Giving Credit to Linda Hirshman

I will give Linda Hirshman credit for the fact that we had a very civil and useful debate. Our encounter was useful, in that it clarified our respective positions. She thinks well-educated women who stay home to raise their children are wasting their time and talent. I think such women are doing a valuable public service. She seems to view the work/family decision as an all or nothing proposition. I view women's life-choices as on-going, works-in-progress. Each woman can cycle in and out of the labor market, as her family's needs and her desires dictate. I pointed out that 1960's style feminism was based on Marxism, and that I consider this legacy to be unnecessary baggage. She never denied her Marxist roots.
I will give her credit for one other thing: she believes in Truth and Goodness. She said as much to me at the end of our panel. "With you, I can have a discussion about what constitutes the Good Life. We disagree about what constitutes the Good Life. But at least we can talk about it. A lot of people are unwilling to acknowledge that some ways of life are objectively better than others." (I'm paraphrasing here. I think I have the gist of it.) I asked her if that criticism came mostly from the Left. She said it was all from the Left.
I welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation with her about what constitutes the Good Life, and what public policies should do to support it.

Some Intelligent Women Stay Home!

Monday's column on TownHall is generating reactions. I took on Linda Hirshman (again) for her insistence that intelligent women should get to work, instead of wasting their lives staying home with kids.

My wife, Bonnie, stay at home to raise their three children and had a stay at home job working for a major pharmaceutical company. When you lose one was going off to the junior high, she went back to work as a registered nurse taking a refresher course first and now has been working in a pediatrics unit for many years. I don't see any waste of my wife's life staying at home and I see that she has poured herself into art three children and I'm grateful that she has done that. She now fights breast cancer and still does photo albums, these a lot of books, helps with homework, and does a lot of other work around the house and is preparing to go back to work after disability in June. Thank you Jennifer Roback Morse for your article confronting Linda Hirschman and her bad penny appearing up again. I feel bad for Linda Hirschman because I think she's going to go into retirement with lots of regret that she did not spend more time with her children if she has any. Thank you Jennifer for confronting stereotypes that are pushed by the liberal leaning newspapers.