We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jahnski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well, and give
us a subscription over to the premium version of The Federalist. Now, we're
joined today by Elizabeth Grace Matthew. She wrote a really interesting essay called the
Failures of lean In Feminism over at Law and Liberty. She is a Philadelphia
based writer and editor. She recently completed the writing Fellowship with America's Future Foundation.
So Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you
so much for having me Emily. You know, I say it's timely because
I had not realized until reading your essay that it's the ten year anniversary of
Cheryl Samberg's lean In. It's hard to actually overstate how important that book was.
It was like this monumental cultural moment, I think, probably in no
small part thanks to how it appealed to other elite women having similar experiences to
Chryl Samberg. Obviously not quite on the same scale, but at varying degrees,
And so, Elizabeth, I wanted to ask you, reflecting kind of
at that thirty thousand foot level on the last ten years of cultural impact of
political impact, when you think about that and lean in what comes to mind.
Thank you so much, Emily for that question and for having me on
to discuss this. I think one of the things that's really important to remember
at that thirty thousand foot level is that this book was an inflection point in
a much longer debate. Right, so we have the mommy wars that we
all know, the working moms versus the stay at home moms of the nineteen
nineties when I was growing up, and so forth. But this book was
really written in response to Anne Marie Slaughter's twenty twelve Atlantic op ed that was
under the title why Women Still Can't Have It All? And Slaughter was someone
that had always worked full time. She was a Princeton professor, but when
she went into working for Hillary Clinton in the State Department under Barack Obama,
she realized that a more traditional scheduled job, unlike academia, which was more
flexible, She recognized that that sort of a position could not allow women to
at least the way it was structured, to be there with their families and
to excel in their work. And she was faced with this conundrum that so
many women, particularly of the elite variety, who are competing for these types
of positions know so well. And I think that by twenty twenty thirteen that
had been the case for quite some time. You had millennial women coming into
the workforce, you had boomer women ascending to positions of power and perhaps reaching
retirement. Gen X women sort of coming into their own as the top people
in the traditional elite worlds of business and journalism and academia, and so it
was really a moment when everybody was looking for sort of is there a resolution
to this longstanding tension of work life balance or is this just an endless catch
twenty two where we sort of are always going to feel like we're failing on
both fronts if we accept this idea that anybody can have it all, or
that women in particular can have it all, or that, as Sandberg argued,
fifty percent of CEOs should be women and fifty percent of households should be
run by net and and that kind of understanding undergirding the modern feminist movement,
the idea that where outcomes are disparate by sex, there must be something wrong,
either with the system or with individuals. I think this book really served
to illuminate and explain how prevalent that view is, because it accepted that view
unquestioningly. You know, it's on a personal note. Our listeners probably know
right now because I talk about all the time. But my college job was
one of them. Was working for Christina Hoff summers at the American Enterprise Institute.
And I was there when this book came out, and we went all
over this book because it raised so many questions or actually forced conversations that we're
right in Christina's wheelhouse. And it's so interesting to think back on, you
know, point A and point B then and now. And I wanted to
ask Elizabeth if you could reflect a little bit. You're just on your own
personal experience as how you found and I think a lot of people our age,
a lot of women our age, found better paths than the ones that
were being prescribed to us. It was kind of an early glimpset maybe the
freak out that you know, anyone who challenged Cheryl Sandberg was subject to kind
of a freak out, and it was probably an early glimpset where the Left
was going in the post obombing years. But from your perspective and from your
personal experience, what did you find? You know, you're write about how
women in Scandinavia have found similar paths. What did you find just through your
own experience as a path to freedom, fulfillment and all of those good things.
