Without any argument, Linda Hirshman asserts in an article in the American Prospect:
Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family — with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks — is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government.
Hirshman never argues for this offensive conclusion. In fact, like most “women’s studies” types, she hardly ever argues for anything. Now if this was a mere blog post, that would be fair enough, but this is an article in a journal and she intends to be taken seriously.
She asserts that well educated women are morally wrong to stay at home. This choice is associated with such joy filled tasks as vacuuming the floor. Evidently (shockingly) this kind of intellectual boorishness provoked an overwhelming storm of criticism, but of late Hirshman has comforted herself by noting that her critics were mostly religious and that working women (the moral ones on her account) were too busy doing the important work of the nation to send her missives of praise. (She claims to know this because a friend reports that working women were emailing each other article links. Evidently working women have time to praise the article to each other, but not to copy her on the email. Following the level of her analysis, perhaps this is because they have chosen public over private so don’t have the time to comfort a sister under fire. After all, they are engaged in the important work of running government agencies and earning big checks.)
Here is my counter-assertion:
We need good mothers more than we need more lawyers and a great deal more than we need more politicians of either gender.
Which seems more plausible to you?
In fact, it is hard to see the social value of the job of writing articles for the American Prospect. Without motherhood the nation would perish, but without the American Prospect nothing much would happen, some of us even think the nation would improve greatly.
Being a mother is difficult because it is more mentally and physically challenging than almost any job one can name. Evidently if one becomes a teacher in the “public sphere” it is valuable work, but if one teaches her own children at home, then one is not doing demanding work. Cooking a gourmet meal for big money is creative, doing it for love is demeaning. Running a government is important to gain power, running a household to create a home is not. By this reasoning selling one’s body for money is good while making love to one’s spouse is less.
Hirshman is a gift that keeps giving to a blogger. She cannot see why women rather than men might stay home with their young children… evidently never having had the natural function of the breast explained to her or having objectified them as sexual objects divorced from love and marriage.
However, her most difficult assertion to defend is the one I highlighted: staying at home is a kind of mental death. Now as any college graduate can report, the transition from the mentally rich world of college to any job, home or not, is difficult. It is hard to keep reading, thinking, and discussing big ideas. In my brief time working in financial planning, I did not notice profound mental discourse breaking out around me. On the other hand, I know many mothers engaged in Socratic discourse and reading programs to provide the intellectual framework for the management of their private estates. One has to choose to stay mentally alive or any role can kill the life of the mind. The first years of any role, public or private, are the hardest in which to do this as the person just starting out has to do the most difficult ground clearing work. This is as true of mothers as it is of anyone else. Critics of motherhood often look at the first experiences and assume it all stays the same as if the first year stock broker who must do a great deal of demeaning work never has her role change. My experience suggests (as did Socrates!) that working for money or the government is the hardest place to stay mentally alert.
Why does staying at home have to include physical labor? Has Hirshman read Proverbs 31? Why is motherhood anything less than managing the private estate of the family? If the family can afford it and wished to do so, then physical labor could be hired out. Managing the home can include private industry. . though Hirshman seems to think managing a quilt making factory for money is more fulfilling mentally that designing and making a quilt by hand for love.
Homemaking can include, for example, home education. Hope can find her role taxing and demeaning, especially when women like Hirshman says that as an honors graduate of a fine college she has acted immorally. She also found being a teacher sometimes taxing and demeaning.
A wise stay at home mother can, especially after the early childhood years (which are the most difficult and from which Hirshman seems to have drawn all her conclusions) find herself with the most freedom and ability to shake loose of the commercial rat race and create the private social networks that used to be the very definition of civilization. Many a mother looks forward to reaping the results of her early loving labor in the years following early childhood.
On the other hand, when did physical labor become more demeaning than mental labor? Perhaps this is due to my religious worldview (which evidently makes everything I say suspect to Hirshman), but there is dignity and can be glory in any job. The dehumanizing snobbery of Hirshman’s post would be breath taking if it were not so common in today’s good colleges. Evidently, people who go to “good colleges” should never be plumbers either. . . since only government and non-physical work has value. Union members involved in physical labor should note the reality that if you are in a union, liberal leadership secretly despises you. There is a reason that Christians led the union movement. We believe all jobs should and can have dignity and great worth.
The greatest jobs are not those for which a man receives money. The old American ideal, the family farmer, was to escape from this dependent semi-serfdom of the wage earner and become self-sufficient. The millions of stay at home mothers and their home centered husbands are recreating that reality. They are becoming less dependent on the state through avoiding government schools. They grow or at least prepare their own food. . . rather than giving their child a generic cookie made for money and purchased with money, they create their own unique food. In fact, they refuse to measure a job’s worth by money, but instead are intent on the formation of the private and social relationships that create a nation.
Of course, traditionally Americans have believed that persons who never do physical labor may be missing out on something. Groups like the Boy and Girl Scouts were created, in part, to teach this value. This is one reason my children are the some of the few in a fifty block region to cut their own grass and why I try to become part of gardening or other projects in the house. My stay at home wife manages these projects and countless others. She engages in discourse with friends and with young women on any number of topics. In fact, when it is all said and done I often feel that I exist to provide the money (sordid stuff) necessary for Hope to create civilization.
Some women must work. Other women choose to work and do not feel called to have children. Others are in complex situations where the best way for their family is for both mom and dad to become part-time homemakers and part-time wage earners. However, there is, as the late Sheldon Vanauken once wrote, an iron law of home: there is no home without a homemaker. . . making a home is a full time job for someone or a combination of someones. The ideal is for both husband and wife to be able to be homemakers. Technology is now allowing many of us to return to the family not just by farming but new jobs. Many more of us realize that wages, power, and “big jobs” are futile snares and spend as little time working for money as possible and as much time working for love and with our families.
Many of us believe, based on best reason and evidence, that home is the most important of all social institutions. We need more homemakers. If you are a homemaker, then you are the bed rock of society whether you are a man or a woman. Don’t let the Hirshman’s get you down. She has chosen the public over the private, the paycheck over the personal, and somehow believes cutting herself off from the physical is good. We shall see whose worldview works best in time, but thousands of years of human history suggest that Hirshman is part of an effete, decaying elite cut off from the way the real world works. Go on creating civilization and the children who will form it, but remember that folk like Hirshman are out there hoping to borrow both for her causes.