July 26, 2006 3:24 PM

To work or not to work; that is the question
Posted by Diane Danielsonat 3:24 PM

O.k., I said I wouldn't write on the Mommy Wars, but someone just added some fuel to the debate that is worth a bit of thought. The Boston Globe ran an article this morning about Linda R. Hirshman, a Brandeis professor, who has written a book that proclaims that all women should work.

Hirshman first became controversial when she wrote an article last year for the liberal American Prospect magazine website saying it's a mistake for women to quit their jobs to stay at home with children. Housekeeping and child rearing, she wrote, are not worthy of the full-time ``talents of intelligent and educated human beings." In a piece last month in the Washington Post, she didn't back down. Then came her book, just out, provocatively titled, ``Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World" (Viking).

I confess, I think with the divorce rate what it is, women who don't work are taking a huge financial risk for both themselves and their kids. But I also believe that one parent needs to be flexible in an era where any corporate job demands more than 40 hours/week and travel. So I'm not ready to accept Hirshman's hardcore approach. However, I do like some of the points she makes!

At 62, Hirshman is articulate, feisty, and a self-proclaimed intellectual. She may be squeamish about the degree of angry attention she's generating, but she's fiercely proud of the firestorm she's created. While the feminist movement has mostly succeeded in removing the glass ceiling in the workplace, it's done squat about the glass ceiling in the home, she says.

``I'm pulling the discussion along. That's a good thing. The family is to 2006 what the workplace was to the movement in 1964 and the vote in 1920."

Her goal is for women and men to lead equal lives.

``If raising children and housekeeping are so important, why aren't men doing it, too?" she asks on the phone in an interview from a Manhattan hotel. She's not talking about stay-at-home fathers instead of mothers. She wants even-steven, what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-gander partnerships: ``Why should we have equality in the public realm and a social caste system in the private [realm]? It's laid on women from the moment they are born," she says. ``They come out with a uterus instead of a pen*s and get assigned the dishes."

* * *

``Why is it," she wonders, ``that as a society, we care so much more about children than we do about the women female children grow up to be?"

Interesting to note that this article about women working was in the lifestyle section and not the business section.