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.
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