Women at Work

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.

More modest, and more harmless, is journalist Leslie Bennetts’s contribution to the Mommy Wars, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? Predictably, she believes nonworking mothers are giving up way too much: Their earning power, their negotiating power within the household, their self-respect, and even the respect of their children. Based on seemingly endless interviews and no systematic data, Bennetts offers the ultimate trump argument for uninterrupted labor force participation: Your husband might leave you, and then where would you be? But blaming career interruptions for women’s economic vulnerability masks the real problem. No-fault divorce, which feminists did so much to promote, has rendered innocent spouses, male and female alike, vulnerable to faithless and even predatory behavior.

Like Hirshman, Bennetts focuses on high-powered career women. While she gives occasional lip service to the conditions of lower-class women, she is tone-deaf to their aspirations for themselves and their families. Bennetts approvingly quotes economist Heidi Hartmann on the relative social benefits of raising children and working in the market place: “Unless you are the mother of an Einstein or a Madame Curie, which most of us are not, your own work, if it is significant, is probably more important to society than raising your kids.”

Bennetts doesn’t seem to notice the obvious corollary: If you work for Wal-Mart and your husband drives a truck, then raising children probably is your most important social contribution, as well as your greatest source of satisfaction. Yet highly educated, well-paid professionals make sweeping statements and implement policies that affect all women, not just those in the top ranks of the professions. The degradation of family life, through divorce, cohabitation, and unmarried child-bearing, has certainly had its most devastating impact on the lower classes.

That is why the most constructive of this current crop of books is Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s effort to encourage business to accommodate women’s career interruptions. She unabashedly appeals to highly educated executives of large corporations. She makes no pretense of trying to solve all the problems of all women’s lives. She isn’t particularly interested in pontificating about how women’s careers will improve their relationships with their husbands. She does not attack women for their choices to “off-ramp” or “take scenic routes,” as she describes the career interruptions that women make for the sake of their families. Nor does she demand justice in the form of workplace regulation or endless equal-opportunity litigation.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett understands well the appeal and the importance of motherhood. She quite sensibly realizes that women have children because they want to, they stay home with their children because they enjoy it, and that no amount of social engineering can or should talk every woman out of these desires. Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success stokes neither class warfare nor women’s fears. Instead, Hewlett appeals to the self-interest of employers. Creating opportunities for skilled women to return to the work force is sound business practice. Companies can benefit from their work experience, and women show their gratitude to these far-sighted employers by becoming loyal and hard-working employees.

Hewlett does a valuable public service in calling attention to innovative corporate programs. Her book compiles interviews with successful women who have struggled with finding “on-ramps.” She also highlights large corporations that have profited from providing these “on-ramps” for women returning from child-care responsibilities. Some companies use flex time and job-sharing, others are experimenting with networking and leadership programs that sustain returning women’s ambition, rather than squashing it.

The bigger picture of Hewlett’s approach is that it would allow women to participate in the labor force as women, not as men in skirts. She proposes that we “re-imagine work life” to offer an “arc of career flexibility” to accommodate women’s distinctive needs. Traditional male career trajectories demand the most intense investment early in life. By the time women have accomplished enough in their careers to feel financially prepared for motherhood, their peak fertility is behind them. Marxist-inspired feminism insisted on identical incomes for men and women at every point in their lives. This misguided concept of justice has shaped 40 years of public and corporate policy.

Women would be better off if we accepted the reality that our fertility peaks during our twenties. Go to college for a liberal, not a vocational, education. Get married. Have kids. Let your husband support you. Maybe go back to school for an advanced degree. Go to work. Help support the kids’ college, and your joint retirement. And since women live longer than men, we could be working longer and let our husbands relax a bit.

Of course, this vision of the workplace also involves an alternative vision of marriage and family: Marriage is a life-long institution for mutual cooperation and support, rather than the unenforceable noncontract it has become. I need not say that cooperation between spouses would be far better for children. Nor need I say that this is the exact opposite of the feminist vision, which replaced the goal of marital stability with the goal of employment stability.

Old-style feminism was dominated by Marxist categories of thinking. Establishment feminists view relationships between men and women as a special case of class warfare, of domination, of power struggle. America is still trying to find ways to incorporate women into public life without the use of these categories. The party or people who can figure out how to do that will have a loyal following. And it is certain that success will look more like Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s vision than like Linda Hirshman’s or Leslie Bennetts’s.

Jennifer Roback Morse is senior research fellow in economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.