever charm it once had for the younger generation. Twentysomethings don't view divorce as the Ultimate Liberation. Generation X mothers demand time off rather than High-Quality-Affordable-Day-Care. Even Ivy League women now take significant detours from their careers to raise children.

These attitudes represent significant losses for the political left, since gender politics provided them an entrée to regulate the labor market, deconstruct the family, control school curriculum, micromanage sports programs, and unleash an avalanche of litigation--goals that would have been difficult to achieve any other way.

Naturally, the feminist establishment is not bowing gracefully to the deviations of the young. The first salvo in the counterattack came two years ago from retired law professor Linda Hirshman in an American Prospect article. It gathered so much media attention she expanded it into a book, charmingly entitled Get to Work. She argues that well-educated women who stay at home with their children are leading "lesser lives" because they are not using their rational faculties.

Although she begins promisingly enough by acknowledging that "Feminism Could Use a Few Dead White Men," her summary of the Greek philosophical tradition is curiously truncated. She omits everything that does not equate "exercising of rational capacities" with "engaging in market work." Those of us in the 21st century easily recognize her argument as a (slightly) dressed up version of old feminist claims: Motherhood is for ninnies; paid employment is the sole source of dignity for women; monetary income is important, not only for what it buys outside the home, but for the power it creates inside the home.

But her most sinister contention is that the government should take aggressive steps to assure that women do not make choices that lead them to live "lesser lives." In the book, and more recently in the New York Times, she argues that the federal government should tax people strictly as individuals, and not as members of a household. This, she correctly argues, would reduce the incentive for couples to view their income as shared income within the household.

According to Patricia Morgan, writing for the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, Great Britain has a version of these tax rules. In The War Between the State and the Family, Morgan relentlessly tracks the connection between public policy and the spread of single-parent households. Childrearing is something women do completely on their own. The state provides financial support, sparing lone mothers interference from a pesky father. According to Morgan, the Bolshevik dream of detaching mothers and fathers from each other, while detaching children from their mothers to be raised in state-funded creches, is very nearly a reality for the poorer classes of the United Kingdom.

This is Linda Hirshman's vision for all of us. All in the service of a good cause, mind you, that of the Ultimate Good of women's achieving absolute income parity with men at all times in their lives. Whether she admits it or not, Hirshman is asking the state to stop recognizing the most basic, spontaneously occurring unit of social cooperation: the married couple. To disaggregate marriage into a mere collection of individuals contributes to the progressive goal of eliminating mediating institutions between the state and the individual, empowering the state at the expense of society. When she subtitles her book A Manifesto for the Women of the World, and when her book is a little red one, the reader may be forgiven for thinking this book has Marxist roots.