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, EMILYs List, and a professor of womens 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 feminisms 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: Were all in here making fresh apple pie, she said.
Another, an an Ivy Leaguer with a masters 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 suspect that they still want babies to be born.....in a predetermined male/female ratio, and then shipped of to the social education and engineering center." Otherwise, referred to as Hillary Clinton's *State Village* in lieu of the cohesive social unit of the human family based on the biological imperative of mother and father.
A small tidbit MZZZZZZZZZ. Hirshman forgets: I raised 3 conservative kids. How many liberal kids did she abort, I wonder? Thinking themselves wise, they became fools. Without remorse and learning nothing, they prattle on. Hoping to convince the world they are right, while the evidence speaks for itself. I have no pity for them. none.
"Maybe the feminazis will start to encourage celibacy."
With their looks they hardly need to encourage it.. who wants them? That's exactly why they do what they do.. they hate men and homemakers because they can never have a man or a real family.
Tell any woman who stays at home and raises a family
that she doesn't "work" and prepare to get punched
in the nose.
Apparently this woman is too slow-witted to understand what any primitive anywhere understands - there is no future without children!
LOL. True.
Screwing a feminist is not worth the time of an intelligent male.
"Feminism was dealt a mortal blow when it left Paula, Jennifer and Monica to twist in the wind.
It showed its true colors as a power movement that couldn't care less about the problems of women."
You should hear them talk about the help or the secretaries or every woman not at the University level. Ugly. Butt ugly. The dears are only self-interested to the point of fanatically fascist playground behavior.
Fortunately, I fight really dirty. They leave me alone.
She sounds like something right out of Brave New World, but I think she's off her Soma.
My university-employed friend who spends more time going to conferences than being with her 2 year-old daughter tells me she doesn't know how I do it...meaning, staying home with my children. She can't handle it; it's too exhausting!
Because she's a writer and people read it.
i wonder if this cu*t even had a mother or father.
This feminazi is proof 'intelligence' and 'stupidity' are not mutually exclusive.
"More children from the fit, less from the unfitthat is the chief aim of birth control.":Margaret Sanger. May, 1919.
There won't be any humans, intelligent or otherwise, if this woman's view becomes widespread...
world would have been different if women throughout time had felt that way.
Takes more intellect to run a family well than it does to be a college instructor. I know this from first hand experience...
Obviously neither of her parents felt she was worth the time and effort. She has some real issues. Idiot.
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