What do women want? It’s a question that men have puzzled over since the dawn of time. But we still worry about it because—well, you know why. What is utterly incomprehensible is to understand what feminist women want.
Fortunately, there’s an article by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect all about women in the workplace. Kate O’Beirne provides a quick rundown in NRO so you don’t have to read the whole thing.
What is happening is that elite women, the kind of women who advertise their weddings in The New York Times “Sunday Styles” section, are choosing to staying home to raise their children. What do women want? “Not what they should.” You see,
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. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, “A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.”
We conservatives, who know that fashion moves from the top down, understand, with Linda Hirschman, that if the fashionable women in the New York Times Sunday Style section are staying home to have babies then the rest of American women can’t be far behind.
But let us return to Linda Hirschman. If the family is a “necessary part of life” shouldn’t it occupy some sort of central place in society, honored and fêted by everyone? One of the hardest things for society to do is to encourage people to stick to the necessary things and to stop going off at tangents and diverting themselves with the fun things, the pleasurable things, at the expense of the necessary things.
But of course, for feminist Linda Hirshman the important things are not the necessary things. What is important is for women to take their place in the political and business elite. If women opt out of the career track, then fewer of them will get to the top of the political and business elites. That means that the rulers will make decisions that benefit men. And women’s lives will be tarnished.
A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world.
So, what does that have to do with a career in the business and political elite?
The problem with Hirschman’s religious agenda—and it is a religious agenda as pointed as the religious agenda of The Purpose-driven Life, is that it flies in the face of what women want, or more cogently, what women clearly do not want. The fact is that women aren’t as interested in the rat-race of “career” (which comes from the French word for racetrack). One of the Times Sunday Style brides,
a female MBA, said she could never figure out why the men at her workplace, which fired her, were so excited about making deals. “It’s only money,” she mused.
That is the problem that the feminists will never solve. For many men, the race is everything. For many women, what’s the point?
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