1. Women at the top have never altered the system in favour of women at the bottom. Everybody's favourite poster girl: Margaret Thatcher.

Can anyone name an elite woman who climbed into a position of power and altered her domain or society at large in a way that benefited non-elite women? Just one? Please?

And if we need to have women in decision-making positions in order to see change, then how the hell did women get the vote, anyway? How did we even manage to get into these professional schools? How did we win the right to an abortion? How did Canadian women manage to finagle maternity and parental leaves out of a parliament that is only 20% female? How did any disadvantaged group ever make any advances at all if they needed to have members of their own groups in positions of power and authority?

What good has Condoleeza Rice done for women in the US?

Even my Mom: Who was actually born working-class, married very young (17) to someone with better prospects than her own, and decided to have two children in the 1970s--but then saw Hirshman's light. She went to school (which my Dad, that awful man with better prospects who must inherently want to keep her in her place, paid for), and switched out of the field she liked for a field she hated because of the better earnings potential. She got a job and worked at it like a slave, hating every moment; she climbed to an upper management position where she wields substantial authority over many subordinates and can implement workplace policy fairly flexibly; and she is miserable. She is sticking it out until retirement because she doesn’t want to give the "boys" who think women can't hack it any more material.

Do you think she is agitating for reform to make her workplace more friendly to women with families?

Ah, no. Would you? If you knew the position you'd fought so hard for was dependent on continuing to appear as the perfect worker, always available, supportive of the company's direction?

She is a feminist much as Hirshman herself is (except that she definitely wants more grandchildren) and, from what I can see, it has made her miserable. Mind you, she wasn't much happier in the nine years she was a SAHM, living under her father’s rules. Sure would have been nice if she'd felt for a moment that she could have made her own rules up for herself.

2. "Choice Feminism" is a conservative chimera, not a real ideology. Constructing and destroying it reinforces conservative and anti-feminist ideologies.

What the hell is "choice feminism," anyways? It's something people make up, is what it is. It's the name people give to what feminist women do when they disapprove of their choices.

Criticizing "choice feminism" presupposes that women ought not to have choices. As Half Changed World points out, the opposite to "choice feminism" (if it actually existed) is "litmus test feminism": Be a Feminist by Following These Ten Not-So-Simple Steps.

But more fundamentally, it is anti-feminist because it presupposes that women are actually making choices--freely exercising their will in selecting one option from many. To how many women does this apply? Even for the elite women she criticizes, the options are constrained: You may work 80 hour weeks at a grueling job or you may sacrifice your career to stay home with the children. These are not "choices," they are horror stories. Criticizing individual women’s "choices" when they are forced to choose from a bad hand like that? Is antifeminist.

Now, if we lived in a world where a woman was free to either work in a grueling 80-hour/week career job, stay home with the children, or design the perfect blend for herself and arrive at a part-time position that is well-paid and allows her to have a family life while her husband is equally free to do the same, and then from those three options selects staying at home, one might be able to criticize that woman's choices--but even then, there will always be families where that is the option that works the best for all members involved. Always. Just as there will always be families for whom it works best when all members work full-time, even in a conservative utopia. This is the magic of human variation.

Even elite women frequently do not have good options. The options for other women are worse; but that doesn’t mean that the options for elite women are good.

Finally—have you ever met someone who called themselves a "choice feminist"?

Ever? Even one?

3. The article isn’t so much another salvo in the mommy wars, as anti-mommy, period. She's against reproduction (but if you really have to, you can have one--just one!

Here's a thought: People decide how many children they want to have, generally speaking, outside of their political philosophy. It might be based on how much they like being around children of a specific age, or health problems, or financial resources, or what kind of resources they would like to be able to devote to each child. It is also related to a strong, biological urge to reproduce. These desires are generally not plastic. Telling women that it's feminist to have ONE child doesn’t mean that most women will decide to have fewer children in order to be feminist. It means women will have as many children as they were going to have anyway, and if it means they're not feminist, then screw feminism. I wonder how Hirshman would respond to a suggestion that feminists ought to have lots of children in order to breed the decision-makers of tomorrow? Keep pumping them out, ladies! We need to breed all the feminists we can! Would she have had more? I doubt it.