Thank you so much. Yeah, so, I think that, as
you said, there's so much to break down in this conversation, but anecdote
and personal experience can sort of help to eliminate some of it. So for
me, I am someone that went through an Ivy League undergraduate education. I
went on to get a doctorate, and I was hoping to pursue a doctorate
in English literature. And it was ultimately considerations of wanting to settle near my
family and start my start my own family that led me to pursue it in
a different field and to come home to Philadelphia where I'm from, rather than
sort of put my foot to the floor professionally as I was getting engaged and
married. So once the decision to be a full time professional, but one
that would take considerations of family and family formation as furiously as I would take
my professional life, if not more seriously. Was sort of made, and
for me that was a foundational decision, but it was also one that I
wanted to make, and that I recognize myself as being so fortunate to be
able to make. So I was in a position where I could choose to
build my life in my career in a certain place so that I could hopefully
be you feed on the ground with my children, or I could choose to
sort of let my career dictate where my family wound up settling and moving.
And that was about being near my own parents and thereby having the ability to
raise my own family in a place where they would have that extended network of
support. Additionally, I was the one in my marriage. My husband is
also professionally ambitious. He's a lawyer, and I think so there's sort of
two prongs to consider here. The first is that he wound up being a
lawyer at a fairly large firm that provide sufficient income that we're able to have
me step back professionally while the children are young. Now I'm freelancing. I
was working full time until about eight months ago. But even in my full
time positions, I prioritized flexibility. I went after writing teaching jobs that allowed
me to be on campus three days a week. So similar to Anne Marie
Slaughter whose essay really prompted you Sandberg's book, I had that academic flexibility.
And because I was not a ten year track academic pursuing conferences and those sorts
of things, I was able to really put my kids first because that's really
what I wanted to do. And my husband also puts the kids first in
myriad ways. He left a big law firm to be at a less big
one so that he could do that, but he also is in a position
so that I can be as flexible as I want. So that's sort of
one prong is that I have. I'm blessed and fortunate to have the kind
of financial flexibility and cultural flexibility that when women have it as they do in
countries that provide tremendous amounts of familial support from government, like the Nordic countries,
and that are culturally very progressive in the sense that women are not you
said not to be in any specific discipline. Women tend to prioritize more time
with their families. In the Nordic countries, women's investment in family as opposed
to work went up, not down, as the governments of those countries tried
to facilitate more parity between the sexes. So that might have been a surprise
to a lot of folks that share Cheryl Sandburg's view of women and work,
but it's not a surprise to me because it's also been my own experience.
But the other prong here, and one that I think was left out of
Sandberg's work entirely, and is also left out of much of this disco,
is that most women work full time, not because they necessarily want to,
but because they need money. They have jobs rather than careers. And that's
true of most men too, except that the fulfillment of taking care of a
family for both women and men is obviously incredibly important when it comes to work.
But the majority of women you know. In Sandberg's books, she tells
this anecdote about here's how you can put your foot to the floor professionally but
also get home to have dinner on the table at five thirty, and I
remember reading it and thinking, well, someone's going to have to make the
dinner, right, Like if I get home at five thirty, how are
we supposed to eat it? But you know, just that sort of oversight
of the amount of help that women at those elite levels are typically purchasing,
typically from other women who are not as privileged. So when I was this
is to go back to your question, I apologize for the roundabout getting it.
When I was starting out, my husband was still in law school.
We got married fairly young, and it was not at all clear that he
would eventually have the kind of salary that would enable me to be professionally flexible
in the sense of not having a full time job, and so I went
after stability and flexibility less so fulfillment right. Not that I didn't like teaching.
I liked it wonderfully, I had great experiences. But I went after,
Okay, where can I teach writing full time? Get our family on
good benefits because I didn't know what he would end up doing, and he
had significant student debt. You know, we didn't have a trust fund,
and so I was sort of in both of those positions, you know,
like the one where I needed to work for money and would optimize around that.
