Feminism after Friedan

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."

Unfortunately, Hirshman lamented in her must-read American Prospect piece, "Homeward Bound," after Friedan's bold rejection of animal labor for women, "liberal feminists abandoned the judgmental starting point of the movement in favor of offering women 'choices.'" Feminism has to get back to "judging," Hirshman insists, and it should judge the choice to stay home as flat-out wrong. As Hirshman writes: "To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, 'A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.'"

I can't speak for Friedan and, sadly, she can't speak for herself anymore, but using her to bolster an attack on "choice feminism" misreads her life work. Yes, she was down on vacuuming, and all forms of floor washing apparently; she once screamed at an audience that no woman "gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor!" (She was a screamer.) But while her stunning indictment of the suffocating expectations of post-World War II family life called upon women to liberate themselves from vacuuming and reenter the world of achievement and ideas, she always envisioned a world, and a feminist movement, that allowed women to combine career, home and family.

The fact that 43 years after "The Feminine Mystique" we're still fighting over what women want more, careers or babies, and even nuttier, what they should want, is evidence that the mystique Friedan diagnosed was powerful and crazy-making and we still need vigilance to combat it. (And yes, Hirshman's work, like Friedan's, is about affluent, educated, mostly white women who have a choice about whether to stay home or work; we can't forget that.) Hirshman is a provocative successor to Friedan in that she accurately and angrily identifies the unequal division of labor inside the home, the realm of children and family, as being the enduring barrier to women's equality. "The glass ceiling begins at home," she says, and she's right.

But the answer isn't a feminism that labels women enemies of the movement if they choose to stay home with their kids when they can. Let's use Friedan's passing to remind us that, problematic though it may be, we have no choice but to commit ourselves to "choice feminism."

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I was only 5 when Friedan famously diagnosed "the problem that had no name," but on some level I knew it was my problem too. I was born to one of the frustrated career women Friedan wrote about, who filled her days drilling me with flashcards, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and brooding. I'm sure I owe my relative career success to having been a trained seal as a young child, reading on demand at age 2 for the mailman, the neighbors, proud aunts and uncles and irritated but indulgent older cousins. But I also saw what it was like to have a depressed, frustrated mother who lived through her kids (and then resented them), and I vowed very early to be a feminist, but even more important, not to be like my mother.

Then I found myself in my early 30s with a baby I loved to distraction, a career I treasured almost as much (yes, almost), and a marriage falling apart due to my volcanic anger at being unable to manage both gracefully, and all my feminist certainties dissolved for a while. I was jealous of my childless writer friends, male and female, traveling the globe on assignment when I only did stories I could do from my basement office; I was also angry at feminism, quite honestly, feeling it had left me alone to manage these dilemmas, that it was far more interested in defending my right not to have children than in building a world that would let me have them without giving up my ambition or my sanity.

Next page: After my daughter was born, I wanted to be home and I wanted to be working. Nothing prepared me for the pull in both directions