pro-choice
When I was in 9th grade, my best friend and future best man went to school two blocks away.This post isn't about him.
I was in private school and he was in a "magnet" school -- meaning a government school that you had to take a special test to get into. We'd known each other since we were 5. We went to the same day camp in the summer, but then different day schools during the year; we went to the same middle school, but then went to different high schools; we went to the same college, but then he went on to graduate school and I didn't. I did follow him down to his university town, however, which is why I live in Charlottesville (even though he moved back to New York).
This post isn't about any of that, but it comes to mind because I was thinking back on the first time I ever saw the slogan
...
He was wearing it on a button after school one day. When his school let out, he'd come over the 2 blocks and hang out with me at my school. I asked him where he'd gotten the button. He said some girl had pinned it on his lapel as he was leaving school. I told him I thought it was the best button I'd ever seen. He explained to me that it didn't mean what it said.
Oh no?I once saw a libertarian button or bumper sticker or something that said:
No, it only refers to the choice to have an abortion.
Oh, man, what a let-down!
I was past displaying slogans when I saw it, but if I were a button-wearer or bumper-sticker putter-onner I would have definitely gone with that one.
This post isn't about abortion either, though it is sort of about what my friend and I thought the slogan should have referred to:
Writing in the pages of The American Prospect,The added emphases are mine. The rest comes from crosswalk.com via ifeminists.net.[prominent feminist thinker Linda] Hirshman argued that "feminism has largely failed in its goals." As she explained [...] this problem is largely traceable to the fact that too many women are staying at home with their children. In particular, she attacked the notion that women should feel free to choose motherhood as a life calling. In attacking "choice feminism," Hirshman asserts that women who give themselves to mothering undermine the status of all women and threaten the emergence of an egalitarian civilization.
Here's another great quote from this thoroughly anti-choice feminist:
"I am saying an educated, competent adult's place is in the office."
2 Comments:
I haven't read Hirshman, so I don't know into which of the following two categories she falls, but I would want to distinguish a) the view that women should be FORCED to go to the office rather than stay home, from b) the view that women have a MORAL DUTY to go to the office rather than stay home. I suspect many of the people you're characterising as anti-choice feminists are really upholding (b) rather than (a) -- and that they're attacking so-called "choice feminists" not for denying (a) but for denyng (b). (Not everyone use the term "choice" the way libertarians do.)
One of my least favorite bumper stickers, which I see every day in Berkeley, says "The Woman's Place Is in the House and Senate."
As Lord Acton said, no class is fit to govern.
Post a Comment
<< Home