And now, you know, a decade after getting married in the position
where I'm able to really prioritize both my professional fulfillment in terms of what I
do freelance and my children, which is a position that very very few women
are ever fortunate enough to be in. There's so much to kind of go
through there, and about the point that this fight sort of presaged fights that
will come after Obama was out of office and in the Trump years. Um,
you know, you have one line in this piece. It's probably the
most provocative line. It's really short, but it's great, and I think
it gets at so much else in this issue, not just in this particular
essay, but in the issue that you cover more broadly. And the line
is, we don't need fifty percent of women to be CEO. And of
course, um, if you said anything like that in elites r C suite
circles, you would be called sexist. You would you would be you know,
chased off the cocktail party circuit. But um, I wanted to see
you know that, And in that sense, this does sort of become an
early glimpse at those flights, those fights that would be very much divided along
class lines and not just sort of les versus. Right. But on that
note, I wanted to say if you could honestly just flesh out that point,
a short line, but a provocative line, and I'd love to hear,
Elizabeth, if you could just explain that argument a little bit right now.
Yeah, absolutely, thank you. So I think a lot of this
is about the broader impetus on the far left that has come to prioritize equality
of outcome over equality of opportunity. So to be clear, I am all
for and could not be more for, and actually have experiences in my own
life that makes me even more for the eradication of the sort of old school
sexism, as well as the Broye culture of some professions, or just the
ways in which Samper discusses women's likability being considered differently than men's in professions.
I'm all for eradicating those structural barriers to advancement for women that wish to advance,
whether like myself, to advance within the university. And I can speak
to and have written about elsewhere some of those experiences that do speak to that
older kind of sexism that does still exist and that does still animate many women's
experiences in many fields. Certainly it animated many of my own mother's experiences who
was a woman in government and business back in the nineteen eighties, and so
I'm not in any way discounting that. However, to take that and then
apply it so broadly that we say every woman who drops out of the workforce,
or who steps back from the workforce, or who pursues a less competitive
career track to take care of her children, or to have more time with
her children, or to do elder care, or to travel or to whatever
for whatever set of reason or reasons. Typically it's family formation, but it
does have to be to say that she is in some way structurally oppressed,
that she doesn't necessarily know her own mind, or to say that she is
being prevented by a culture that rejects her abilities. To say that she doesn't
become the CEO for reasons that are outside of her own control is not entirely
or even mostly true in many cases. Again, there are still those systemic
barriers. They do still exist. They are enormously lesser than what they once
were. Right, there's been tremendous progress made, But the fact that we're
focusing on a quality of outcome as though women should want to certain saying that
they should change their preferences or their trajectories in accordance with some predetermined notion of
how our CEO class should look. I think is really paternalistic and or maternal,
depending on how you want to say it. Toward you, toward toward
women who are in many cases the most educated, self aware people in our
society. They have the freedom and the skills to determine what they want,
and in large measure, they are choosing to step back to be with families.
Now, some fathers make that choice instead, and some women do go
on to be CEOs or to maximize their careers. That's great, that's fine,
that's wonderful. Every family formation technique in terms of who does care and
who does work, and how you blend that together. And in most families,
of course, to the extent that there are two adults, both of
them are working to one extent or another, I think that's all to the
good and show societal naturation. But I think this overfocus on equality of outcome
by the essentialist sort of idea of sex that many on the far left would
otherwise to floor in every other scenario, is really problematic and extremely infantilizing of
adult women who are making their own choices. I will say I think that
there is an argument to be made, and many on the far left and
even the broader left would make it about how a field or a discipline may
be inhospitable to women when no women are in it. So the idea that
girls who code are getting girls into stem these sorts of things are not inherently
bad. In fact, I think they're inherently good. Just like on the
other side. Richard Reeves, who wrote a book recently about Boys and Men,
about the crisis and sort of male educational attainment, has been talking a
lot about incentivizing men to get into early childhood education is a great thing,
and I actually am not at all opposed to that. But there's a difference
between incentives that help people to make decisions they might otherwise make if they did
feel culturally odd or you know, different, for doing so and forcing them
or expecting them to make decisions that they wouldn't make. I think there's a
huge difference between those two things. There's another line in the piece that's similar
in the senses. It's sort of like the tip of the iceberg, and
there's so much more going underneath it, where you write. Moreover, even
in professions where women are as likely to be in positions of supreme power as
men, such as academia where I work for over a decade, motherhood is
often incompatible with continued advancement. In part as noted above, this is because
women choose to pursue are flexible and less ambitious career pads in order to be
more available for their children. In some professions, that's inevitable. Some careers
simply are not and cannot be flexible. And then you also add, if
we had greater respect from any women's desires to tend to their families while maintaining
their careers, more women might find it possible to advance professionally while raising children.
