Oh, by the way, a little snooping's just fine. As everyone knows, I have NOTHING to hide! And you as well, right? So, what’s the problem?
And really, who cares that the Department of Homeland Security not only is planning to track us with the REAL ID in 2008 – something that the American people rallied against only ten years ago, but now accept without protest – but is also planning to track our movements via vehicle. And you thought 1984, Brave New World, and all those other utopian sci-fi novels were mere fiction?
Well, whatever, anyway we obviously have MUCH bigger fish to fry here in the U.S. If you saw Good Morning America recently (and I am thankful that I have better things to do in the morning – taking my basal body temperature, for instance), you know that the big story was the “Mommy Wars”! Really, I’d rather worry about some elitist female propagandist telling me that my children will be better off AWAY from me all day, in the care of some institution, than to worry about losing my freedom and privacy. Oh, and by the way, I’m wasting my talents and education by doing something so banal as raising my children. My brain is withering as I write!
I am curious, though. Why is it that people assume that taking care of children isn’t fun and fulfilling? By the way, what does it mean when one's life is fulfilled? Does a fulfilling life only include being a corporate drone for 40 or more hours each week?
As a mom who is mainly at home, I can tell my children about Shakespeare as easily as I used to tell my first-year college students. Or I can teach my children the alphabet. Or numbers. And guess what? Unlike my former students, my children know where I live. And, my children will know where I am years from now; I will know where they are. You get my drift – there's some permanence in teaching my children that I never had teaching strangers, wonderful as some of those students were. And yet, people like Linda Hirshman are just sure that what my little educated self is doing is a) bad for me b) bad for society, and c) bad for my children.
In case you can’t stomach the article, I’ll give you one of my favorite lines: Hirshman thinks that those of us who have degrees and yet, choose to raise our own children are part of “a trend that is a tragedy not only for the mothers, but ultimately their children and women as a whole.”
See? It's not King George and his posse who are providing us harm, it's me. Oh, and the other moms who choose not to hand our children over to others all day. Before you read Hirshman, you may indeed have a different view of things. Here's my thinking prior to Hirshman's admonishment of me: Our Constitutional rights out the window? A tragedy! Our president’s spying on us? A tragedy! Mothers who raise our own children . . . A tragedy?!? B.F. Skinner must be cackling in his grave over Hirshman's words. Imagine! A nation full of mothers who want nothing more than to fulfill themselves by turning their children over to an institution, as close to birth as possible.
I can only say that this kind of blather would have never made network television prior to the so-called feminist movement of the 60s and 70s. I’ll remember the first time I questioned that movement. My now five-year-old was a mere three months old at the time and I was having lunch with a friend of mine who had a daughter a few months older than my son. I was supposed to return to work from maternity leave the next day and I wasn’t too happy about it. I said something about the feminists and she said that she had never really been one. Suddenly, all the socialist feminist propaganda that I’d gleaned from way too many years in school cracked. I was ecstatic to find an intelligent woman who didn't consider herself a feminist!
Since then, I've found a few more. I realized with my friend that day that I didn’t have to love the feminists. Thanks to her eye-opening comment, I began to realize that anything I did was because I did it, not because some supposed bra-burning women’s libber had paved some metaphorical road for me. I could be a woman and not believe all the feminist crap – how liberating!
I could tell Ms. Hirshman, of course, how I've met few women who were happy and fulfilled by leaving their child in daycare or with a nanny all day. Most of the women I know who have to work outside the home would be much happier spending time with their children, if they could afford it. I know it's hard for someone like Hirshman to believe, but there are some of us who actually like being around our children.
That's not enough, of course. Loving to be with our children and to teach them is bad news for those of us who are educated; and evidently, we are way too stupid or conditioned or something to make our own choices: "Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy," Hirshman says. Then why bother? Really, what business is it of Hirshman's what I do with my education? Maybe we are choosing traditional roles because, well, they're traditional. Perhaps the fact that they seem to have worked well for thousands of years makes them attractive to many of us. Maybe some of us see women and men as contributors to our family, but not as equals per se. Therefore, if men rule the corporate world, maybe, just maybe, that's okay with some of us. Some of us are quite happy to have the privilege of raising and teaching our offspring.
But it's not okay with Hirshman. In fact, taking care of the children that we've created makes us traitors to our class, unless, of course, we are in the "lowest caste." According to her words in The American Prospect, it is better to pay someone else to do the dirty work with our progeny:
" . . . these daughters of the upper class will be bearing most of the burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping and cleaning bodily waste. Not two weeks after the Yalie flap, the Times ran a story of moms who were toilet training in infancy by vigilantly watching their babies for signs of excretion 24-7. They have voluntarily become untouchables."
Even though I can hardly be called a daughter of the upper class, the elite to which Hirshman refers supposedly affects me greatly, as part of what she calls the "regime effect," or what I like to call trickle-down choices. In other words, when those who've gone to Yale start staying at home with their children, all the rest of us – too dumb, of course, to make our own choices – will follow, wreaking supposed havoc on humanity.
I can't help but wonder if Hirshman realizes how demeaning her comment is to the women who actually do the childraising while the moms that Hirshman so admires are off fulfilling themselves. Oh, never mind, you go off to your office and let Helena take care of your children all day. After all, she only has an associate's degree in some childhood education program. But you, you, my darling, have a master's! As a result, you must never ever touch poop. Instead, you must go and teach socialism, I mean, sociology all day. If you weren't there to teach those little darlings, then they might be taught by – horrors! – a MAN! And if that were the case, then you wouldn't be able to tell them how victimized we women are! If you weren't there to tell them how to think, then they may just learn to think for themselves! We can't let that happen! You MUST give your child to the woman with less education and go tell the masses what to think!
As with so many modern-day women, many of whom took women’s studies classes as part of their degree, Linda Hirshman is frittering away her own talents and skills by becoming a professional feminist. Instead of doing something really useful for the world, Hirshman is busy telling women that being a mom and raising your own child is simply bad business. It's her privilege to say what she wants, of course, but how much better might her talents and skills be used in, say, keeping the government out of all our lives, no matter our gender.
photo by John Thomas
It's been a while since the world had a Margaret Sanger running around, supposedly helping women by telling them to stop reproducing so much. But I do believe that Hirshman is a valid contender for a Sanger award of some sort. It's sad, indeed, that Hirshman was able to have so much airtime on national television, especially when our freedoms are dwindling, zooming away from us faster than King George's defenses of his unconstitutional searches fly from his mouth. The real tragedy of Hirshman's desire to tell educated mommies that what we do for our children is a huge waste of our talents and skills is that anyone bothers to listen.
March 7, 2006
