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Thursday, October 12, 2006

October surprise

My students’ papers just came in, and that means . . . it’s time for a blogging hiatus!  I’ll be back with new material next Friday, but in the meantime I’ll post a series of golden oldies from this blog’s early years.  I might even put up an excerpt from Rhetorical Occasions, because I’ve been so remiss in the book-flogging department lately.  (Though I will point out, for the benefit of those people who find the whole book-flogging thing kind of obnoxious, that I have thus far refrained from switching on the special Internets technology that would register each visit to this site as a sale from Powells.  That’s right, just a click onto this blog and you could be getting a book in the mail within the week, delivered by a specially dedicated Internets tube!  But I won’t activate the device—at least not yet.)

Actually, blog book flogging is obnoxious only when it’s one’s own book being blog flogged.  So before I sign off for the week, I think I’ll flog someone else’s book for a change.  Here’s a choice excerpt from Laura Kipnis’s latest, The Female Thing:

So who actually gained over the last thirty years, the heyday of women’s much-vaunted expedition into the workforce?  As we see, the job market proved flexible enough to absorb women into its ranks with barely a hiccup, while suppressing salaries and quashing labor demands across the board.  The exhilarating women’s lib notion that women entering positions of economic and political power would somehow transform the character of existing social institutions turned out to be just wrong.  With hindsight, the question is whether something got left out of the political calculation along the way—quality-of-life issues, for instance. Or what kind of equity to aspire to.  But then why be surprised that feminism too succumbed to the winner-take-all logic of a winner-take-all economy with the oppositional edges smoothed down to suit the times.  Who doesn’t want to be a winner?*

As the contradictions continue to mount, now we hear that the real radicals are the crop of twenty-something Ivy-educated women leading the so-called opt-out revolution, which is the new code for moms staying at home with the kid instead of ascending the career track.  This is being presented as the brave new thing, with words like “choice” lobbed around just to twist the knife a little deeper for cranky old feminists, who used the word rather differently.  Somehow, as highly educated as these girls are, they don’t seem to have heard about the 50 percent divorce rate!  Somehow, they imagine that their husbands’ incomes—and loyalties—come with lifetime guarantees, thus no contingency plans for self-sufficiency will prove necessary!  Let’s hope they’re right.  (Somewhere Betty Friedan must be cackling—though recall that Friedan wrote before the advent of Prozac, which might have made all the difference for her generation of depressed stay-at-home moms, as we hope it will for their successors.)

* For the backstory on the backing down, consult Alice Echols’s Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75 on the break between feminists and the New Left, and the factionalism between liberal, socialist, and radical wings of the emerging women’s movement, all of which set the direction for future political calculations.

By the bye, I agree that everyone should consult Echols’s book.  As often as possible.  Great stuff, that.

And I see that Amanda has begun reading The Female Thing.  I do hope she keeps liking it as she goes, not least because I insisted to Laura that she really, really, really had to send Amanda a copy, or else.  Actually it didn’t take much persuading.  Because as anyone who’s read either Ms. Kipnis or Ms. Marcotte would know, the pairing is pretty obvious.

See you all when I’m finished grading papers.  In the meantime, the We Are All Detroit Tygers Burning Brightly in the Giant Nuclear Fireball Now party will keep the flame alive!  So to speak.

Posted by Michael on 10/12 at 11:55 AM
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