I notice that a lot of the commenters appear to be commenting on their personal psychodrama and not on the actual book, Get to Work, which Rebecca reviewed so interestingly and well. Just to take a random example, too busy seeking attention to concern myself with the issue of economic dependence for stay at home wives? In Get to Work, I write "the women of the Times --- and the more than 50% of all women the census says are not working full time -- are not independent anymore. They are dependent on the productivity and continuing good will of the men they married. They cannot support themselves or their children." (page 35)

They're reselling them on Amazon for $9.99 for Chrissake. Before you comment, why not invest a ten spot and see what I actually say?

I read the Cathy Young piece that RC recommends as "smartly argued" but only saw that Young completely misses Hirshman's point.

If Linda Hirshman's book sounds radical, it is because it is necessarily so. People need to wake up a little! You "want" to stay home with your kids, fine. (Hey, most of us moms have done it for at least a little while, at some point.) But don't spout on and on about it being your "choice," let alone your "feminist choice." It just is what it is.

While I haven't read Hirschmann's new book, judging from the reviews she's received, it seems either herself or her readers have fallen into a classic "Mommy Wars" style claptrap. What's at stake is a role for women in the public sphere. For better or worse, ours is a largely capitalist society with an economy weighted more to the free market than otherwise. Within this society, value is attributed through price, anything else is nine-tenths lip service, one-tenth wishful thinking. As an economy, we attribute little to no value to childminding or housework, stay at home mothers are not financially compensated and despite the rhetoric about the inestimable values of her labor, we pay the most marginalized, untrained people in society minimum wage or less to replace her efforts. After all, for all that men in high powered positions talk the talk about how much more fulfilling full-time motherhood is than the corporate world, very few of them ever demonstrate they believe it by heading home.

Nor is biology on our side. Childminding is widely acknowledged to be intense, exhausting business, made exponentially harder to incorporate with a career if the parents in question want to breastfeed or raise the child themself rather than in daycare, as most people admit would be preferable. If a child is to be breastfed and raised outside of daycare, biology has dictated the mother will be doing it (or spending hours daily strapped to pumps, time that is pretty much wasted). Even a few years taken out of a career will cripple that woman career-wise until she retires, but given our society's utter lack of compensation or respect for her work, it also leaves her entirely dependent on her partner for the duration. This state of affairs is excused simply by declaring the marginal improvement of the child's condition as "worth it," which frankly reveals how little a woman's contribution to the outside world is valued. As a society we all but conspire to maintain this system of biologically backed unpaid labor, then heap insult on injury by encouraging movements that sermonize on how women are not only predisposed to the circumstance by our relative physiology, but by universal instincts (which have failed to materialize in cross-cultural comparison). Is it any wonder so many women conclude children are simply not worth the sacrifice?

Without our own money and socially endorsed productivity, we women ourselves become almost invisible in society. With our waking hours devoted to a single human being, it takes Herculean effort to effect the culture through other avenues such as volunteering or grassroots lobbying. Instead the sum total of our influence on society is reduced to being the targets of irritating household cleaning ads. As more individual women opt to stay at home, a reasonable decision in light of the fact that we're equipped to be the caretakers of children, the influence of women in society at large diminishes. In other words, the dilemna is so difficult to resolve because both sides are absolutely right! A woman who stays home to raise her children is making a sacrifice for others, but it's a reasonable sacrifice to make. Women who work have every reason to be concerned that their collective bargaining power is reduced when women stay home, meaning women's rights will not figure in the political arena. If there can be a healthy resolution, it lies in changing social attitudes, fixing an economic value to the work, and providing social and government support for the work. That is, unless we really don't value such work, in which case those preaching women ought to stay at home have some explaining to do.

Yesterday we're all up in arms because women can't breastfeed while working the register at Walmart. Now, we're offended because Linda Hirshman thinks that professionally-capable women should choose not to stay home.

Look, if more women stayed in their white collar jobs and earned promotions and greater power, then they would be in a position to demand and receive better workplace benefits for women, mothers, etc. This, in turn, can generate a trickle-down effect (if not outright social change) that will eventually provide all women with greater benefits and options - maternity, health care, flex time, etc.

I hate to say it, but if we really want to be in a position to affect positive change for the status of women in America, that position probably isn't going to be at home. And that's less a comment on staying at home than it is on how America and politics work.

This is what the Totalitarian Left looks like. Hirshman wants to take away people's control over their own lives in favor of her own vision of what the world should be like. She is as scary as anything on the far right.

The very essence of feminism is choice. Anyone who doesn't get that doesn't understand the very first thing about feminism.