Linda Hirshman on Grand New Party
This is peculiar:
Coincidentally, contemporary conservatives Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam just published a book, “The Grand New Party,” in which they also suggest that Americans return to the real traditional marriage. Douthat and Salam propose that women not only put on the veil but also stop taking the Pill and stay home with the babies. The conservatives even suggest that society pay families (read: women) with children to stay home from work, using a benefit for which the rest of us would pay. They advocate for marriage confined to a man and a woman, strong social pressure and rewards to confine childbearing to such marriages, and a facially neutral but actually heavily gendered proposal to motivate women to quit their jobs and tend the home fires.
Almost nothing is true in this paragraph. It is true that Ross and I wrote a book called Grand New Party (not “The Grand New Party” — but let’s give Hirshman points for coming close).
Do we propose that women “put on the veil”? Well, we do argue that it is a good thing for women and men to get married, which is to say for women and men to, metaphorically, “put on the veil.”
but also stop taking the Pill
This is flatly absurd.
and stay home with the babies.
Also absurd. We argue that some parents — fathers and mothers — will choose to “stay home with the babies,” and that this is a choice that is as worthwhile as the decision to outsource parenting to professional caregivers.
Hirshman evidently believes that we mean the word “families” to read as “women,” which is peculiar. I am a non-woman, yet I am part of a family. I assume the same is true of other non-women as well, except perhaps clones generated under laboratory conditions.
They advocate for marriage confined to a man and a woman
Actually, I’m a proponent of legalizing same-sex civil marriage, so we didn’t discuss the controversy over whether marriage should be confined to a man and a woman in the book. This charge is made up out of whole cloth.
I have to assume that Linda Hirshman hasn’t read Grand New Party, which is a shame. Amazon is selling the book at a steep discount — $7.66 off. Hirshman could use the $7.66 to buy a clue.
Actually, that was mean. The truth is that ridiculous mischaracterizations are Hirshman’s stock in trade. Some months ago, Hirshman claimed that white women were being “intimidated” — I mean, close to intimidated — into supporting Obama.
When faced with a “movement,” resistance is costly. And for weeks now, online and on cable news channels, almost anyone who expresses criticism of Obama or support for Clinton has elicited a firestorm of disapproval.
Was this ever true? Almost anyone?
Obama’s scores of defenders — “Obamabots,” they’re called — immediately recite the anti-Clinton litany: Billary, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary’s Iraq war vote, identity politics. Well-regarded activists such as Planned Parenthood’s Feldt or successful writers such as Tina Fey who support Clinton are excoriated as worthless pieces of nonsense.
Tina Fey has been drummed out of Hollywood?
After Steinem wrote an op-ed on Clinton’s behalf in the New York Times, the New Republic published an article titled “Gloria Steinem’s Awful Op Ed.” Not wrong. Not misguided. But “awful.”
TNR is not allowed to use the word “awful,” evidently. “Awful” is beyond the pale.
Has this rhetorical firestorm had an effect on the political decisions of college-educated white women? I don’t know. But I do know that many of these women have succeeded by meeting or exceeding society’s expectations.
I.e., women who disagree with me are sheep. Or am I misreading this?
And the movement quality of the Obama campaign has certainly raised expectations of commitment to its candidate well beyond those of a normal political campaign. This has to be generating powerful peer pressure.
See above.
The commentary can feel like something close to intimidation, a gantlet of verbal punishment meted out to anyone who dares to disagree.
Note the slippery language: “can feel like something close to intimidation,” and “verbal punishment.” One would think Hirshman was Solzhenitsyn for daring to support Hillary Clinton in America’s Democratic primaries.
It’s well established social science that women on the whole are much more averse to political conflict than men are, so it’s fair to speculate that avoiding that gantlet may be one more reason women are tilting toward Obama.
Again, a generalized, vague claim that women are — let’s not mince words — sheep. Who is the sexist? Wait for it …
Whatever the explanation, the Clinton campaign could now be stuttering to its close, and Mark Penn has been criticized for everything from short-sightedness about the primary schedule to overspending on sandwich platters. But those failures pale beside the biggest one of all: not recognizing the fickleness of the female voter.
Fickleness: the reason Hillary Clinton didn’t have the support of all white, college-educated women.
The outright misrepresentations and falsehoods aimed at Grand New Party are one thing. (I mean, yes, Hirshman either didn’t read the book or she did and has a vivid imagination that was somehow incorporated into her “recollections” of the book.) This generalized damning of pro-Obama women is another.
