Meghan O'Rourke on Linda Hirshman

I've pretty much avoided the Linda Hirshman discussions, because I kind of agree with her bottom line (though not her self-righteousness, her absolutism, or her unwarranted attacks on people I think are great), and I don't want my stay-at-home mom friends to hate me (because it really really is fine with me that they stay home, in fact, it's none of my business; I just think that the decision to stay home has political implications that need to be acknowledged). Now I can continue to avoid the topic, and I don't even have to read the book, because Meghan O'Rourke sums it up beautifully in Slate:

But—though I almost hate to say it—buried beneath Hirshman's overblown rhetoric is a useful idea, now set out in a short book titled Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World: namely, that our obsession with choice prevents us from asking tough questions about how to achieve further equality. "Deafened by choice, here's the moral analysis these women never heard," she says: Until there is more equity in the cultural norms for child-rearing and household tasks, each time a woman decides to "opt out" she is making a political decision that reinforces an already ingrained social inequality. Women who believe otherwise suffer from a mixture of false consciousness and impractical idealism. It's when Hirshman is at her most radical—when she sets aside the language of personal fulfillment in favor of injunctions about the collective good—that she is at her most valuable. I would never write this book, but I'm glad somebody did.

Yup.