I’m not immune to genius or charm. Particularly when the people admire, I feel, give me permission to do something that feels instinctual.
I will tell you that growing up as a cheeky little socialist I believed, naively, that being a stay-at-home mom or ‘homemaker’ represented some sort of dashed potential for a woman. She was contorting and calcifying herself inside the archaic institution of Motherhood. Her intellect eaten away by nursery rhymes. Her lithe body made fat and idle from nursing. Her will to power sublimated through tyrannical rule over a helpless child. All these opinions, are of course, in 90s parlance, retarded.
Instead I believed women should…be poets? Actresses? Farmers? That their bodies and minds should be made free through labor? Why was the labor market such a redeeming arena? I don’t know! This is what happens when you read Marx and Engles at 17 and grow up watching Empire Records!
Looking back, I think Paglia summed up where my head was at: “There is a moral hollowness at the core of western careerist feminism. A bourgeois secular code that sees children as an obstruction to self-realization or as a management problem to be farmed out to working class-nannies.”
🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 spicy and correct🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶
So along comes Hitch. This exchange always blows my mind because of the anchor’s insistence that Hitchens is being retrograde and “wrong” when he suggests that women don’t need to work. I find it to be pretty progressive. After all, feminism at it’s best should allow me, in the indomitable words of Charlotte York:
Of course, his answer is tinged with some irony but I do love this line:
“They’re called the gentle sex for a good reason, I don’t want to see them coarsened in the labor market.”
Now, at 38 I think about this all the time. I’ve spent 20 years in labor market -I’m coarse, callused, creeky- and while I don’t regret it, the notion of doing twenty more is nauseating. Rather than invest my energy in an institution or corporation, I’d rather invest everything I have in my daughter and my family. Anyways, this is me now:
love it Natasha -- and pretty similar to how I felt 40 years ago, when I discovered how rich and rewarding the whole experience of bearing, feeding and raising children was! We talked about 'balance' because meaningful work is also desired, and of course needed.. The key is to support women and families so they can make the choice. That is actually what Hitchens was saying, but didn't elaborate. Brava Natasha!
I'm sorry to be so serious... but I hate Hitchens.
First of, almost as an aside, I was blown away by how much my partner knew what to do instinctual when our son was born. We also found that caring for the newborn was a two person job, with a third person to keep us alive.
More importantly, while I agree that mothers shouldn't have to work per se, the female perspective, and the maternal perspective, is so valuable. I briefly worked in cancer research and I thought it was so incredible how women, mothers in particular, were always better leaders, always more insightful, and always had more innovative ideas. (Now that I am a mother it is not so surprising--I've been much cooler since i pushed this guy out of my body.) My experience working in the sciences truly radicalized me in my devotion to the female perspective.
However, I also saw Horrors. Women coming in to work within two weeks of childbirth. Women scheduling inductions so they could submit their schedule to their thesis advisory board.
Obviously, as valuable as a mother is to Science, she is more valuable to her children.
Did you know Thomas Jefferson based the senate and court off of the Iroquois government structures--but left out a key governing body, the grandmother's council? Ideally, I'd like a grandmother's council, and a mother's council, in every industry, and a woman at the head of the table in every lab meeting--after which she goes home to her children while the men do the bench work.
I don't need to tell you this, but when Christopher Hitchens says he doesn't want women to "have to" work, he doesn't mean he wants their time to be valued so highly they only preform executive and consultant work. He means he'd rather not hear women's voices and perspectives anywhere outside of the home. And in his home, I imagine he expects out voices to be soft, and dulcet.