"Really Clears the Sinuses" (David Brooks)

How often does an article in a liberal policy magazine "rip" through the blogosphere? That’s what motherhood activist Judith StadtmanTucker said about Linda Hirshman’s "Homeward Bound" just weeks after publication in The American Prospect. And that was just the beginning.

The controversy has exploded since the publication of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World (Viking) on June 12. It is now spreading so fast we can only note the most interesting sites, mostly mainstream media. Take a look at Ms. Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and Slate. Linda also apparently lit a fuse when she outed the neutral sounding "Institute for America Values" and its "Family Scholars Blog" for its undisclosed heavily religious orientation.

In Get to Work, Hirshman has captured the attention of the mainstream media. Big time, as Dick Cheney used to say. This week’s Newsweek magazine opens with a chat with Linda, Tuesday, she appeared on Good Morning America, where the interviewer, Kate Snow, ambushed her with a picture of Snow’s newborn child. “Would you have had me not have her?” Snow asked, sitting back and waiting for Hirshman to melt. Fat Chance. As Salon’s Rebecca Traister put it, comparing Hirshman’s book to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” here’s the little lady who started the big war. “This is not memoir,” Hirshman replied. It’s sociology and politics. It’s bigger than any one individual . . . . it’s even bigger than YOU.”

"Everybody hates Linda" Tucker called her summary of the reaction in the "feminist blogosphere."

And many people did. After all, as Tucker said, full time mothers, who are overwhelmingly represented among female bloggers, don’t like being told they had chosen inferior lives.

Yet, Tucker writes, "while I disagree with Hirshman's basic premise . . . I agree, for example, with the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by workplace feminism. . . I also agree that mothers sometimes soothe the discomforts of their inequality by falling back on the motherhood mystique . . . I positively applaud Hirshman when she writes: 'Like the right to work and the right to vote, the right to have a flourishing life that includes but is not limited to family cannot be addressed by the language of choice.'"

Just weeks after the article made the rounds in cyberspace, Hirshman's article was the subject of The New York Times syndicated columnist David Brooks' New Years Day column, "The Year of Domesticity." Here's what Brooks said: “Hirshman's essay really clears the sinuses. It's a full-bore, unapologetic blast of 1975 time-warp feminism and it deserves one of the 2005 Sidney Awards, which I've created for the best magazine essays of the year, because it is impossible to read this manifesto without taking a few minutes to figure out why she is so wrong."

Days later, the Boston Globe's syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman wrote “Then came Linda Hirshman's piece in The American Prospect saying that, Times or no Times, there was truth in the tale of elite women opting out. Indeed, she reported, women who made the Times' wedding pages — what is it about the Times? — were the least likely to work after motherhood. A retired Brandeis professor, Hirshman lamented stay-at-home brides, saying that ''the real glass ceiling is at home." Her message — snap out of it — was about as soothing as Mennen skin bracer across a raw wound. She advised young women to find jobs that show them the money, to marry ''down" or to marry feminist men, and to have no more than one child." The Boston Globe (1/6/2006).

It's been like that ever since — "Good Morning America," "Geraldo Rivera," Salon.com, The New Republic — everybody's talking about Linda.