It seems most readers of the article read it as meaning that it's not ok to stay home, and we should all go out to work. It's true that she wants us all out there working, but the article is by no means pro-working-mother. She would hate me. I got a "useless" degree in Environmental Studies so I could make the world a better place; I intend to have more than one child; if I could scale down my hours, I would, because I miss my little girl; I'm going to have another child if I can manage it; I'm not angling for promotions because the risk that they might require overtime is too great, and I already miss my little girl too much; I obtain practically zero mental stimulation or opportunity to 'reason' from my work (my hobbies are far more gratifying that way) and I am, supposedly, in a professional field; in short, besides working, I’m not doing a single thing she advises, nor do I intend to.

Furthermore: She is either dispensing advice solely to elite women, and ignoring the rest of us; or she is dispensing advice she feels is useful to all women but directing it in particular to elite women in this article. It's one or the other. Yes?

Both are flawed.

If the advice is solely meant for elite women, then what does that mean for the rest of us? What does that mean for me? I suppose I'm allowed to do whatever I want with my life, and the feminism (or lack thereof) of my choices doesn't matter, because all I need to do is sit around and wait for "elite" women to climb to the top and institute changes that will benefit me from above. They will do this, of course, because they are women. And all women are the same, and want the same things. OF COURSE those elite women who climbed to the top will immediately recognize my need for on-site daycare. Just because they all hire private nannies doesn’t mean they wouldn't innately sense that some of us can't afford it. OF COURSE they will recognize that I can't afford the $15 dollar charge for every one minute late after the six o'clock daycare closing time, and never require me to work late. OF COURSE they will recognize that I can't go on every business trip they'd like because sometimes my spouse is out of town too. Why wouldn't they understand? Aren't they all women?

And that's not paternalistic, is it? I shouldn't be at all offended.

The substantial and basic flaw in the entire premise is that any woman who has followed her advice (to marry down, earn lots of money and have only one child) to climb to the top will not have had to make substantial sacrifices--or, perhaps, any sacrifices--to obtain that position because she ordered her life to achieve it. I see no reason to believe that she would have any understanding therefore for the sacrifices that other women would and do make.

The other option is that she is talking to all of us, but that this article in particular is addressed to elite women. Unfortunately, in this context her advice becomes absurd: We cannot all marry down, since many of us have no "down" to marry to; some of us have twins; even if we wanted to, schools do not have the capacity to accept all women into the professional fields and, if they did, the economy could not absorb all of the graduates; and most obviously, not everyone can be at the top. It is a basic characteristic of hierarchies that there is only one person at the top. We cannot even all be near the top. In hierarchies, most people will be at or near the bottom; that's how they work, it's inherent in our whole social and corporate structure. If we were to follow her advice, all of us, to a woman, we would simply have a much better educated class of people staffing temp agencies. It would not change our social order by a hair.

4. It throws out every advance feminism has made within its own ranks in the past twenty years--inclusiveness, diversity, focusing on the feminization of poverty and women on the margins, etc.

Raise your hands anyone who has read an article, paper or book by any feminist of any standing in the last twenty years (besides this one) which has claimed that what feminism needs is more focus on the elites.

Yeah. That's what I thought.

Everything I’ve read in about feminism published since the 1980s has agreed that the exact problem with feminism historically is that it has focused too much on elite women and ignored the needs and desires of the substantial proportion of women who aren't elite, who already had to go to work because their income was needed, who had to put their kids into substandard daycares because their jobs were not optional, who couldn't afford to go to school regardless of whether or not they qualified, who never expected to get "mental stimulation" out of their work, just survival.

5. It's focus is completely insular, totally American, and misses easily available counter-arguments close at hand--say, in Canada. Or any other country, really.

Here's how it seems to have worked here:

1. Make it easier for women to combine paid employment with family responsibilities by instituting things such as adequate maternity leaves.
2. Women take them, and keep working, by and large.
3. Women realize they could work more if these policies were available to men.
4. They're made available to men.
5. Men start taking them.
6. The work of caregiving becomes valued--yes, it’s fucked up because it's becoming valued because men are doing it, but hey, it's becoming valued.

No, this isn't based on anything but my own supposition, but it's a good hypothesis for the Canadian situation, in which a brief maternity leave policy was implemented, Canadian women agitated for more (and got it, from an overwhelmingly male Parliament), that was implemented, Canadian women took it, and Canadian women and men starting agitating for an extended leave period that was available to both women and men, and got that too.

Today anyone who qualifies (the qualifications are restrictive and limit it to middle class women/men and above, which is incidentally another case against focusing feminism on elite women), 50 paid weeks of leave are available. The first 17 weeks are reserved as maternity leave, for women, to recover from pregnancy and childbirth. The rest is equally available to women and men (It's also available to adoptive parents, up to the full 50 weeks).

