Excerpt: 'Get to Work'

Part of this failure was personality. But partly it was also because feminists were stared down by women on the other side. Almost from the beginning, antifeminists, like the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, organized by Phyllis Schlafly, claimed that feminism wanted to control peoples' personal lives. (Would that they were right!) Schlafly charged that passage of the ERA would lead to men's abandoning their families, unisex toilets, gay marriages, and women in the army. All of this has now happened, with no sign of the world's ending yet, yet Schlafly succeeded beyond her wildest imaginings.

Schlafly's domesticity was never some bliss of choice; she advocated a religiously dictated, sex-driven dependency. It was 1976, when Indiana was on the verge of becoming the thirty-fifth state to ratify the ERA, when Schlafly says she realized she needed to seek support from the churches. For her vision, she says she got "1,000 mainline Protestants, evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons and orthodox Jews" to attend an anti-ERA rally in Springfield, Illinois. "That is when the pro-family movement was invented," she says. "It was a coming together of believers of all denominations who would do two things--come into politics for the first time and then work together for a cause they shared."

Instead of challenging the legitimacy of orthodox religion as a source for public policy, feminism made the fatal error of denying the charges: We're not feminazis and we don't want to tell you how to live your life. We only want to give you opportunities. Whether individual women take their places in the public world is up to them. It's their choice.

So while Steinem was giving cocktail parties in the Hamptons for Cesar Chavez, and Schlafly was putting the tradition in traditional family, feminists retreated to the arena they could defend--that the public world should be open to women who wanted to work there. Building on the innocuous prohibition of employment discrimination based on sex, in the race-oriented ?1964 Civil Rights Act, conventional women like Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the ACLU began a legalistic, culturally circumspect campaign to open the office doors to women.

In the drive to offend no one, the feminist movement abandoned the home front. The radical Friedan didn't turn her attention to the family until 1981, in The Second Stage, and by then she had lost her edge. The tone of the book is dispirited and full of useless, grandiose, and wishful rhetoric ("women and men even now are transcending sex-role polarization...we can transcend that false antagonism between feminism and the family...and move beyond sexual politics"). All that transcendence was unworthy of the sixties radical she had once been, and the book was ignored. Real change occurred in the public world. But between the politically correct antipatriarchal spinsters like Steinem and the carefully bow-tied Justice Ginsburg, the family slipped away, untouched by the corrosive principles of feminism.

The result of this was the preservation of the most intransigent of patriarchal institutions in our society. And that's where the trouble lay. Feminism did not lack the resources to recognize the problem. Very radical early writing included Pat Mainardi's political analysis of housework, which is riveting to this day. "Here's my list of dirty chores: buying groceries, carting them home and putting them away; cooking meals and washing dishes and pots; doing the laundry digging out the place when things get out of control; washing floors. The list could go on but the sheer necessities are bad enough. All of us have to do these things, or get someone else to do them for us. The longer my husband contemplated these chores, the more repulsed he became, and so proceeded the change from the normally sweet, considerate Dr. Jekyll into the crafty Mr. Hyde who would stop at nothing to avoid the horrors of-housework. As he felt himself backed into a corner laden with dirty dishes, brooms, mops and reeking garbage, his front teeth grew longer and pointier, his fingernails haggled and his eyes grew wild. Housework trivial? Not on your life! Just try to share the burden."

Instead, institutional feminism adopted a set of formal policies about housework. The National Organization for Women recommended "provision of independent Social Security coverage, including disability, in the homemakers own name, portable in and out of marriage, and continuing as the homemaker leaves and re-enters the paid workforce" and demanded that unpaid caregiving be included in the calculation of the gross domestic product. Such policies, however, never took on the core problem--the conventional assignment of the household to women. Even in 2006, NOW's "family" initiative is all about building caring coalitions and funding child care and family leave in the public sphere rather than taking on the inequality where it lives.

The final step toward choice feminism came as women got to the workplace in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s and then found themselves doing everything. It turned out they would be allowed to go to work, but at the same time they wouldn't be allowed out of the home. And instead of asking Why do I have to do it all in order to have it all? they decided they really didn't have to have it all, cut their ambitions off at the knees, and reverted to choice. Instead of thinking their way out of the dilemma to the path of status and power, they simply appropriated the language of choice from the liberating choices the movement started. Thus, although it was really a backlash, the language of choice anointed any decision at all about what life path to follow.

The leveling off of women's professional ambitions today shows us one truth: Without a movement to support them, women are not choosing the path to status and power alone. My little survey of the brides of the Times reflects that feminism lost even the women who had the most opportunity to choose the path toward status and power--the geeky and quirky intellectuals, not the prom queens and debutantes. Take a look at any Sunday Times. Although most of the brides have the bloom of youth, the wedding portion of the "Styles" section no longer resembles a debutante party. Just to cite a random example, on Sunday, January 15, 2006, the featured "Vows" bride, a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, was the curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Other brides included a medical student who was magna cum laude at Harvard; a Harvard Law grad associate at Arnold & Porter; an ob-gyn, cum laude from Columbia; deputy director in the Mayor's Office of Special Projects and Community Events in New York with a master's degree in public administration from Columbia; and so on.

I don't know them personally, but I can bet they were the ones who read Pride and Prejudice and identified with Elizabeth, the sharp-tongued and clever daughter of modest means who captured Darcy with her high-spirited independence, not the pale, mute, daughter Lady Catherine de Bourgh had in mind for him. These were the girls who were going to make their lives from their wits and their brains, not their looks, trust funds, and reproductive organs. Immensely desirable mates, they should have been able to find spouses whose needs would not require, overtly or covertly, that they quit their jobs. Gifted with capacities for refined scholarship, human healing, legal reasoning, and educated to use the capacities, they were the women for whom the constraints of the feminine mystique were the most unjust. The twentieth-century feminist movement was the beginning, opening up the public world of work to women but leaving the family untouched. The Opt Out Revolution may be in reality only a leveling off, but in this context it is the end of the beginning.

Deafened by choice, here's the moral analysis these women never heard: The family--with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks--is a necessary part of life and has obvious emotional and immediate rewards, 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.

The choice is a false one, based on the realities of a half-revolutionized society. Once we recognize that, we can admit that the tools feminism offered women to escape the dilemma have failed. This book is an effort to try a different approach. It is time for a new radicalism. Fortunately, the roots are sound.

Excerpted from GET TO WORK: A MANIFESTO FOR WOMEN OF THE WORLD by Linda R. Hirshman. Copyright © 2006 Linda R. Hirshman. All rights reserved.