So the question becomes, you know, what does that look like you
practically, pragmatically, what does that look like in the workplace where is there
more that needs to be done? But in which direction does it need to
go? And is it more that needs to be done to create a space
for mothers who want to work to work, or is it more that needs
to be done in the space that allows women who don't want to work or
who wants to work very part time to stay at home. And to be
supported by a male breadwinner. Basically, you know, to talk to us
more about what you mean with that line. Yeah. Absolutely, So I
think there's really two sides to this, as you just stated. One is
professions that are more flexible where more could be done to accommodate motherhood, and
the other is professions that are inherently, if you want to ascend to the
highest levels, inflexible. So I'm going to take the second one of those
first. Laura Basilon, who is a trial attorney and also a professor of
law, recently wrote a book called Ambitious Like a Mother that I'm sure you
have heard about her or read, and it sort of retrenches the Cheryl Sandberg
idea of lean and feminism, but also addresses directly the fact that she has
had to make to advance to the highest echelons of her career and to do
what she felt was the best job. She was a public defender and now
also runs the Believa Legal Clinic at a law school of the name of which
is Escaping Me somewhere on the West Coast. Basilon is super frank in that
book about the fact that she has had to prioritize her career over her children
up to him, including to get the most advantageous trial date for a client
missing her daughter's birthday. Now, I wouldn't do that, But that's also
why I'm not a public defender running a legal aid clinic, right, because
I don't want to put myself in a position where I'm in that undeniable of
a conflict. Right. You have here a person who put aside. You
know, Basilon's vision of criminal justice maybe different than many people, but let's
take at face value that she feels this is important, that she is doing
this work in the best and most advantageous way for her clients. There is
no way to square the circle between being in one city to be at that
trial on the most advantageous day and having her child's birthday. Most women will
not make the choice that she made, and that's part of why her profession
at the level she's at, tends not to be people with the mothers of
young children. And you know that's okay with me, right. I think
there are certain realities that you know, there are twenty four hours in a
day, they're three hundred and sixty five days in a year, you know,
I think there are certain realities that are just not able to be breached
or to be massaged, right, And so I'm okay with that, and
I don't have any problem with that. I think that for some other women
in professions like the one I was in in academia, the ways in which
motherhood is penalized wind up being more cultural than professional. So again, for
Basilon, there's nothing to be done. It's nobody's fault. It's not her
fault, it's not her client's fault. It just is the reality, right,
And that's part of why perhaps there are going to be fewer women there,
and that's okay. In academia, on the other hand, the work
is inherently flexible, right, other than when you're in class or not or
whatnot, there are inherently a lot of personal choices built in about when you
do what you do. And yet, because culturally the institution is not particularly
friendly to a more traditional version of motherhood that prioritizes direct childcare for some of
the reasons that we talked about relation to Cheryl Sandberg's vision of what motherhood and
family and womanhood look like, because the profession is not as friendly to that.
I think there are ways in which certain of the barriers that could be
undone don't get undone because even though many women do advance, they tend to
be women that share Sandberg's view, and so they tend to be women that
perpetuate rather than seek to reduce or get rid of the ways in which the
culture is not friendly to families or to the involvement of family. Most academics
are are on the left. That's not to say there aren't those who aren't,
but most are. Many of them would ascribe to Sandberg's vision of sort
of fifty percent of women should run businesses and you know whatnot, and so
that as effect their orientation toward women like me, who frankly got off of
the ten year track early because I could see right. Not that I got
on it, but I left without my PhD in the traditional discipline. I
got my doctorate in education, and I did that because I could see down
the road that I was not going to be able to get the kind of
support that I wanted to have a family while also excelling in my career.