Having a job at Salon is a third thing. And being very facially expressive on MSNBC is something else entirely.
Here’s another Hirshman takedown from a writer you might like. Hirshman owes you an apology.
— southpaw · Aug 9, 08:11 AM · #
I’m not going to defend everything (or even most things) that Hirshman has written, but let’s not play games here. Even if a proposal to subsidize in-house child rearing is facially gender-neutral, given the way our society is structured, it will almost certainly involve predominantly women staying at home to care for children, while men work predominantly outside the home. Objecting to this as sexism’s snout under the tent flap is perfectly reasonable, and certainly deserves a real response, even if you don’t agree with it. There’s some interesting discussion at <a href=“http://crookedtimber.org/2008/08/08/working-women-hurt-their-families/”>this Crooked Timber thread</a>.
— Dan Miller · Aug 9, 07:17 PM · #
Dan, Hirshman could have said, “Douthat and Salam’s proposals, if implemented, would have the effect of returning us to a sexist social order.” But instead she said “Douthat and Salam propose that women not only put on the veil but also stop taking the Pill and stay home with the babies.” The first statement would have been a serious criticism requiring a serious response; the second is just making shit up.
— Alan Jacobs · Aug 9, 07:30 PM · #
I love reading your takedowns Reihan, since you’re always so gracious (even if sometimes, I think, deadpanly), that when you take out the artillery, it’s devastating. Sheer pleasure.
— PEG · Aug 9, 09:34 PM · #
Reihan, you might like to know that my cross-examination style is, I’ve just realized, a direct rip-off of your blog takedown style. I do think that Dan Miller’s point is one that merits a response, but if I recall, you dealt with that on some level in the book.
— hugo · Aug 13, 04:53 PM · #
I realize that this comes out of left field (pun intended), but I am actually offended that Hirshman, as she accounts on her webpage (where she indulges in a charming big of self-congratulation), named her standard poodle Alexis de Tocqueville. Would not Robespierre have been a more appropriate epithet to bestow upon a radical’s French dog?
— Nathan P. Origer · Aug 14, 07:27 AM · #
“Take the veil.” And they say feminists have no sense of humor. It’s a pun on the wedding veil in the main story, Mr. Salam. Jeez.
Difficult as this is to believe, my piece in Salon http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/08/06/linda_hirshman/index.html was not about your book, but about the ambivalent feelings people have about the siren song of traditional marriage; it was the reaction to your book proposing to redistribute tax revenues from the unmarried or the unconventionally married to the conventionally married, and from the families with market child care to the families where one “parent” stays home, not the book, that interested me.
As to the real politics of the proposal to tax everyone and redistribute the proceeds to people who commit to legal marriage, heterosexual in all but two states, everything I know about Grand New Party I learned from that lefty pinko, the senior editor of Reason Magazine, Kerry Howley. She said:
“I don’t think I am overstating the R&R position when I say that my friends would like to return us to a more traditional and less pluralistic concept of family life. Through social and tax policy, they would privilege heterosexual two-parent families, fund marriage promotion programs, encourage the stigmatization of single parenthood, subsidize motherhood among married women, increase taxes on the childless, and so on. In short, they would structure incentives to encourage women to use their bodies in the one way most appealing to social conservatives.
Privileging one, dominant idea of the family comes with costs that R&R never really grapple with in their breezy book, and those costs fall almost exclusively on one gender. Through the tax code, R&R wish to change the relative prices of women’s options, rendering childlessness more costly and early motherhood less so. They want the federal government to stake a position on the proper role of women, and that role involves a heterosexual marriage with children. While conceding that this is politically infeasible at the moment, R&R write that “we should be willing to stigmatize illegitimacy by tying a tax relief to responsible parenting.” (Responsible parenting=parenting by legally married couples.) This is a policy that punishes poor women unable to find marriageable men, gay and lesbian partners unable to access legal marriage, and any other number of people who are responding rationally to their environment, doing the best they know how for the kids they have. http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/14/what_women_want/ “
But your criticism reminded me of every time some proposal says “he” or “she” when it knows full well that it’s “she” who’s going to do the work in the present social life. Would his or her penis make a penis female? Well, according to the United States government Bureau of Labor Statistics, women with children spend twice as much time as men on primary child care and half again as much time as men do taking “secondary” care of children.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t10.htm.
So kudos to you for the gender neutrality of your language, but, like the senior editor of Reason magazine, I’m going with no sale.
— Linda Hirshman · Aug 14, 12:54 PM · #