American politics

The Envied Michelle

Time Magazine's latest admiring article on Michelle Obama highlights the wistfulness of American women in an era of triumphant egalitarianism. Michelle is enviable not just because she has all the clothes and servants she wants, but because after years of career, she is now that rarest of all things: a housewife. According to the authors, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Sherer: After working hard for 20 years, she gets to take a sabbatical, spend as much time as she wants with her kids, do as many high-impact public events as she chooses and, when it's all over, have the rest of her life to write the next chapter. "I don't even know what that is yet," she says, but she'll have choices then, as she has now, that most working mothers only dream of. Of course, it is ludicrous to say Michelle is taking a "sabbatical."  Being First Lady is a job - a difficult and exalted job. Predictably, feminists have complained that she has sacrificed too much of herself for her husband's career. Apparently even having a president for husband does not warrant giving up one's job in public relations. How long before we have a First Lady who leaves the White House with a brief case every day?

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May 28, 2009
Work and Domesticity

Sense and Non-Sense

  A recently-released survey of American employees showed that 41 percent believe it's better if the "man earns the money and the woman takes care of the home and children." This figure, downplayed by writers of the report as evidence of weak support for traditional roles, is strikingly high given the constant veneration of career women in the press and the historically high numbers of women in the workforce. Many more people than is generally acknowledged lack confidence in the current model for family life.     Surveys that examine the effects of the cultural revolution of the last 100 years rarely take into account the full significance of the changes, and often blatantly downplay them. This report by the Families and Work Institute, funded in part by IBM, is no exception, presenting with rosy optimism figures that confirm the popularity of the dual-income model. A majority of the respondents, for instance, said that a mother who is employed outside the home can have "just as good a relationship" with her children as a woman at home, implying that the most important thing about the parent-child bond is the personal satisfaction it gives to parents.   The report confirms the growing feminism of men, but concludes that men still endorse traditional sex roles in higher numbers than women. While 80 percent of the women who responded said working women can have just as good a relationship with their children as mothers at home, only 67 percent of men did. A staggering 25 percent of women…

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May 27, 2009
Feminism

Are Men More Feminist than Women?

  Feminism is not a “women’s movement.” Women have been its most outspoken and visible proponents, but men have enthusiastically embraced its central ideas and worked to fulfill them. Men may even be the greater feminists today. Feminism has meant a loss of status, of political power and of earning potential for men, but these are things they have willingly conceded for other benefits. Women have succeeded in ways they never could have imagined in convincing men that the central project of a woman’s life is easy and relatively unimportant.  One of the principle ideas of the feminist interpretation of history is that men are innately threatened by women in positions of power.  Recent history shows this is not true. Many men complain about the arrogance and machismo of powerful women, or the stupidity of affirmative action, while at the same time accepting and furthering the culture of feminism. Some do so out of respect for women, or what they consider to be respect, and a desire to atone for the sins of their fathers. The past is entirely disgraceful, and the life of the traditional woman a veritable hell. The thousands of years in which women devoted themselves to home, children and community were one long period of barbarity. Ready sex without marriage is hard to turn down. Obviously, many men approve of the sexual freedom feminism has granted. The ancient dream of a chaste bride lives on, but is now rarely fulfilled.  It’s still a private dream, but there…

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May 26, 2009
Work and Domesticity

The Farmer and the Housewife

                               In the foregoing speech by Roosevelt, he makes an important point. Democracy depends not just on vital laws and institutions, but on certain sensibilities. And, as Roosevelt noted, there are two types who represent a shared sensibility critical to a large democracy. They are the farmer and the housewife.

By farmer, I refer, as did Roosevelt, not to the big-business tycoon, but to the relatively small-scale grower. And, by housewife, I mean the woman who devotes the vast portion of adulthood to caring for and living in daily physical proximity to her husband and children.

Farmers and housewives have natural affinities. For one, they both live close to nature. I don’t mean they both live close to the earth or to the outdoors. I mean nature in a larger sense, as the physical world in all its daily cycles of degeneration and regeneration. Children are a part of nature, a rapidly changeable part of it, and a home, with all its cyclical physical needs, is a part of nature as well.

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May 8, 2009