This takes us down another interesting road. I remember when Donald Trump was debating
whether to nominate Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett. I wrote a piece for
The Washington Examiner at the time in which I said, you know, if
conservatives believe that there are essential biological differences at separate men and women, it
is logical that conservatives would seek to have one conservative woman, one justice of
choice, or the conservative movement on the court that women. You know,
if we believe men and women bring different experiences to the table, obviously we
expect justices to evaluate each case on the merits of the law and the Constitution.
But we aren't blind to the reality that women have a different experience with
pregnancy, with motherhood, will have these with motherhood, but with you child
rearing, with family life, and with their bodies. And there are a
lot of questions in which a woman just has a different experience and that experience
is salient for its differences. So I guess the question then becomes, what
do what is the balance? You know, if you look at women,
by and large surveys wanting to work part time, But how do we as
a society ensure women's voices are included in conversations like, for instance, media,
I do think there are class blind spots in media. I think it's
also important that you have you know, people who understand differently what it's like
to carry a child in their womb or to you know, from men,
or what it's like to actually use, for instance, birth control or something
like that in those conversations. So how do we balance that as a society,
especially given that so many women do want to work part time? How
should we sort of shape things, order things, and uh, you know,
as women determine where we best serve, you know, the world,
the causes we believe in. Yeah, that's a great question. So one
thing I'll say is that I have a lot of friends who are who are
nurses. And you know, obviously that's not a profession that's proclaiming on different
areas of policy and government and business, and I'll get to that in a
moment, but that is a profession that is run by women. And it
is also a profession that is purple. And by purple, I mean it's
about fifty fifty maybe a little more blue in terms of political oriented ship.
And because of that, I think that it creates a space where women are
able to advance while also stepping back. So what I mean by that is
one of my good friends and I we both have small children, And when
I was thinking about stepping back from academia, I was explaining to her that
it's you know, if you go part time, you're basically not there right,
you're adjunct ing, There's no advancement trajectory, etc. Whereas in nursing
there is. She was able to go part time and maintain her position,
maintain her seniority, expect to go back in and leave a clinical and run
a floor at some point. And that really struck me because I was not
aware that that was an option in any discipline, because I've been in spaces
that are extremely beholden to the Cheryl Sandberg view of womanhood and women's advancement for
pretty much my entire professional life, and I thought, wow, that's pretty
incredible. I wonder if there are ways to apply those sorts of that understanding,
right, both that women want to excel professionally in this predominantly female discipline
in this case, and also that women are going to often have different desires
than men when it comes to young children. And I think there are probably
ways to be a lot more intentional about doing that in other disciplines, But
what it would require is a really pluralistic unideological view of motherhood, meaning that
some women are going to be like Lara Basilon and they are going to miss
their daughter's birthday to be at the trial and then write New York Times op
eds about it, and that's fine for them, Right, There shouldn't necessarily
be cultural judgment around that. In a way that feels like it speaks into
the professional space. Right, The gains that someone like Basilan gets for doing
that professionally are going to be gains, and that's fine. And on the
flip side, someone that wishes to be involved in that discipline to write the
legal briefs, to be you know, speaking on the news, to be
writing things at the Supreme Court level. You know, there's a way to
have, especially now and are increasingly gig and work from home economy, for
those people to advance without necessarily making them feel that they are stepping back from
their own eventual trajectory. I think that's something that you know, would impact
a lot of men positively as well as women, though it would be predominantly
women. And I also think of a talk I went to in college with
metal and Allbright, who of course is the first female Secretary of State,
and someone asked her, how did you have it all? You have four
or five kids, and you you did all this and you and she basically
said, well, you can't have it all at once. And of course
she's from an older generation that accepted that, even if they expected advancement,
they accepted that, you know, you couldn't do everything in the same day.
