Wolf Dressed in Feminist Clothing?
I don't have too much left to say about the Hirshman article (see post below); so many interesting reactions have already been blogged (see links in post below), and Hirshman herself has surfaced in the comments at Alas a Blog and Echidne of the Snakes (it looks like she supercopied the same comment into the comments sections of both blogs). Which is a better place for her to be than my e-mail inbox, where one of her missives said in pertinent part: "I will say this: I have answered almost none of the hysterical internet commentators on my article, because I am not interested in engaging in dialogue with people whose thinking cannot sharpen or challenge my own." (I'm now fairly confident the e-mails actually came from Hirshman - I will issue a correction as necessary). So now according to Hirshman we are "hysterical" too.
William Sjostrom at AtlanticBlog, in a post entitled "The Irrelevance of Modern Feminism," said: "Two days ago, I noted with some amusement a feminist, a retired women's studies professor no less, complaining vehemently about women who opt to raise a family rather than work for a paycheck, as modern feminism apparently requires they do." Modern feminism DOES NOT require this; there are a world of feminists that Hirshman doesn't speak for. She is, as MUBAR puts it, a wolf dressed in feminist clothing. Packed in Saccharin said: "I like to think of feminism as a movement about equality and creating choices and opportunities for women. Not dictating what those choices should be. Hirshman can bite me. If this is the future of feminism, count me out." Given the reaction of the blogosphere, I'm cautiously optimistic that Hirshman is NOT the future of feminism, and will not be misperceived as such. Here is paragraph from Echidne's response that I wish I had written:
...."I am not denying that people have strong opinions on whether to have children and on the way to bring them up, just as they have on the type of car to drive or whom to vote for. But hidden in these strong opinions about children and childrearing are strong opinions on how women should behave, how women should lead their lives, and given this I'd expect that people would think twice before giving me their opinions on the whole womankind. When they don't I get truly pissed off, because we rarely if ever tell the whole class of men how to lead their lives or even how to be good fathers. And also because it is impossible to be both a Good Woman and a Good Careerist, given the definitions we have chosen to use." ....
If Hirshman was trying to stir things up to improve her prospects for a book contract, I'll have to assume she suceeded. The wingnuts will certainly enjoy haranguing the rest of us with all the little gems that can be extracted from her article to illustrate the loathsome elitism and anti-family agenda of feminism; the prospects of an entire book to mine probably have them salivating on their keyboards.