Linda Hirshman

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Linda Redlick Hirshman (born April 26, 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio) is a lawyer, feminist, and the author of The Woman's Guide to Law School and Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex. She is a retired Distinguished professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in philosophy. She has written for a variety of periodicals, including Glamour, Tikkun, Ms., the ABA Journal, and the Boston Globe.

[edit] Body of Work

In 2006, Hirshman released Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World^[1] in which she re-iterated her arguments in favor of women demanding that their husbands participate in raising their children, and addressed some of the criticism of her earlier work that she found on the Internet.

[edit] Criticism

As Hirshman's own biographical byline for periodicals proudly states, she "landed spot No. 77" on Bernard Goldberg's list of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America "with almost no effort." Goldberg criticized Hirshman for comments she made in a segment produced by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes in October of 2004. Hirshman's comments involved young, well-educated women who chose to give up high-paying, high-powered, and prestigious jobs in order to stay home and take care of their children. In the segment, Hirshman argued that this kind of decision would only lead to a lesser life for these women- "These women are choosing lives in which they do not use their capacity for very complicated work, they're choosing lives in which they do not use their capacity to deal with very powerful other adults in the world, which takes a lot of skill. I think there are better lives and worse lives."

Goldberg criticizes her for these remarks, arguing that Hirshman is a perfect example of a condescending old-fashioned radical feminist.

Hirshman was also criticized by economists such as Heather Boushey for having an insufficient empirical basis for her contention that women were dropping out of the U.S. labor market, ^[2] a charge which Hirshman says does not change her conclusions.^[3]