Someone recently pointed me to Linda Hirshman's article in Inside Higher Ed, which discussed some of the same issues as her Prospect article on why women need to take work seriously, which I meant to write about at the time, and also meant to write about when the New York Times' Modern Love section ran a href="http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A1FF738540C728CDDA80894DE404482">this article about a defender of the stay at home mom who changed her mind when her husband divorced her.

Anyways, I'm writing about all this now.

Hirshman's articles reminded me about a conversation I had with a classmate when I was perhaps four or five years old. The question he'd asked was whether I thought it was better to be a boy or a girl, and my response was that of course it was better to be a girl, because girls could dress up in pink dresses, or wear jeans, while boys could only wear pants and boring colors. Of course, he was unimpressed with my argument because he didn't understand why anyone would want to wear a pink dress because boy clothes were so much cooler.

It was, I think, a tellingly prescient exchange. I don't think anyone can deny that one thing feminism has succeeded in doing is opening up a whole new range of choices for women. An intellient, capable woman starting out her career can aim for power and fortune through the traditional means those come in, choose a less demanding path whose rewards is comfort and satisfaction, or look at work as a sort-term project to entertain her until she settles down to her real calling of raising a family.

Of course, a women still face unique difficulties and discrimination, particularly in choosing the first path, but does anyone really want to claim that it's easier for a man to find a successful woman to support him as a stay-at-home dad than it is for qualified woman willing to sacrifice having a family to succeed in the corporate world?

Most men and many feminists would argue that the lack of this option is hardly a hardship for the man, finding it difficult to believe that anyone could really want to be a full-time homemaker, just as a four year old boy found it difficult to believe that anyone, even a (gak) girl, could want to wear a frilly pink dress. But while nobody really needs to wear frilly dresses, somebody does need to do the work of keeping a house and raising the next generation of children. And so long as men continue to view this work as approximately as desirable as wearing ruffles and lace to a client meeting, women are going to continue to do the lion's share of this work, because it's going to continue to be the path of least resistance for maintaining a happy family.

The thing is, it's not delusions or false consciousness or whatever to see keeping house as satisfying, rewarding work. Especially if one is a member of the upper middle class, who can enjoy the latest in dishwashers and washing machines and expensive vacuum cleaners, and a maid to come in once a month to do the really dirty work and the luxury of throwing clothes and bedding and table linens away as unfashionable before they get old enough to need repairs, what remains is largely interesting, creative, rewarding work.

Yes, tossing together another batch of pasta for dinner is not exciting, but as any regular reader of this blog has by now realized, cooking can be a fascinating pursuit. Similarly, vacuuming the family room is dull, but decorating the space to be warm and welcoming is fun. And while changing diapers is no fun, watching a child grow older and explore the world around them is an experience like no other.

By and large, women get that housework is more than drudgery, and by and large men don't, and this is the divide that most needs to be overcome, and it's one that starts, I firmly believe, with the differing socializations that parents provide to their children. Women aren't genetically programmed with an aversion to mismatched curtains and ring around the toilet. Rather, they're taught socially to value a nice-looking house, and introduced gradually to the process of creating one.

The same parents who will enroll their daughters in all sorts of empowering activities to show them that math is fun and work is good will nevertheless still encourage their daughters to get a summer job babysitting and their sons to bag groceries, resulting in women that have been introduced to the challenges and rewards of caring for children, and men that see babies as mysterious creatures who dirty their diapers and cry for inexplicable reasons. Similarly, the same mother who'll demand that her son learn to wash the dishes and sort his socks will take her daughter to the mall as a special treat to pick out a new bedspread for her room, but just buy one and bring it home for her son.

In fact, the drudgery part of housework is the easier to divide. Even a neandrathal can be made to understand that a toilet needs cleaning once a week and that fairness dictates that he should therefore complete this task twice a month. However, it takes a rare man who understands why he should spend three hours shopping for the right collage frame to hold the pictures from the last family vacation, let alone one who will take the time to learn what type of frame is ideal. So the well-meaning husband pitches in with the dirty work and resents it as, well, drudgery, while the wife increasingly becomes fed up by the the fact that her husband doesn't even see how much more she contributes to the house.

So for the women who really want to see women represented more equally in public life, Hirshman's suggestions are well and good, but not, I think, likely to get us much further than we are now. Change is only going to come, I think, when stay at home parent is as much an equal opportunity occupation as career parent is now, which in turn is only going to happen when men understand what they're missing and demand to get in on it.

So here's my small proposal: just as we now have Take Your Daughter to Work Day, we need to institute a Keep Your Son at Home Day.

A while back a few bloggers I regularly read went back and forth on the dilemma on the socially responsible corporation-- i.e. whether there was a duty or right for those who run corporations to do not-legally-compelled but-morally-nice things with other people's money. (See Professor Bainbridge, Tyler Cowen, and Milton Friedman).

BB&T's recent decision to refuse to lend money to developers who engage in what it believes to be abuses of eminent domain is an interesting test case, as Jacob Levy points out. [Rick Garnett defends BB&T's decision as "moral judgment".]

Obviously the ideal solution is contractual pluralism. Corporations would warn stockholders about which causes they found morally compelling and possibly worth spending share-holder funds on. But absent prior notice and consent, there does seem to be somethingg troubling about exercising "moral judgment" with other people's money. And whose judgment, after all, will be exercised? (This is also a reason I am nervous about university divestment campaigns.)

In the Post story, Dana Berliner tries to justify BB&T's decision on profit-maximizing grounds. Eminent domain makes people mad, so they end up getting sued. But it seems clear that this is not what's doing the work.