She’s the woman all the other women love or hate

Just before Linda R. Hirshman’s book, “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World,” was published this month, she sat in the hushed and sleek library of the Philips Club, in New York’s Lincoln Square, talking about the popular idea that something is feminist simply because a woman does it.

“It’s like when people say, ‘What we really ought to do is honor housework more. That would be the real feminist thing to do. It’s just because women do it, that we don’t honor it.’ That’s false! OK? That’s false,” said Hirshman, who sounds a bit like a Midwestern Katharine Hepburn and has hair cut into tiny yellow-white pretzel-curls all over her head.

Housework is not, she continued, devalued simply because women do it. “The reason we don’t honor it is because it’s not very highly skilled in a society that values education above all things,” she said. “It’s repetitious, it’s done in private, it’s boring -- that’s why we don’t honor it. I don’t see people saying, ‘Well we’re going to stop listening to the Supreme Court because there are women justices.’ ”

“Get to Work” showcases a concern for the fate of elite, educated women in the U.S. that is both off-putting in its narrow scope and refreshing in its candor. The polemic expands on her December “American Prospect” article “Homeward Bound,” which argued that these women, especially, should stay in their jobs after they have kids, so that they are in a position to effect real change in the world, and so that they can force men to shoulder more of the workload at home.

Hirshman, 62, a retired professor of philosophy at Brandeis University, blamed what she calls “choice feminism” (and the all-embracing Gloria Steinem) for the exodus of women from their careers since Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” The article was conceived during a “Sex and the City” episode (she loved the show, she said) in which Charlotte freaks out about getting her wedding photo into the New York Times Style section. Hirshman decided to track a group of “thirty-plus” highly educated women from a 1996 edition of the notoriously exclusive wedding page. She found that 85% of the brides “had left the workplace in whole or in part.” “Perhaps more important,” she wrote of the nation as a whole, “the percentage of highly educated working mothers has stopped going up.”

The piece caught the eye of conservative David Brooks, who wrote a quietly hysterical column in the New York Times calling it “a full-bore, unapologetic blast of 1975 time-warp feminism.”

In the weeks that followed, journalists and bloggers debated Hirshman’s central argument as well as her strident, judgmental, why-are-you-staying-home attitude. Hirshman, after all, was saying that it was up to women to stop “choosing” to quit their jobs when kids came along.

The hubbub snagged Hirshman a book deal with Viking -- something she’d struggled to do since she started on the project four years ago.

In the 100-page book, Hirshman lays out a “Strategic Plan to Get to Work.” Her suggestions for women include training for practical careers, rather than, say, becoming an artist; bargaining “relentlessly for a just household”; having only one child; and “marrying down,” so as not to feel comfortable abandoning a well-paid, prestigious job. Hirshman repeatedly counsels “self-discipline.”

The book arrived in the midst of seemingly bottomless media interest in the so-called “Mommy Wars,” in which riled-up working and stay-at-home mothers defend their “choices” on blogs, the morning TV news shows and newspaper Op-Ed pages. Hirshman herself has made the TV rounds and published a piece in the June 18 Washington Post called “Unleashing the Wrath of Stay-at-Home Moms,” detailing the hatred that has been directed her way by those who disagree with her.

She was cheered only by the notion that her detractors had far too much time on their hands: “I guess working women are too busy at work to blog about their lives and are already on their way to their jobs when ‘Good Morning America’ puts me on at 8 a.m.,” she wrote. Since her Washington Post piece came out, Hirshman said, she has received close to 700 e-mails, the vast majority of them positive.

Still, Hirshman is offering a prescription that even some who agree with her central message find abrasive. Anna Fels, a psychiatrist and advisor at Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Center for Work-Life Policy and author of the 2004 book “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives,” said that perhaps Hirshman placed too much responsibility on women.

“The pressure on young women who are facing motherhood for the first time and dealing with a new marriage and a career is just overwhelming,” she said by phone. “And to ask young women to think this through and marry an unambitious man or an older man -- it’s putting a huge burden on these young women who are already burdened with conflicting cultural imperatives.”

But Hirshman has both big and small ideas about how women should manage their lives, with the ultimate goal of not only gaining power but also maximizing their potential as full human beings.

