Opting out

Linda Hirschman continues throwing bombs at women who quit their day jobs in order to raise the kids/support the careers of their ambitious husbands. It does feel a little like twisting the knife in poor Silda Spitzer (also, why does Hirschman keep cattily calling her a "blond upper East Side mother" when she's clearly not blond??), but it also re-raises the old critique of well-educated, smart, successful career women who opt out of the working world to have a family. I'm secretly sympathetic to the claim that it's bad for women when opt-out "revolutionaries" exercise the "choice" to stop working and start breeding, for a few reasons: it makes it seem like working and raising kids have to be mutually exclusive if you're going to do a good job at either (a terrible message to send your daughters); it reinforces to employers that it's stupid to invest lots of money in training females when there's a guy available for the same job who's not going to leave the workforce in three years; and it absolves men from sharing family responsibilities by forcing them to be primary breadwinners.

But I also wonder if Hirschman's argument isn't a generational/class thing that doesn't apply in such force to the middle-class, well-educated group of young professionals I'm familiar with. This group was raised with more of an ethos to do what they want for self-fulfillment as opposed to supporting a family; as a result, the men aren't more likely to have well-paying jobs (or greater earning potential) than the women. And that means that more subtle planning has to go in to the calculation to have a family--plans that include more shared responsibilities and compromise in terms of who works and who stays home that have more to do with the stage of career each spouse is in than with whether they are male or female.