Debra Pickett

Feminism shaken, Not stirred: According to author, there's no choice allowed for smart, educated, capable women

By Cheryl R. Reed

Smart women have gotten lazy.

That's what radical feminist Linda Hirshman thinks. The former Chicago lawyer has devised a plan to get women out of nurseries and back into boardrooms. Laid out in her brief book, Get to Work: A Manifesto For Women of the World, Hirshman targets the Ivy League, New York Times wedding-announcement crowd, who have "opted out" of their law firms and corporate offices to stay home to raise Baby Gap.

That graduates from Harvard Business School are now shelving their expensive educations and lucrative livelihoods to attend Mommy & Me classes irritates Hirshman. She believes it should upset all of us when elite, educated women choose hearth over commerce. After all, these are women with credentials, access and power. They are the ones who can call a legislator directly, throw their prestige and money behind important causes, educate their powerful male bosses about the difficulties of raising a child and making partner.

These women, Hirshman argues, could change the world as future senators, scientists and Supreme Court justices. Instead, they're at home finger-painting with their kids.

It's appropriate that Hirshman's pocket-size book is red because it reads much like a communist manifesto, calling on women to live by strict codes for the betterment of society and for the advancement of feminism overall. Individual concerns, desires and the pursuit of happiness have no place in Hirshman's scheme.

In her view, women should have only one child, persevere in jobs they hate, marry much younger or much older men, turn a blind eye to dust bunnies and ignore milk expiration dates. Forget art and poetry, Hirshman says. Those pursuits don't pay.

It's not that Hirshman's plan wouldn't work. Her formula, if followed religiously, would no doubt produce a lucrative and prestigious career, and it does provide a guidepost to young women who are wondering what they might have to sacrifice to make it in the corporate world. But following Hirshman's rules -- as she calls them -- would be about as joyful as a rigid, no-carbs diet. Then again, pleasure does not figure high in Hirshman's equation.

"Just because work isn't as wonderful as people fantasized does not mean it isn't usually the best alternative available," Hirshman writes. "There's no such thing as a perfect job. Condoleezza Rice actually wanted to be a pianist. . . . Don't look to work for love."

Hirshman is not a big fan of choice. She believes feminism's greatest downfall was allowing women the choice of whether they wanted to work. She has a point. Feminism is supposed to be about achieving equality with men. But what man out there can "choose" whether he wants to work?

Hirshman presents defendable arguments and she's done her homework, tracking down census and labor statistics and stalking New York Times brides to find out what happened to them 10 years later -- 85 percent in her sampling had either left the workplace altogether or were working part-time. What she doesn't seem to grasp is why women are leaving their jobs.

Smart women don't just pack up their BlackBerrys because they have a baby. Many use their planned pregnancies as politically correct reasons for leaving jobs they find excruciating. They realize the professions they have labored to achieve are just not that rewarding. Today's working women have less to prove than Hirshman's generation.

And once a woman has attained a certain level of success -- the junior partner at a prestigious firm, a mid-level manager in a corporation, an assistant professor -- the work to achieve the higher levels of success require tremendous sacrifice, long hours -- and luck.

Some women are smart enough to realize achieving success is a big gamble. They've calculated the trade-offs and decided that enduring a job they find unbearable isn't worth their happiness nor is it worth the time it will cost them to be away from their children. So they opt out -- because they can.

And for this elite set, opting out of work often means opting in to a community of other highly educated moms who lunch together, go to the club together, hang out at one another's houses, one hand clutching the coffee cup and the other rocking the pram.

What Hirshman doesn't get is that these upper-crust mothers are not home cleaning the stove a la Betty Friedan in the Feminine Mystique. They are at the spa getting pedicures and taking Pilates. They have traded in the race for the corner offices for summers at the pool and bodies that can don a bikini even after a Cesarean. This is a choice about quality of life. And that's something Hirshman doesn't address.

Arguing that women should work for the good of humanity makes for a hollow plea in today's world, where individualism reigns supreme. According to some research, today's young women have opted out because of the lack of attention they received from their own Baby Boomer mothers. Like all yin-and-yang cycles in life, once today's elite, stay-at-home moms have grown into empty-nesters, they might grow bored with spinning classes. Then maybe they'll look for a job.