Posted on 06/20/2006 3:34:11 PM PDT by wagglebee
NEW YORK, June 20, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Linda Hirshman, a feminist US writer on cultural issues, has told the world why she thinks staying at home with the children is an occupation “not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.” She complains at length that the feminist movement, while making some gains in public life through legal activism, has largely failed in the one area where it counts most: the family.
She upbraids women who stay at home for failing the feminist agenda, saying, “They do not require a great intellect, they are not honored and they do not involve risks and the rewards that risk brings.”
Writing in the November 2005 edition of the American Prospect, Hirshman admitted that the real intention of the feminist movement was not “equality”, but to destroy what she calls “the unreconstructed family” of a husband and wife rearing children. She writes that the goal was to see as many women as possible abandoning family life for high-level professions and politics.
Hirshman a committed radical, was a member in the 1970s of the feminist lobby, the National Organization for Women (NOW), a donor to the pro-abortion political organization, EMILY’s List, and a professor of women’s studies.
But, she complains, the movement has “stalled”; while the “public world has changed…private lives have hardly budged.” Childrearing is still seen by both men and women to be the natural purview of women. She writes of her “shock” to discover that among those professional women whom she called the “logical heirs of feminism”, large numbers were leaving their careers to opt for childrearing.
“Marriage is essentially unchanged,” she laments. “The real glass ceiling is at home…Looking back, it seems obvious that the unreconstructed family was destined to re-emerge after the passage of feminism’s storm of social change.”
She writes, “this represents not a loss of present value but a loss of hope for the future -- a loss of hope that the role of women in society will continue to increase.”
Some of the women she interviewed confirmed her worst fears: they liked being mothers. One declined to be interviewed because she could not leave her activities with her daughters: “We’re all in here making fresh apple pie,” she said.
Another, an “an Ivy Leaguer with a master’s degree” described her at-home activities: “I take my [3-year-old] daughter to all the major museums. We go to little movement classes.”
The article ignited a blaze of online outrage from feminists and traditionalists alike. Bloggers and editorials in print and online editions of a number of magazines have run comments blasting Hirshman.
In an op-ed at the online edition of the political magazine, the Huffington Post, Ann Coulter wrote that Hirshman and those who think like her, are “expressing an intolerant world view that women who don't work are losers.”
“Hirshman isn't just expressing an opinion about what she thinks is best, she is saying that any woman who makes a choice different from what she espouses is unequivocally ‘wrong.’”
Coulter writes that feminism is losing its sway in public because it focuses on “problems that hardly exist…while spending precious little energy on issues that indisputably have a negative impact on women: pornography, sex trafficking.”
“If [feminists] spent a fraction of the time on these issues that they spend trying to get women to get their men to vacuum the living room, the world would be a better place.”
I don't know...30 million+ babies have been aborted since '74. And chances are they weren't from conservative women. Somebody SOMEWHERE had enough drugs/tequila/paper bags...;)
noted and appreciated.
Apparently, no intelligent human wasted a whit's worth of time rearing her....
How does a nihilistic moron like this make a living writing anything? This is so absurd, you'd think a talented and intelligent human would have recognized it and stopped herself before she made a total fool of herself (again.)
Hey, maybe she's a perfect candidate for motherhood, by her own definition of what it takes.
No one who is deeply religious would do, say or think things Hitler or Jim Jones did. Any fiend can pretend he's religious - using the trappings of religious garb, verbiage, carry a holy book around, etc.
Like actors on a theater stage, or worse, like wolves dressed in sheeps' clothing. A real religious person tries to love and serve God. Fake religious people use "religion" for their own selfish purposes. Jones and Hitler (according to your argument about Hitler) were not religious at all; any more than a stage actor is religious because he's dressed up in clerical garb spouting some words.
Anyway, if you read the entire Pink Swastika you'd see that Hitler didn't have any belief in Christianity whatsoever. And the "Hitler's library" article is pretty clear about his philosophical direction, and it was not towards a personal God, supreme Lord. To compare fiends like Jones and Hitler to religious believers is worse than stupid, it's downright offensive.