“Never do yourself what you can pay someone else to do, because that then frees you up to do what you’re good at,” said Hirshman of housework. “When workmen come to my house and say, ‘So what’s the matter with the lamp?’ I say, ‘OK, you stand up in front of a class of 200 people and explain to them about Plato, and I will figure out what’s wrong with the lamp.’ ”

This is her chaos theory of work-life balance: Women shouldn’t constantly worry about whether the milk’s gone sour or their husband’s socks are strewn across the kitchen table. In the case of “a choice between something that engages your full human capacities and gives you power, honor, wealth and so forth in the world on the one hand, and something that’s repetitious, physical, low-level on the other hand, do the higher thing,” she said.

But is corporate law, for example, the “higher thing”? Reached by phone, Katha Pollitt, a columnist for the Nation and author of the forthcoming book “Virginity or Death,” said she admired Hirshman for “laying down the law like the anti-feminists” who are “very free in telling people what to do.” But Pollitt also said, “There’s a lot of work that isn’t very exciting, and you can easily find yourself thinking: ‘What’s this all for?’ Then the notion of putting your energies toward the family seems very appealing because the alternative is continuing to do something that’s not all that interesting or fulfilling.” And, indeed, some women might enjoy working in the home. “Well, everybody needs a hobby,” Hirshman said at this suggestion. “I am an elitist in that I believe people have different capacities.”

Raised in Cleveland, she attended Cornell University, the University of Chicago Law, and later the University of Illinois, where she wrote her dissertation on “the greatest bargainist in the history of political philosophy Thomas Hobbes.” For many years she was a union side labor lawyer, and bargaining in marriage plays a big role in Hirshman’s philosophy. For example: “You want more children?” she said a woman could say to her husband, “Then start doing the laundry.”

Hirshman had one daughter during her first 17-year-long marriage, and she also has two step-daughters from her second marriage of 17 years. She is protective of her privacy: When she let a “Guardian” reporter into her home recently, she wouldn’t permit her to describe the art on the walls. Hirshman is clearly well-off -- she spends the winters in Arizona, the summers in Duchess County, N.Y., and two months a year in residence at the Philips Club -- and critics of both stay-at-home-Mommy writers and feminist get-back-to-work activists often question how much anyone living a relatively privileged life can understand the average person’s concerns.

“I don’t mind about that,” she said. “Most intellectuals come from a middle-class background. And I did a lot more for working men and women than any of the journalists who call me an elitist. I was a union side labor lawyer -- there are still people in this country who make a little more over time because I lived.”

Still, Hirshman knows that, fair or not, readers and journalists alike will want to know: How does Hirshman do it all?

“I’m a philosopher,” she said. “I would not deliberately try to lead a life that was less good than I thought I could.” She fiercely maintains that her book is science: “I am ideally suited to take on this issue -- I’m a trained philosopher; we’ve spent two and a half millennia thinking about what is the content of a good life, I specialize in bargaining theory, which has a huge application to sexual relationships, which has been untapped in the popular literature.”

Of course, the ever-expanding category of literature on work-life balance is chock full of women -- most recently and famously, New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly writer Caitlin Flanagan -- who write about their personal lives.

“Who gives a ... ?” Hirshman said about such intimate details, her voice pitched. She’s aware, however, that as a female writer provoking a new “Mommy Wars” skirmish, she might be lumped in the same category as Flanagan, even though Flanagan defines herself as an “at-home Mom.”

“We have nothing in common. I find it insulting,” Hirshman went on. “There was an Op-Ed on Mother’s Day in the Chicago Tribune -- I was waiting for it to happen on Mother’s Day -- in which some woman, an unemployed mother of two from Highland Park, wrote about how Caitlin’s wrong and Linda’s wrong and we should all just get along!” She hugged herself -- “It’s like there’s some macro on the computer, and you just press it and that essay comes out.”

Next, Hirshman hopes to publish “Red State,” her political novel that speculates about what would happen if abortion laws went back to the states. “It takes rebellious thick-skinned people like me to say, ‘I call it abortion, I don’t call it choice,’ ” she said. “People don’t scare me, and I can live on what I’ve saved. What are they going to do to me?”