And partly that's because they often had children younger, and those go into
bigger cultural questions that you know, require a whole other conversation to get into,
I think. But I was really impressed by that answer because I thought
that's absolutely true, right, there have to be ways to remain professionally relevant
and ascending while also prioritizing family. And I think that's something that people with
Albright's political pedigree and orientation might not say the same way now, which is
really unfortunate. Yeah, I mean this is it's again you point out we
don't live in a dramatically different world than the world in which Standberg lived in.
And by that, you know, I don't mean obvious. There are
major differences, and we've talked about some of them, but we aren't,
you know, in a completely different time period for women, and I see
a whole lot of pieces from Axios and others celebrating in recent days women's post
COVID return to the workplace that they're you know, putting up some numbers that
we as women are putting up numbers that are comparable to before the pandemic.
And to me, that just looks like a whole lot of you know,
corporate media people celebrating that women are coping with inflation and costs by taking jobs
they don't want, by entering the workforce to deal with costs against their wishes.
But you know, with a decade in the review mirror from show Sandberg,
which is still so crazy to think about. I mean, there were
these circles. They were called what like lean in circles or something. At
the time, I mean, there was the sense that she had really started
this movement and gall of anized women to you know, put on their heels
and lean in and negotiate and make the big bucks. But it's sputtered out,
And I guess I wonder, you know, now that we're ten years
out, Elizabeth, is there anything we can take from that sort of failed
arc of lean in, from the fact that it fizzled. What does that
tell us maybe about our world, maybe about the human condition. What does
it tell us maybe about women? What do you think? I think there
are two things that I would would take away. One is a bigger cultural
reality, which is the stay at home mom versus working mom sort of idea
ten years ago still felt somewhat relevant. That was my own mother's experience.
She was the primary wage earner in my family when I was young, as
my dad was beginning an academic career, and then she quit. And when
she quit, it was like, now she quit, and she's home with
three children, and she's supporting her husband's career, and she's doing elder care
and she's maybe volunteering, but like she was out of the professional workforce.
And you know, that was nineteen ninety two or three, And by twenty
thirteen, twenty years later, that still felt semi relevant because it was,
you know ten You know what, however, six years, seven years before
the pandemic, and while obviously everyone was online, the gig economy of a
sort of freelancing as a norm had not really picked up yet the way that
it has now for a lot of college educated people. And by the time
that Baslon's book came out last year that sort of picked up on some of
these threads. My primary reaction to it, in addition to sort of say,
well, we've take much of her kinds of careers and some of the
things it in this piece, my primary action with this is really dated,
right, the idea that there's this binary between women that work and women that
stay home. I mean, I'm a woman that stays home and works,
right, and there's a lot of women like me now, So I think
there's that reality. Just the cultural and economic reality has changed, sus that
this debate is now so much more nuanced and multifaceted, which also in turn
makes it a lot more philosophical and psychological and cultural than actually focused on policies
and realities and logistics around work. So I think that's that's one reality.
The other reality is that I think broader culture are broader culture. Now there's
a level of dissatisfaction and discontent and malaise. I guess would be would be
one word you could use, you know, the level of anxiety, the
level of mental health concerns, which are particularly prevalent among the Sandburg demographic now
in their senties. Right, those things can't be solved by more hours on
the corporate treadmill, right, that doesn't create meaning. It can it can
it can invest meaning, it can be invested with meaning. It's not that
it's a bad thing, but I think people are looking for other outlets,
women as well as men, but women perhaps in particular at this moment,
if the data on mental health are in the indication, are looking for areas
with which to create meaning that perhaps can't be met by a sort of corporate
work is mentality. And I think for women like Sandberg, like Basilon,
who grew up in a culture that was still running on the fumes of so
much family first Christian into religious, you know, other religious um way of
seeing about the family and the self and the place in the culture. It's
hard for women who grew up with that to know what it would be like
to try to have their professional orientation without that, because even if you reject
that, even if you critique that, it still informs and influences and undergirds
so many of the ways that you think that you derive meaning. And I
think now a lot of young women have lost that, and we're not providing
some of those other aspects for the formation of self and identity and I think
it's becoming clear that absent those leaning in will not get you anywhere if you're
very online capital v capital Oh like I unfortunately am. You are definitely aware
of the like trad cast trad wife trend, and it really has started to
creep into mainstream culture popular culture in some super interesting ways. Like I saw
a video of Ben Shapiro reacting to like tried cafe videos the other day.