If everybody thought like her, we'd go extinct as a species.
I've said it before, I'll say it again "feminism was thought up my some college frat boys during a night of heavy drinking." They were trying to figure out how to get women to support them and how to get sex without commitment.
They don't procreate, but they do recruit. Unforunately, the feminist/liberal reproductive organ is the public school.
What is this, "Last Comic Standing"?
This is exactly why box office receipts are plummeting. The proliferation of free entertainment like this is going to ruin Hollywood.
She sounds like something right out of Brave New World, but I think she's off her Soma
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I was thinking more of Welles' "The Time Machine": either as a Morlock for looks or an Eloi for brains.
"Linda Hirshman, a feminist US writer on cultural issues, has told the world why she thinks staying at home with the children is an occupation “not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.”
Now that's a "just damn" if ever there was one!
If nurturing young humans is a worthless activity, why is any other human activity of any worth?
It kind of reminds of Ayn Rand's observation about communism: To the communist, an individual is nothing, the group is everything. What the communists forget is that a million zeroes still equals zero.
I never put my kids in daycare. We paid a friend to come to the house and watch my first son until my mother moved in, and my husband and I juggled our schedules. (The friend, by the way, is now a famous author, so my older son can tell people she was his babysitter.) I stayed home until they were two, then worked part time until they went to school.
Women have always worked. Work is good. Work is fulfilling. I've never wanted to be a fulltime stay at home mom except when the kids were little, and they aren't little any more.
There are plenty of women and men who believe that ALL women should stay home and be full time stay at home moms for the rest of their lives.
That's not my choice, that's not the path I took, and I would never tell anybody else to do it unless they wanted to.
I think the emphasis is on "full time." I've never met a woman or a man who devoted every minute of their entire lives taking care of their kids, except one lady with six kids who homeschooled them all.
Most of the rest of us have time to work at least part time if we make that a priority.
.
LOL!
It's ok; idiocy like this will wipe itself out in a generation or two.
Remarks about religious mottoes on German coins or military belt buckles during the Nazi era are entirely beside the point. Just as Saddam Hussein could be secularist or Islamic, left-wing or right-wing, as it suited him, so Hitler twisted and deceitfully used whatever he thought would build his power and that of his party. Treaty with Stalin? Fine. Make-nice talk to Chamberlain? Of course. Religion? By all means.
Hitler was raised in a Catholic family. However, as an adult, he specifically rejected the Catholic Church, as well as Christianity in general. He described himself as "a complete pagan". As he said in 1941, "National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew."
This underlines the enmity which existed between the Catholic Church and the Nazis from the beginning.
In 1935, four years before the War even started, the future pope Eugenio Pacelli gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult."
The day after Pacelli's election as Pope Pius XII, the Berlin Morgenpost said: ‘The election of cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.’ "
As always, deeds tell us more than words. In 1938, the Pope published an ani-Nazi encyclical, "Mit Brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Anxiety"--- pointedly published in German, not in Latin). In 1939, 80 percent of the Catholic clergy and five of the bishops of the Warthegau region had been deported to concentration camps. In Wroclaw, 49.2 percent of the clergy were dead; in Chelmno, 47.8 percent; in Lodz, 36.8 percent; in Poznan, 31.1. In the Warsaw diocese, 212 priests were killed; 92 were murdered in Wilno, 81 in Lwow, 30 in Cracow, thirteen in Kielce. Seminarians who were not killed were shipped off to Germany as forced labor.
These are not indicators of a "pro-Catholic" Nazi regime, nor of a soft-on-Nazism Catholic Church.
Denis Leary, clean up on aisle three(y'all know what song I'm talking about)
Thanks for the ping, NYer, and this a ping for a mom who raised 9 kids ;) Don't you just love women like Linda Hirshman? I'd rather have the satisfaction of raising kids, than shattering some glass ceiling.
Remember: "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Is The Hand That Rules The World". Feminazis hate that :-D
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