Feminism just hates everybody, equally.

In a Washington Post oped yesterday, Linda Hirshman, a self described feminist philosopher, treats full-time motherhood with the curiosity of an anthropologist who has stumbled upon a previously undiscovered tribe of people. Like SNL's "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer", Hirshman seems to be "frightened and confused" by this bizarre creature called the "stay-at-home mother." What could possibly account for their freakish behavior?

According to Hirshman: "The tasks of housekeeping and child rearing [are] not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings. They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings."

It's incredible that the drudgery of working full time at a law firm is deemed worthy of women's "full time talents" but a woman dedicating herself to raising a family isn't. Hirshman then bizarrely asks: "Oh, and by the way, where were the dads when all this household labor was being distributed?" Umm, if they have a stay at home wife, they are probably working all day. And for most people, it's actually called being a mother and a wife, not "household labor". Hirshman later endorses the viewpoint that women should refuse to do 70% of the housework, ignoring the fact that if women are only doing 70% of the cleaning that's pretty revolutionary considering how much cleaning most men do on a regular basis before they cohabitate with women.

I saw Hirshman on 60 minutes and was shocked when she announced that women graduates of Ivy League schools who had left their careers to raise families were making the "wrong choice". There it was laid bare: feminism really isn't about women having the freedom to make choices. It's about women making the "right choice" as determined by people like Linda Hirshman.

As a "feminist" - whatever that word even means - one would think Hirshman would resist the temptation to infantilize grown women, but she claims she is just "asking women the hard questions." In reality, she is expressing an intolerant world view that women who don't work are losers, which makes her scarcely different than Caitlan Flanagan (aka the Ann Coulter of stay-at-home motherhood) who attacks and lectures women from the opposite end of the spectrum. And to be clear, like Flanagan, Hirshman isn't just expressing an opinon about what she thinks is best, she is saying that any woman who makes a choice different from what she espouses is unequivocally "wrong."

Hirshman is perplexed by the resistance she has received, but quickly surmises that all the opposition she is receiving is manufactured by religious freaks bent on imposing a biblical view of motherhood on society. She clearly could stand to take a stroll along the Upper West (or East) Side of New York -- hardly the beachhead for Christian childrearing -- to disabuse her of this notion. It is littered with highly educated ex-career women are happily raising their children full time.

I am constantly amazed at the hostility the word feminism seems to unleash in so many people, since I've always associated it with the belief that women should be given equal opportunity, fair pay, redress for sexual harassment etc. which seems fairly non-controversial. Unfortunately, too many of the voices for feminism seem disconnected form the reality that most women inhabit. They are focused on "problems" that hardly exist - like women wishing they were working more - while spending precious little energy on issues that indisputably have a negative impact on women: pornography, sex trafficking, or lack of adequate child care for the vast majority of mothers who are working because they have no choice. If they spent a fraction of the time on these issues that they spend trying to get women to get their men to vacuum the living room, the world would be a better place

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060619/cm_huffpost/023328