There has been recent talk of extending it to two years. Before I had Frances, I thought that was over the top. Now I'm all over it. Give me two years! Please!

While in most families all of the leave is still taken by the mother, a substantial number of families split it to a greater or lesser degree. Erik took one month, a friend's husband took two, several colleagues took several. One man I know was gone for six months. Now, I work in the public sector, but still: It was accepted as a wonderful thing for him to do. Everyone was happy for him. He came back to his management job, and no one thought less of him for being gone for six months to care for his baby girl. And I'm sure that having done that for six months, he has a far different conception of housework and childcare than he once did.

There seems to be this idea in the US that if you implement policies that make it easier for women to combine paid employment with family responsibilities, that they will give up on paid employment and it will reinforce traditional gender roles--but it doesn't work that way. Maybe you have a different hypothesis for why it doesn't work that way, but it doesn't. Personally, I believe that the act of making it easier to combine paid employment with home responsibilities gives value to home responsibilities--in our case, 55% of your previous income up to approximately $30,000/year. This very action begins to erode the traditional devaluing of house care and child care and makes it more palatable for men to assume a greater share.

According to her argument, this would mean that Canadian feminism "succeeded" while American feminism "failed." Let's consider for a moment that Canadian feminism did not demand or advocate that we all assume the traditionally masculine life course and was far more socialist and accepting of government interventions in family life, so that perhaps her advice--putting the burden on individual "elite" women and insisting on gender parity in every sphere--is actually not necessary. Let's also consider that it focused on collective solutions, funded by taxation.

The "domestic glass ceiling" can be broken collectively; it does not depend on women being willing to be a bitch about housework. In Canada in 2000, the transition year for parental leave, 3 per cent of fathers took leave. In 2001, it was 10 per cent. I tried to find a more recent statistic, but couldn't; regardless, that's a significant increase and, while it is still not enough, was largely the result of a government policy. I would argue that this is at least partially the result of the policy being interpreted as "childcare is really important work, and we are willing to pay you to do it, at least for a year."

It is also important to add that the numbers of mothers taking leave are just around 55%, due to the limitations on qualifying for the program, so that the 10% of fathers taking it is much more significant than it initially may appear.

6. It doesn't mean to be part of an anti-working-mother backlash, it doesn't mean to be part of recent movement to haul women up by their beltloops and escort them back to the kitchen--but it is.

Yes, I mean that.

Because the basic assumption of her article is that these women are choosing to go home.

And for whatever reason--whether it is argued as sociological or cultural or biological--if it is cast as a choice when in fact it isn't, when it is a result of changes in the economy leading more people of all groups to leave the workforce, it reinforces the idea culturally that women are less committed to work, that especially mother-employees are not committed to their jobs, that they don’t "deserve" them as much as men do, that they don’t "really need" promotions or more responsibilities, which makes work even less appealing or desirable to mother-employees, which causes them to really start "choosing" to be at home. And then it's the fucking 1950s all over again.

Whether one argues that women need to be at home working for their families for fulfillment, or that women are selfishly choosing to be at home instead of slugging it out in the corporate world for their feminist sisters, it comes down to the same thing: Economic restructuring recast as the stereotype of the mother-worker who is only putting in time until she can afford to quit, and who is thus more disposable and less rewardable.

I'll say it again: If terrible books and articles based on terrible research and flawed assumptions are being easily published as long as they assume that women are choosing to work at home (whether they see it as a good or bad thing)--that means something. It means that the people who choose what to publish easily accept the idea that mothers don't really want to work, and they don't ask for a lot in the way of evidence.

There is no evidence that mothers, as a group, don't really want to work. There is evidence that they work less than fathers do, for all kinds of cultural reasons already discussed elsewhere. But there is no evidence that as a group they don't want to, elite or not. If mothers as a group were less inclined to work than any other group, one would expect that in the context of a rising economy and increased support for family responsibilities, less mothers would work while more of every other group would work--yes? But that describes the Canadian condition to a T, and instead, more women of every category are working, and working full-time, than ever before, even after the increase in parental leave from six months to one year in 2000.

If an economic downturn in the US leading to job losses for everyone is being recast in the US as empowered, enlightened elite women "choosing" to leave the work force because they would rather be at home raising children--even though that undoubtedly describes the situation for some elite women--and this being taken as proof for what all women want, and feminism has failed, etc.--that is really, really bad news for women. All women. Period.