It's it's going mainstream, And I guess I wanted to ask you if this
has anything to do with the phenomenon of quiet quitting that took off after the
pandemic. You know, millennials gen Z are completely exhausted by the grind,
at least if you if these trends are to be believed as any indication of
some sort of widespread sentiments among younger members of the workforce, and so I
guess, Elizabeth, my question is, is any of this sort of being
healed or going and shifting in a healthier direction. And maybe that premise is
wrong, but is it possible that after the pandemic people are coming away with
healthier approaches than the leaning approach to family and relationships and womanhood. What do
you think, yeah, thank you for that question. I'm thirty five,
so I'm a little bit you know, young for the Sandberg demographing and a
little bit old for the gen Z Quiet quitting. So I'm kind of writing
that millennial older millennial space, right, And I think a lot of the
trad wife craze is among women. My agent slightly younger than me, and
I tend to look at it as a bit of an overcorrection because to me,
that feels like another way of leaning in that is sort of premised on
an idea of identity being being the highest thing. So it's a it's a
very curated and performative identity. I think, you know, similar to the
Standberg idea of women are going to do this. This is just no women
are going to do this and be happy. No women are going to do
this and be happy. And I am really sort of allergic to the idea
that there's anything in particular that all women should do and be happy. I
think there's a lot of room for disagreement and for living different ways without even
disagreeing, right, for saying, like the fact that we're both women,
or that we're all women does not mean that we have to view these things
in common. But we should acknowledge that given the choice between trad wifery,
shall we say and lean in Charyl Sandberg style, an enormously large number of
women, probably the majority, if not the supermajority, are going to choose
trad wifery. But isn't it great? But those are not our only two
options. So I think it would be a great thing if the quiet quitting
could sort of, instead of being a quiet quitting, could be more of
a you know, loud reshaping, if that makes sense of the way that
we think about womanhood and work and how they can be together in a life
that centers family. Because I think that absent the necessity of of that old
binary I work, I stayed home, I think they can. You know,
one thing I write and think a lot about is nineteenth century womanhood and
feminism in America, and the Industrial Revolution obviously moved work off of the farm
into the home, separated domesticity from work, and so you've had a long
period of time where women did domesticity and men did work, and then women
started doing work too. And of course that was always the case that many
women who were not of the class of the women that could maintain their own
independent homes without working had to go be servants or you know, otherwise occupied
in the homes of richer women. But there was this binary between domesticity and
work, and I think that that was not the case before the Industrial Revolution,
right where work was on the farm and work was you know, productivity
and home were intertwined. And I'm not by any means saying that we can
intertwine them that way. I understand that, you know, it's not the
same collective and communal familial experience that it was then that's not going to be.
But I think that we're still talking in when we say lean in or
we say tradwife, we're kind of talking in the binary that was created about
one hundred and fifty or so or two hundred years ago, when really we
don't need to be in that binary at all, when we can have a
more pluralistic, nuanced idea of womanhood, work and how they fit together.
Again, this essay is up at Law and Liberty. It's called the Failures
of lean in Feminism. Elizabeth Grace Matthew, thank you so much for joining
us on today's edition of Federalis Radio Hour, and also for noticing that it
was the tenure anniversary of LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn of lean In. I
hadn't realized that because the media doesn't seem to be talking about it. So
first, thank you for picking up on that. And secondly, where can
people follow your work? Sure I'm on a Twitter at Elizabeth G. Matt
and my website with all of my work is also linked to that. Thank
you again for joining the show. Thank you you've been listening to another edition
of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jasinski, culture editor here at The
Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, being lovers of
freedom and anxious for the Fray