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Work Culture
On Tuesday, Slate began running its annual Breakfast Table Supreme Court Conversation between my favorite, Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger. I love reading Slate's Supreme Court commentary generally, and the dialogue format for the end of the year decisions pressures me into thinking of the quotidian implications of these cases.
In a depressing moment for elections and legal precedent, for instance, the Supremes wound up supporting Texas's middecade redistricting plan that wildly favored the Republican party, but happily has ruled that the Bush Administration's military tribunals are a violation of the Geneva Convention and US military law.
What do these decisions say about the culture of this country and about how we think about the government as having abandoned its citizens? In spite of the Supremes having come down hard on these military tribunals, which are indeed horrific, the administration has proudly announced that it doesn't care what the nation's highest court has to say.
And to this end, on the super domestic front, I have been thinking about the irritating Linda Hirshman, who is making a lot of money and getting a lot of ink by condemning stay at home mothers as damaging the feminist cause, their lives and the lives of future generations of women. Her writing is really appalling (really), though some of her ideas can spur interesting conversations about gender roles in families and what women should learn to expect from their partners.
But once again, as I think Judith Warner describes in her book Perfect Madness, there is a lapse in thinking. All sorts of pressure gets ladled onto the individual. If a woman stays at home, she is betraying the cause of ALL women. What is missing is a sense of spreading responsibility around, NOT just between partners in a relationship but to industry as well. What is wrong with corporations becoming more flexible about how people work? Why do we admire so deeply a culture of work that admires brutal hours and foregone vacations- that measures workers through an abstract markers of "dedication." Why isn't there more discussion of making work better for everyone?
Hirshman's smugness is unbearable but her work is unimaginative and just another silly way to polarize women, many of whom have lousy options and feel brutalized generally.
The whole current paradigm is rotten and the disappointing thing about writers like Hirshman is that she's a waste of space with her shrill, scoldy voice. Her writing feels like a trip to the principal's office when what we could really use is something like a revolution.
posted by Elise at 10:52 AM
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