My lunch with an antifeminist pundit

But you also point out that married men make more than single men.

Yes, that gap is bigger than the so-called gender gap.

Right. But if your thesis is that it's not sex discrimination because mothers work fewer hours, but that married men are the biggest earners, then it doesn't track. If it automatically falls to women to maintain the balancing act of parenthood, work fewer hours and therefore earn less, and married men aren't expected to cut back -- in fact they earn more -- then that is gender inequity, isn't it?

No. For two reasons. The first is the idea behind the whole book: sex differences. We want to [stay home]. Hel-lo? We want to do it! Secondly, men show devotion to the family by working really hard. Women show devotion to the family by showing devotion to the family.

But isn't that social conditioning?

I did it, and I did not feel I was socially conditioned. I had more earning potential than my husband. I'm a lawyer; he ain't.

But you also had the desire to work!

No, no. no. I had much more earning potential than Jim O'Beirne had. [Sotto voce:] I didn't want to [work full-time]. Am I a weak-minded tool of the patriarchy because I didn't want to?

I think you're hard-wired. We're better at it than they are. Famous joke: "She came home, the kids were alive. What more does she want from me?!" So no, it's not sex discrimination. So many feminists are howling at the moon: "Gee, it shouldn't be so." [Pause, sardonic look:] Okaaaay. I don't think it's anything any movement's going to fix anytime soon.

One of the most honest pieces I've read in a long time was [Linda Hirshman's in American Prospect about professional women choosing to stay home]. It was refreshingly candid. She didn't pretend that these women are weak-minded or too dimwitted to know what makes them happy. She's like, "This is what they want and hey, they and their husbands seem pretty darn happy!" I'm like, "Thank you!" Now we can move on from there. Of course I think how she'd like to see this rectified is wrong. But I think she's confronting what so many others want to deny.

Yes, I thought that piece was smart because she was willing to say things other people aren't. But she wasn't celebrating women staying home, she was addressing the inequities of the home, arguing that as long as it always falls to the woman to stay home, feminism has failed.

I refer you to my chapter, "Mother Nature Is a Bitch." But also, what is wrong with it, given that, as she says, these women seem perfectly happy? Why exactly does this have to be addressed?

Because there is a fear that we're going to go back to a pre-Friedan world in which women are expected to stay home. I'm sure many women who stay home are happy, but if any of them are not ...

The feminists always claimed they didn't pass judgment [on stay-at-home mothers]. But they did [and not just radical ones]. That's why I quote mainstream feminists!

[Incredulously] Catharine MacKinnon?

I don't use so much of her. But a leading scholar like Jessie Bernard [who wrote in her 1972 book "The Future of Marriage" that "being a housewife makes women sick"], who wrote that to be happy in a marriage women must be mentally ill? I could have cherry-picked the "all men should have been castrated" stuff -- you can sure as hell find those things. But I wanted to be honest.

Now the publisher, they want names on the cover and names in the press release.

Yeah, it looks from the jacket illustration and copy as if you're going after Jane Fonda and Carrie Bradshaw and Maureen Dowd. But there's a paragraph about Fonda, a paragraph about "Sex and the City," a paragraph about Dowd -- and you agree with her anyway about Hillary's betrayal of the feminists!

Thank you, thank you. Ahem [eyes publicist]. It's because the most influential people, the ones who've had a real impact -- nobody knows their names! I'm trying to introduce them to my audience. You just can't put them on a cover.

But I think it's fair to cite the AAUW [American Association of University Women]; I think it's fair to cite NOW; [criticizing stay-at-home mothers] is what they're all about! ... I say, "You've got to make your own choices for your own family." They don't say that. They say there's one responsible choice: You're hurting your child and yourself and women more broadly if you make the choice [to stay home]. So there is no choice for feminists. They denigrate motherhood.

But some women who stay home are critical of the choice to work; they say there's only one responsible choice. Aren't feminists responding to an attitude that by working, mothers are hurting their children?

It's a false flag. Corporately, mainstream feminists denigrate marriage and motherhood -- they just do! They're not the least bit interested in -- and in fact sort of opposed to -- the work-at-home stuff, the federal things you could do to encourage working at home, telecommuting or whatever, they're not interested in that. They have one model. The fundamental thing they think is that you've got to follow the male career model. But to follow the male model, what the heck are they going to do with the kids? Damn!

Hirshman made the point that polls show women select certain jobs with a lot of personal satisfaction, a lot of people contact. And she says, "Would you knock off the self-regard? Does your job have to be so damn fulfilling? Why the hell don't you go for what the guys go for? How about power and money and prestige!?" I have an answer for why so many women don't go for that: nature.

That it is our nature not to?

For some. Some women are ambitious and want to get in there and mix it up. Fine! But women who don't are not weak-minded or anything else.

Fine, they're not weak-minded, but those women who do want to follow a male path --

... will be very successful. We have established that they will be very successful.

But if those possibilities were made more available, mightn't even more choose that path?

What more needs to be made available to them?

Well, cultural acceptance, financial and government support, attitudes ...

The cultural support is already there. That book "Maternal Desire" makes the point that it's harder now to justify staying home. Now it's horror at "You're going to stay home?"

As for public policy, I hate to be a nerd. But who pays? The majority of families with young children get by on one full-time salary. High-income couples qualify for the dependent-care tax credit. The family struggling to get by on one full-time salary is arguably subsidizing the day-care choices, the career choices, of the more affluent couples.

I am a veteran of the '88 day-care fight. The "family-friendly workplace" -- very clever title! It ain't so friendly to the family. Very friendly to employment for women. That's what you're subsidizing: employment for women, [by giving] companies a bunch of tax breaks for maternity leave and day-care centers on site, yadda yadda. Why don't we, given the choices women make -- and we have a pretty good idea 30 years later how that's shaking out -- subsidize the ones who are electing to stay home?

We don't know what kind of choices women would make if there were breaks for on-site day care and what you call subsidizing women working. If they had affordable places to put their kids maybe more would choose to work?

I'll refresh your memory. When Hillary and Bill Clinton did the federal day-care thing, [opinion data showed us that] families are not clamoring for day care! Most children are either home with their parents or they're in relative care. And guess what kind of care [the government] won't subsidize? They'll only pay for center-based or heavily regulated care ... If relative care was subsidized, if you didn't license the heck out of the woman down the street, maybe there would be more women working. But they're going to work part-time. Opinion data shows if you ask women with preschool children, "What do you want to do?" some percentage want to be home, I think 10 percent want to work full-time, and the rest want to work part-time. But most influential [feminist] organizations are not interested in that sentiment. They're only interested in the 10 percent who want to work full-time.

Next page: Men and women used to believe you should stay together for the sake of your kids. Now people probably give up too easily