A Woman's Work (is never done)

How far has the Feminist movement come along since the 70s? Some would argue that women nowadays have more education and income-earning capabilities than ever, while others claim that even with those choices, women are still "Opting-Out" by grabbing their Ivy League diplomas and heading back to the homefront to stay with the kiddies. And as most of us "educated women" know, as accomplished as we may be on the workforce, society (and our husbands) still expect a steaming-hot plate of (organic!) dinner waiting when they're ready to kick up their feet and watch the tube.

Is this what feminism looks like, or what capitalism can only accommodate for the educated woman in new millenium? Sandra Tsing Loh writes a compelling rebuttal to Linda Hirshman’s "marvelously cranky 'Get to Work … And Get a Life, Before It’s Too Late' " book that asserts the workplace as a highly-fulfilling, nonstop thrill ride to becoming a complete human being; an almost revist to bell hook's critique of the Feminine Mystique: what job do you have and why the hell isn't mine as fulfilling and pleasurable as yours?!

Once again, it comes down to privilege and social class, and this time, the scholars that generalize work - any type of work - to be better for the soul than staying at home and rearing children.

Here are some choice excerpts:

Of course, Hirshman, with that somewhat unlovely, censorious tone, is being a tad simplistic. She leaves aside the matter of whether women driven to make piles of money are the same ones likely to incite meaningful social change. If the Harvard stay-at-home mom walked away from an attack-dog corporate-lawyer job with Exxon, I, for one, would rather see her playing tag and climbing trees. And although Hirsh man did work as a lawyer (lawyer, along with doctor and judge, is the kind of high-degree, socially relevant job she approves of), she then became a professor of philosophy and women’s studies. (Call the White House! We have a professor of philosophy on the line!)

Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment, mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have “real” jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities.

To be sure, attacking feminist criticism as being the extended whine of a privileged, educated upper class is as old as … well, as bell hooks’s 1984 critique of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique: “[Friedan] did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.” It’s a point that keeps having to be made, though. And hooks’s list doesn’t even include the legions of colorless office jobs that most women endure, “real” jobs that trap them from eight to five in a cramped cubicle under hideous lighting. During the course of a Sex and the City workday you’re likely to encounter Mr. Big, but at a “real” job you’re far more likely to be thrown in with the pimply, fright-wigged characters of Dilbert or with Dwight Shrute from The Office, the show whose name is synonymous with tedium, idiocy, and despair.

Click here to read the rest of this highly intelligent and entertaining dialogue between the worth of women's work. (Don't be intimidated by the length...its only two internet pages long!)