Responding to an attack on motherhood

Ms. Candice Watters of Boundless alerted^[1] me to an interview^[2] with Ms. Linda Hirshman, author, legal scholar and philosopher. Ms. Hirshman is a strong example of the problems of a secular feminist movement. This is perhaps more true because she is not a moral relativist. She attacks motherhood from a firm set of premises, allowing her, unlike your average moral relativist, to use logical arguments that many people are ill equipped to respond to. We, as a society, are not prepared for rational debate on meaningful topics, particularly not on our feet and without advance preparation. I intend to respond to segments of this interview, rather than giving the more cohesive and generalized response that Ms. Watters gives. All quotes come from one of the three pages of interview unless otherwise noted.

Are you angry or frustrated with women who stay home with their kids? I think they're making a mistake. The most frustrating thing about the whole business is the nonsensical stories that they tell themselves and me about what they think they're doing. The delusional quality of it is a little weird.

The Christian argument is certainly not nonsensical, it is simply not secular. Ms. Hirshman would have us evaluate the ethical status of a given choice in terms of three questions:

1. Does it fully use the capacities that make you human, specifically, the capacity for speech and reason?
2. Does it allow you to be free and independent and morally autonomous? Do you get to make decisions about your life yourself rather than having them dictated to you by others?
3. Does the life that you lead do more good than harm?

Looking at the first question, we see that the stay at home parent will need all of their wits to raise good, moral, hard working children in this society, with nearly everything going against them. Despite the need for speech as part of raising a child, the decision itself is a statement, something that will become more obvious as we progress with this response. Looking at the second question, we come to a fundamental disagreement with Ms. Hirshman's ethical analysis. She rightly identifies that the person action on religious belief is co-operating with someone else's will, namely God's. She is wrong in equating this co-operation with being forced to do something. God does not force us, but rather gives us free will. While a religious society can provide something in the way of pressure to conform to its idea of God's will, the same can be true of the secular society in reverse. The two forms of "peer pressure" cancel out in any comparative analysis, that is, looking at this societal pressure alone, neither society leaves its members more or less free in making their choice. Looking at her third question, we see what is perhaps our biggest disagreement. How do you measure "good"? Ms. Hirshman and I would have radically differing metrics.

However, we both have our metrics, and they metrics themselves are internally consistent. Our evaluation is not nonsensical, it is simply different than hers.

You seem to be saying that a woman who chooses to stay at home with her kids rather than working is harming all women in our society. Right. ߪ There's a law against discriminating, but you can't get into the head of every employer in America. These women are feeding into the stereotype of women as unreliable employees.

From this you can gather a couple of facts. One, Ms. Hirshman is not afraid to make the assertion that the stay at home mom is necessarily acting immorally. Secondly, you can see from this that there is and would be in Ms. Hirshman's world, societal pressure reducing the autonomy of a choice to work.

They chose it and therefore, they argue, it's all the same. And they're so used to living in a religious world--the religious right was saying that it was correct for women to quit their jobs and stay home with their children. The right and the religious right never says that it's the correct decision for men to quit their jobs and stay home with their children.

This is true. Christianity continues to teach the physical and psychological reality that men and women are different, and thus can be, and are in fact called to different roles in the family. Unlike Ms. Hirshman, though, Christians do not believe that the role of primary care giver for the family is a demeaning role, or in any way shape or form a lesser role.

I got 1,000 e-mails in the two days after an article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Some of the working mothers finally became aware of what was going on because they're too busy working to be mommy blogging. They said, “Thank you so much for speaking out. I have felt so alone here. All we hear is the other message. Even if I don’t agree with everything you said, I'm so grateful to you for raising the issue.”

From this I gather that Ms. Hirshman is not alone in condemning those who choose not to work. This confirms stories I have heard elsewhere of such condemnation. This author is not a tolerant person. In her defense, she does not claim to be one.

[Conservative activist] Phillis Schlafly said that they hated men and didn't want to get married or have children.

I am sorry to have to inform you that Ms. Schlafly is not the origin of such comments. Liberal feminists are. To accuse Ms. Schlafly and other conservatives of deception on this point is ludicrous.

And my second rule is take work seriously. One of the things that I found was that the stay-at-home moms [who had elite professional training] believe that there is no job in the world that is good enough for them. So, in deciding that the law firm wasn't good enough for them, they have retreated to a job that certainly isn't good enough for them.

Yes, they have evaluated the workspace in light of different principles, principles that you reject but have not refuted, and found the role of Mother to be the most important, rewarding, and compelling. You disagree, so you assert that they must be wrong. That is not substantially different from what I do when I reason to an absolute right or wrong from my Catholic faith. The difference is that my philosophy created Western Civilization, while hers created the post-modern disaster of a society that we live in, in which Europe is failing to maintain replacement level birth rates. Fr. Pollard rightly says that the test of philosophy is the ability to live by it. Secularism is a path to societal suicide.

Right, it's just hilarious to listen to these women describe their investment-banking jobs as not good enough for them, and then to have them tell me what they're actually doing with their days.

If you consider raising your children unimportant, best relegated to the uneducated, or those otherwise unsuited for business, and not deserving and requiring the best efforts we can dedicate to the task, then yes, I am sure that it is hilarious.

What is going on there is that she's walked away from any hope of a meaningful career, and she doesn't want to face it.

\You see, there is just no way for motherhood to be a meaningful vocation.\

I got a flood of really rabid e-mail--very personal, very harsh. And unlike the usual e-mails, they also were notable for their bad grammar and spelling. So I couldn’t figure where this flood of e-mails was coming from, and then someone sent me a speech by Albert Mohler, the head of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He said, “This woman is the instrumentality of the devil.” He lied about what I said, and then he told everybody that I was the end of civilization as we know it. That was my first clue that the forces of organized religion in America were going to be aiming at me.

It is deplorable that such a claim is not laughable. It undermines all our efforts when people misrepresent the arguments that we are debating. I am not saying that Mr. Mohler did so, I have not read his speech myself, and I do not trust Ms. Hirshman. She was, as you saw, perfectly capable of deception about the nature of feminism afterall. Still, even Mr. Mohler's accuracy aside, that people would respond in such a way is equally deplorable. This is true not just in debates involving religion, we see the same thing in the Open Source movement whenever Slashdot publishes a story that causes its readers to react against a person or company. It is, however, less tolerable when coming from Christians, as we are called to better behavior and higher standards.