The Helpmeet?
Angel in the House?
Maybe crinolines are going to make a comeback?
Why is it impossible for men to do any of this?

Actually, that particular point has been refuted, at least here in Australia – both middle class AND working class women enjoy the social aspects of working, even if the job itself isn’t up to scratch. And working class women are delighted at the paycheck and independence. Pamela Bone, a feminist columnist at the Melbourne AGE (now sadly terminal with cancer) described how, as a factory worker before her journalism career, she enjoyed working because she was independent and had that money, as well as the social network.

And I as an enthusiastic non-professional cook (I suspect professional chefs would agree) take offense to the suggestion that cooking is “mindless.” Maybe bad cooking is. Good cooking is creative and requires thought. A lot of weaving, as practiced throughout much of history, isn’t “mindless” or uncreative either.

Cleaning is mindless. And many domestic chores aren’t a whole lot of fun if you have to do them all the time, with no other options (that’s why automation is nice). But if chosen, plenty of domestic tasks can be creative, enjoyable, and intellectually stimulating.

“Women’s work” isn’t intrinsically unpleasant, and we’ll never convince men to pull their weight domestically if we keep saying it is.

But at some point, if you are going to be defending something, be it a behavior or the legal status of some behavior, you have to address the substance of the topic and not just the abstraction of choice in itself. Protected choice is only valid insofar as there exists some hypothetical value in the options the choice presents, and the it is only significant to the extent that that the choice is exploited.

So it’s extra impressive when you are able to criticize someone’s private choice and get very far with it– like anti-smoking activists or abstinence activists. These people have really achieved quite a bit given the nature of what they are saying. Kudos to them.

Over the long run social traditionalists will make arguments in opposition to some type of behavior– homosexuality, “unchastity”, abortion, being a career woman– and the other side will respond with the slogan “choice”. The traditionalists will make arguments as to why these behaviors are bad– they don’t lead to fulfillment, they kill babies, they are selfish, they are unBiblical and people need a compassionate God to feed their spiritual growth– and the other side will respond with “well it’s a free country I can do what I want.”

I don’t see the conflict here.

It’s perfectly okay to live in a society where gay marriage is legal, but there are no gays, because those who feel themselves sexually attracted to the other gender feel that the benefits of leading a Biblical life outweigh the fulfillment of their inner desires. Is this situation because gays are pressured, or because they’ve made their own sovereign decisions? How can the two be distinguished, told apart?

MommaSteph writes:

Is staying at home really a “freely made” choice? I say that I chose to stay at home with my kids – and it felt like a free choice, and my husband was with me either way – but how much of my decision was based on “gendered norms”… we need a new word for the choice that may or may not be a choice

We don’t need a new word. That’s what “choice” already means.

Well, not if we all keep dropping out of the public sphere to be stay at home moms.

Is it really a surprise that women aren’t getting the policies they need and want when women keep “choosing” to say no to power? Who are we expecting to come along and change the world for us?

It’s not really useful to critique choice feminism when you have a population of women who can’t make the choices that women with money and educations can make, or make the choices that they’d like to make.

I’d be interested in hearing more about what people think of Hirshman’s ideas about marital barganing. Lots of women stay at home because it’s a good economic choice – their husband earns more than them. There are gender based reasons for this (the pay gap), but there are also social reasons for it (women tend to marry older men, and tend to marry ‘up’ relative to men).

Hirshman’s suggestion that women should go for young, poverty-striken bohemian artists, who’ll have no choice but to do the childrearing, is a bit extreme – but I wonder if there’s something in the general idea. (Though it does seem a bit unromantic to plan it like that, and I can’t help but feel some choices will be social frowned upon.)

That’s the rub, for me. Is staying at home really a “freely made” choice?

I think for some it’s a choice, and for others it’s the “best alternative.” For instance, in jobs that won’t let you stay unless you’re back in six weeks, quitting is the alternative allowing you to be with your baby for as long as Europeans can take maternity leave and still return. That’s my other question about all this–are people who are totally against staying home, also fine with newborn babies going directly to full-time day care, or would they support a European-style FMLA policy?

What would Hirshman think of Sweden or the UK? It’s something interesting to consider.