Biffing the Obvious

One would think that, given the harsh lessons of recent history, the Left would have yielded, if ever so slightly, to the allure of reality. While it is hard to deride at least some of the Left's goals, as soon as the means to those ends, no matter their apparent advisability, involves recourse to collectivism and denial of human nature,

In Homeward Bound, Linda Hirshman derides what she terms "choice feminism," the notion that women can, and should, choose how to live their own lives.

In Hirshman's view, choice feminism is just fine only so long as it leads to the correct -- collectively speaking -- choice. She "found that among the educated elite, who are the logical heirs of the agenda of empowering women, feminism has largely failed in its goals." (As a side note, the moment a word processor blows a logic-gate aneurysm when faced with such a sentence, will constitute the onset of machine intelligence, Turing test be damned.)

Unfortunately, according to Hirshman, the unreconstructed family is the true barrier to the onslaught of women in elite jobs.

As a result of feminist efforts -- and larger economic trends -- the percentage of women, even of mothers in full- or part-time employment, rose robustly through the 1980s and early ’90s.

But then the pace slowed. The census numbers for all working mothers leveled off around 1990 and have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews, women with enough money to quit work say they are “choosing” to opt out. Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism. (emphasis added)

Of course, the belief about that belief conceals a glaringly obvious conclusion: the belief is not mere belief, but reality itself. It is a singularly puzzling fact that many of those claiming Evolution as ground truth possess the most astonishing antibodies to its implications. Primary among them, in this case, is that essence of stubbornness: Human Nature.

In an attempt to discern, without a hint of irony, the lives of women most able to "[reap] feminism's promise of opportunity" she was shocked, shocked to discover her selected covey of professionally elite brides (as culled from the NYT marriage announcements), nearly without exception, chose to raise their own children, rather than outsource that task in favor of professional advancement.

I'm sure even the casual progressive reader can see the problem here: "30 years after feminism started filling the selective schools with women, the elite workplaces should be proportionately female. They are not."

The problem is with choice feminism, "because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men."

Great as liberal feminism was, once it retreated to choice the movement had no language to use on the gendered ideology of the family. Feminists could not say, “Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.

This is a Jaw meet Floor with loud, anvil-like clang assertion. Nowhere in the article does Ms. Hirshman ever begin to acknowledge the possibility that men and women have unique natures, stubbornly resistant to the blandishments of those who are certain how society should look, because they know how people should think.

Here is where an intellectually honest philosopher would pose societal counterexamples to the patriarchal family and traditional gender roles. Or, failing that virtually impossible task, because history is singularly bereft of such examples, said philosopher would surely make a stab at why this universal phenomena does not reflect some essential components of human nature (See Evolution, antibodies to).

Ms. Hirshman attempts no such thing, yielding instead to the Left's sectarian preference for assertion over analysis, implicitly assuming the meaning of terms such as "flourishing" and "just":

Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust.

(Also, Ms. Hirshman yields to the Left's other reflexive rhetorical flourish -- passive voice. Note the use of the word "assigning." The structure of the sentence completely elides the agent, and, in so doing, completely avoids what is the crux her position. Where passive voice is not simply bad writing, it is nearly always dishonest.)

What is her solution to a problem for which she has given no evidence of understanding at anything remotely approaching a human level?

... feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy. It will require rules -- rules like those in the widely derided book The Rules, which was never about dating but about behavior modification.

Wow. "Start offering ... require[d] rules." Once stripping the sentences of their overburden, through ellipses and brackets, the Left's inner self is just as ugly as it ever was.

But why is choice feminism such a bad, very bad thing? Because

... these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives. At feminism’s dawning, two theorists compared gender ideology to a caste system. To borrow their insight, these daughters of the upper classes will be bearing most of the burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping and cleaning bodily waste. Not two weeks after the Yalie flap, the Times ran a story of moms who were toilet training in infancy by vigilantly watching their babies for signs of excretion 24-7. They have voluntarily become untouchables.

It is an astonishing achievement to write a paragraph as ugly, ignorant and dismissive as this. Ms. Hirshman appears utterly incapable of comprehending the very real possibility that, when given an actual, you know, choice, actual women just might view "flourishing" in an entirely different way than she.

What this article also demonstrates beyond any possibility of contradiction that the moment someone dons the crown of "liberal" or "progressive," critical thought has come to a dead halt.

Never mind the further proof, as if such was needed, of just how anti-human the Left really is.