Feminism after Freidan
Salon.Com
More than 40 years ago, she launched a movement by denouncing stifling, stay-at-home motherhood. Today, are women who choose to stay home betraying feminism?
By Joan Walsh
Feb. 6, 2006 Betty Friedan's death at 85, after a life in which she launched modern feminism, four books and three children, can't be lamented as a tragedy, given the random, untimely and unnecessary deaths that we harden ourselves to daily. But it hit me anyway, because it came as I was thinking about how to jump into the stirring but vexing debate over what Brandeis University professor Linda Hirshman derides as "choice feminism:" the notion that anything a woman chooses, whether it's jumping off the career track to have babies or forgoing motherhood altogether to pursue public achievement, should be OK with feminists, as long as it's her "choice" (an extension, of course, of the language that carried the day on abortion).
Instead, Hirshman argues, feminism should rebuke the affluent educated women who are increasingly (in what numbers is disputed) abandoning careers for family life. She even cites Friedan as an example of how radical the feminist movement once was on these questions, a radicalism she thinks the movement should return to. She notes that in her movement-inspiring 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," Friedan went so far as to compare housework to animal life: "Vacuuming the living room floor -- with or without makeup -- is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman's full capacity," Friedan wrote. "Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from other animals by his mind's power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the future to it ... when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different from his past, he is a man, a human being."
More:http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/02/06/friedan/
More than 40 years ago, she launched a movement by denouncing stifling, stay-at-home motherhood. Today, are women who choose to stay home betraying feminism?
By Joan Walsh
Feb. 6, 2006 Betty Friedan's death at 85, after a life in which she launched modern feminism, four books and three children, can't be lamented as a tragedy, given the random, untimely and unnecessary deaths that we harden ourselves to daily. But it hit me anyway, because it came as I was thinking about how to jump into the stirring but vexing debate over what Brandeis University professor Linda Hirshman derides as "choice feminism:" the notion that anything a woman chooses, whether it's jumping off the career track to have babies or forgoing motherhood altogether to pursue public achievement, should be OK with feminists, as long as it's her "choice" (an extension, of course, of the language that carried the day on abortion).
Instead, Hirshman argues, feminism should rebuke the affluent educated women who are increasingly (in what numbers is disputed) abandoning careers for family life. She even cites Friedan as an example of how radical the feminist movement once was on these questions, a radicalism she thinks the movement should return to. She notes that in her movement-inspiring 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," Friedan went so far as to compare housework to animal life: "Vacuuming the living room floor -- with or without makeup -- is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman's full capacity," Friedan wrote. "Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from other animals by his mind's power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the future to it ... when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different from his past, he is a man, a human being."
More:http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/02/06/friedan/
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