but wait, there's more

I can hardly keep up with the various responses to the American Prospect piece I talked about below. Here are a few really worth your while; read the comments, too:

Mrs Coulter of Republic of Heaven collected one good bunch of links.

Mamazine picked up a couple more (yes, including me!).

And Jen has some more to say over at the Literary Mama blog, which you should be checking out regularly anyway.

Dr. B. gets her own link, even though she's linked in Mrs. Coulter's post, too, because she takes the by-now-contrarian position of mostly agreeing with Hirshman. Dr. B. doesn't mind dishing out advice or making rules, which is what some folks find particularly annoying about the piece. I might give different advice, and would certainly make different rules, but it is worth noting that agreeing with Hirshman doesn't necessarily mean you're antifeminist.

I actually think Beauvoir would agree with much of what Hirshman says. If, as Beauvoir and her existentialist colleagues believe, you are what you do, AND IF (here's the big if, for me) only public, money-making "doing" matters, then LH is right.

The problem is, public money-making "doing" isn't the only game in town. It is, however, a game that I'd actually like to see more women in if only because they might change it. I vote for women politicians, try to patronize women-owned businesses, even read novels by women BECAUSE they are engaged in a kind of public "doing" that is different from the mainstream while still, somehow, part of it. I like that women need to be reckoned with in these ways.

And, as I've said before (in comments on some of those posts linked above, I think), choices can be constrained. Many women "choose" to stay home not because they really and truly want to but because the other options (full-time child care, low wage labor, part-time work with no benefits, whatever) are less appealing. I never chose to stay home, so I will not be so arrogant as to claim that no one else "really" does, either--but I do know many women who would have chosen differently if they had real options.

This is, again, getting too long. And I'm feeling like maybe it's time for something really frivolous. Too bad Becca's not blogging about "All My Children," because I could really get behind that...

edited to add...
There's another data-rich post here and another bunch of links, some new, some old, here (both on Alas, A Blog).