Echidne: The Longest Revolution, Part I

Or the Woman Question, if you wish. When I was a very young goddess with soft scales and all I thought that this gender business was easy: just share things equally and let everyone have a piece of the cake. Some day I will tell the story of how I lost my innocence and what happened next, but right now I want to talk about Linda Hirshman's recent article in the American Prospect, entitled Homeward Bound. It has created quite a furore in the feminist blogosphere and some very good debate, too. You might do a lot worse than reading the posts by Bitch PhD and 11D and the attached long comments threads.

Hirshman's article talks about the elite women who decide to drop out of their careers and stay at home when they have children. In this she follows the general fashion in writings about women these days: it seems that we are all white, highly educated and homeward bound, that our education was a waste and our biologies the destiny. Where she differs is in her take on all this. She is definitely not delicately analyzing the problem or bemoaning the death of feminism or even really ridiculing the uppity ex-career women who are now ladies-who-lunch. Rather, she is giving us a feminist bootcamp and telling us how to change things. More about that in The Longest Revolution, Part II. In the first part I want to address the validity of Hirshman's basic premise and why the blogosphere discussion on the article is so heated.