September 5, 2006

Political philosopher Linda Hirshman pulls no punches in her critique of women who make career sacrifices to take care of their children. The idea of "Ph.D.s who are wiping butts," she tells Mindy Farabee in an interview posted on Alternet, is "horrifying" and "immoral."

Hirshman's new book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, comes out around the same time as Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner's Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want and What to Do About It. But their points of view could hardly be more divergent. While the authors of the Motherhood Manifesto argue for more flex time, parental leave, and other policies that would alleviate the "double shift" and help mothers, fathers, and children, have happier, less stressful family lives, Hirshman simply sneers at women who want more time with their children.

Ironically, the intro to the Alternet interview, which originally appeared in LA CityBeat, claims that Hirshman "takes the highest of high roads, focusing only on highly educated elite women and taking them to task for staying home." In other words, Hirshman's critique should be palatable to progressives because she reserves her barbs for rich ladies, not the oppressed of the earth. The problem, of course, is that implicit in her argument is the idea that highly educated women's lives are too valuable to be spent "wiping butts"--leave that disgusting job to poor, uneducated moms, or to the nannies and maids, please!

This is the sort of thinking that gives feminism a bad name. It infuriates middle class women (even some with Ph.D.’s) who resent being looked down on for choosing to stay home with their children. For working class and poor women, it reinforces the idea that feminists neglect them or look down upon them. And for non-progressive men, whose work-obsessed values Hirshman seems to prize so highly, she only confirms their preconceived notion that feminism is a club of elite, white-wine-sipping whiners and snobs.

Denigrating child rearing and endorsing the notion that every human being's value can be measured by one's place in the market is not, to my mind, much of a manifesto. In fact, it is an endorsement of the status quo. As Blades and Rowe-Finkbeiner point out in their book, "In order to maintain income levels, parents have to work more hours—two-parent families are spending 16 percent more time at work, or 500 more hours a year than in 1979 just to keep up." Most women are working for pay--81 percent in 1999, up from 63 percent in 1975--so the bonbon-eating housewives Hirshman targets are a mighty small group anyway. The real damage Hirshman's argument does is that it give "feminist" and "progressive" cover to old-fashioned misogyny. Women who are, by Hirshman's own figuring, doing 70 percent of the housework at the same time that they are holding down paying jobs, don't really need yet another voice telling them how stupid and worthless their time taking care of their families is. That is the sort of thinking that keeps employees at the office until 7:00 at night, and fosters hostility to calls for flexible and family-friendly policies. Who needs to accommodate a bunch of under-achieving butt-wipers?

So retrograde are mainstream American attitudes when it comes to child care that, while most parents work full time, we still have one of the most abysmal day care systems in the world. The United States ranks ninety-first among 151 countries for its child/caregiver ratios, according to The Motherhood Manifesto, and turnover is higher in child care--with its low wages and no benefits--than in the fast food industry. ("One study of childcare centers in California found that between 1996 and 2000 there was a 76 percent staff turnover rate," the same book points out.)

That matters a lot, furthermore, because low quality early childhood education sets kids up for a lifetime of failure, while high-quality early care sets up society for less class stratification and a more educated, happy, populace. There is plenty of concrete evidence for this--from the familiar study often quoted by the Children's Defense Fund, which found each $1 invested in good early childhood care saves $7 on welfare, crime-fighting, delinquency, teen pregnancy, and other costly social ills, to the higher scores of children on all kinds of aptitude tests compared with peers in low-quality care.

Yet most child care in America is of poor quality. No wonder some highly educated mothers decide to give up on the care the marketplace offers for their infants and toddlers and reduce their hours of work or stay at home.

Hirshman dismisses the question of whether it wouldn't be better to have a more humane world, rather than urging women to conform to a culture that devalues care giving. Idealistic notions about making the world a better place for women and children are hogwash. "I think wishing for an ideal world is just an excuse for not engaging the world as it exists," she says. And as for the idea that raising children is the world's most important job, she says, "If, in fact, it were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it? They'd rather make war, make foreign policy, invent nuclear weapons, decode DNA, paint The Last Supper, put the dome on St. Peter's Cathedral; they'd prefer to do all those things that are much less important than raising babies?"

Americans are still leading the world in warmaking, foreign policy (which has devolved into warmaking by another name, it appears), nuclear weapons, and, arguably, decoding DNA. But the countries that produced The Last Supper, St. Peter's Cathedral, and many of the other lasting achievements of humanity tend to have a more enlightened view of the value of raising children than our country does.

"The United States ranks low in global comparisons of child-care support," Blades and Rowe-Finkbeiner observe. They quote a report by the Project on Global Working Families at Harvard University: "Initial inequities across social class are markedly exacerbated by the public policy decisions the United States has made, including, among others, the failure thus far to provide public preschool or early childhood education to parallel public school. . . . In many other nations, working families can count on publicly guaranteed parental leave; and in many, preschool childcare or early-childhood education is already publicly provided."

That kind of commitment to making life better for children and families doesn't happen when academic "progressives" take the uber-capitalist line, denigrating childrearing as glorified "butt-wiping."

Fortunately, there is a growing movement that rejects that old, chauvinist attitude. Some of the most outraged and articulate readers who wrote in to Alternet to take issue with Hirshman's comments were stay-at-home fathers.

"As a Ph.D.--who not only wipes butts but also changes colostomy bags, changes cat litter, and cleans up after puppies my children adore, all in the course of being a loving parent--I find it insulting to suggest these are appropriate jobs for some and not for others," writes one. "Isn't it stunningly elitist to suggest that there are jobs beneath me because I have an education? I truly believe that all work has value, and particularly when it comes to my children there is NO JOB I would not do gladly. Oh, and my wife, who is also a Ph.D., agrees with me."

Others pointed out that maybe going to the office is not the highest human calling.

"I'm a stay-at-home dad, music director for a church, my wife's a teacher. I'm lucky to be able to take care of my kids, and while no one enjoys the nitty-gritty of child care all that much, I think it's a load of crap that the working world is the repository of meaning for any of us," writes another. "The author has bought the goal of our mercantilist culture: reduce everyone to their usefulness to the system. Life is for living, not measuring, and not winning. Quit trying to tell people what should be important to them, and go back to your office and get ready to teach your next class, if that world is the one you feel is important."

For the many, many fathers and mothers who know in their bones that their children's well being is more important to them than squeezing every drop of marketable value from their bodies and brains, Hirshman's "Manifesto" just does not resonate. We need to work to build the kind of society that helps us all find fulfillment in our public and private lives. That, not celebrating material success and advanced degrees and denigrating the basic work that makes the world go around, is a true progressive vision.