Linda Hirshman = My Mother

Last night, as I drifted off to sleep, my Linda Hirshman post still fresh in my mind, I had a revelation.

Readers of this blog, remember this conversation last week?

Remember these lines?

DAD: " We didn`t send you to college so you could sit around on your ass."

MOM: "Remember, Mrs. A. next door? She sat around on her ass all day long. You`re just like her now."

ME: "Yes, I know, Mom. Mrs. A. went to PTA meetings and sat by her pool during the day, while you worked to save money to send us to college."

I wondered why Hirshman no longer makes me angry, and the answer is, she`s attacking the places on me that already have a thick layer of scar tissue, from decades of my parents` stinging barbs.

Linda Hirshman is a feminist of my mother`s generation, the generation that fought their way into a man`s world, tooth and nail. No wonder she`s upset that lots of young women didn`t want to follow them.

Here is my mother`s story: her parents refused to give her any money for college, because they said they needed to save for her younger brother`s education. ("Boys need to go to college, but girls don`t, because their husbands take care of them," they said.) So she went to a small Catholic women`s college in Hartford, and paid for it entirely herself. She took a "baby break" for a few years when my younger brother and I were small, but returned to work fulltime at an insurance company when he started kindergarten. She worked fulltime until she retired, endured sexist bosses and overt discrimination, went to night school to study computers and get an MBA, and ended up making more than my father.

And my dad? He was raised by a traditional mother who did all the cooking and housework, but when my mom went back to work, he picked up a vacuum cleaner. He did the grocery shopping. I don`t remember his doing laundry, but I do remember seeing him washing the kitchen floor at night. And after my mother developed a severe chronic knee problem, he actually did more of the physical tasks around the house than she did.

Our house was not a feminist utopia, however, because there was a hostile neighborhood outside. When I was growing up, my mother was one of the only working-outside-the-home mothers in our neighborhood. My grandmother lived with us and worked nights as a waitress, so my parents never had to worry about daytime childcare. But still, I know what the stay-at-home mothers said about my mother, because I overheard some of it when I was playing at their houses:

"Her kids aren`t important enough to her to raise them herself!"

"She never volunteers for anything. Her job comes first!"

Many of the mothers in our neighborhood looked down on my mother, and my mother in turn looked down on them, and ridiculed them as brainless Stepford wives who sat by their pools all day. (We didn`t have a pool. Even if we could afford one, I`m sure my parents would have refused to put one in on principle, because pools were a symbol of the lazy lifestyle they abhorred.)

So now that I`ve become one of these women, in my mother`s eyes, it`s no surprise that she needles me about it. My choices are clearly an affront to her own. I have joined the enemy.

Thanks to one of my commenters below, I found an excerpt from Hirshman`s book. Go to page two -- she says this:

In response to my recent article on the subject, BloggingBaby.com (a Web site that advertises baby care, baby products, maternity clothes, etc.) solicited stories of stay-at-home moms, apparently thinking their reports would rebut my work. The BloggingBaby.com mothers do not for the most part appear to be the same socioeconomic class that the Times brides are, so the seven profiles published in December and January make a little picture of how regular people behave. Surprise! The statistics are identical: Three of the seven moms don't work at all, three have part-time jobs at increasing distances from their education and training, and one works full time at what she was educated for.

I wrote one of those Blogging Baby profiles, but I don`t know if Hirshman read it. There were actually eleven profiles, not seven, counting the two written by Blogging Baby`s paid bloggers. She quotes from a few of them, but not from mine.

Even if she did read mine, I surely don`t fit any definition of "regular people," because I`m married to a foreign government official, and have a back-and-forth life between two countries. I`m fortunate that my field -- journalism -- is one that can accomodate our unsettled life, and I have no doubt that I will be able to find a fulltime job again someday. Whether it`s a satisfying job is another story, but that`s never guaranteed, no matter what course my life takes.

Anyway, back to my family.

My grandmother, the one who initially objected to my mother`s college plans, ironically was the one who taught me the importance of self-reliance, which she belatedly learned herself. She was a waitress all her life -- she had wanted to be a nurse, but had to leave school and go to work during the Depression, so she never finished high school. When my mother was a senior in college, her father suddenly died of a cerebral aneurysm when he was 50 and my grandmother was 45.

"Never completely depend on a man," Gramma told me. "Even if you find the perfect husband, he could die."

So we`ve always had life insurance and a "what if" plan, in our family.

The other example that made an impression on me is the case of a friend of my father`s, who lived in our neighborhood and had a similar job at the same insurance company.

My father never enjoyed his job as an insurance underwiter -- it was just something he did to pay the bills and save money for the future. Now he and my mother are living it up in their senior community outside of Las Vegas, truly having the time of their lives.

But his friend died of cancer a few months after retiring. It occurred to me, that could have been my dad. He (or my mom) could have worked hard all his life at a job he didn`t like, and never gotten his delayed gratification.

This is where that maligned "choice" feminism comes in: satisfaction really matters to my generation, both men and women alike. We understand our responsibilities and our goals, but we want to enjoy the journey there as much as we can, too. We want to do what makes us happiest, because life is short and babies grow up so quickly. This is entirely personal, and therefore selfish by definition. No wonder Hirshman thinks we`re failures to her cause.

Overall, I`m not sure Hirshman`s book ("Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World") is going to motivate any of us stay-at-home mothers to get off our lazy asses, put our kids in daycare and heed the clarion call of old-style feminism.

If the success rate of my mother`s nagging is any indication, I wouldn`t count on it.