By The Cranky Housewife -
Let me count the ways, indeed. Today we have this great literary moment in history provided to us by one Elizabeth Wurtzel (lawyer extraordinaire and contributor to the Atlantic Monthly Online) as she waxes poetic over deficiencies within the American feminist movement just before she goes all Dirty Harry on the women who choose to stay at home to raise their own children rather than…you know…work for a living. No seething, my dear ladies. Anon, it is most undignified. Deep cleansing breaths while the bittersweet irony washes over you and fills you with a sense of ethereal dignity. Hark! Methinks Ms. Wurtzel protests too much.
I love it when liberals get territorial, don't you? It's adorable. Feminism belongs to them and they mean to reclaim it, by golly – by Jove. Yee-haw.
She's got a lot to say on the subject of her false-feminists. I encourage you to check out her article. She's none too pleased with their insistence on being included in the elite force of women-warriors. An interesting raw nerve is exposed there as she threatens to…hold on. Let me check that quote… right - "smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time – by which she means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits – is her feminist choice." Soo-ee Bob, my friends. I'm not even sure what a Jivamukti class is. That tells you where I rank on the idiot scale. Hold on. Let me research this.
Okay – got it. It's yoga.
Yoga? That's what stay-at-homes do while the real women work, don't-cha know. And that's apparently what needs to end per Wurtzel's most recent publication of her feminist manifesto. Turns out Jivamukti classes shall be reserved only for those women who are deemed worthy to Supta Verasana by the feminist Left (who are as always the great arbiters of such privilege and culture) so please have your W-2s and your birth control prescriptions ready while we access your legitimacy profile.
Naturally, I'm not really expected to know the term "Jivamukti" because it's the women of the one percent that Ms. Wurtzel is railing against in her article. Those Ann Romney types. They are ruining feminism as defined by the Left with their fast and loose application of the term to broadly include any woman who chooses anything. These privileged one percenters are (as you well know) the only women who stay at home to raise their children. They are the only women who are considered elite enough to afford such luxury and luxury is apparently being assigned a rather elastic definition as well - one worthy of its own yoga pose if you don't object to the editorial disregard. The one percent, those are the women who are ruining the term "feminism" by claiming it for themselves. The nerve of some people. That may very well be deemed a blasphemy if the Left has anything to say on the subject, this manipulation of the language for one's own ends. It ought not to be tolerated. The feminists may want to convene their College of Cardinals to get a ruling on that point. Who do these one percenters think they are? Nancy Pelosi?
Again, this is just the one percent that we're referencing. The non-existent stay-at-home moms of the two to ninety-nine percent aren't even granted a footnote within Wurtzer's rather impressive yoga soliloquy unless you cite this gem of a stereotype, "The whole point [of feminism] to begin with was that was that women were losing their minds pushing mops and strollers all day without a room or a salary of their own." But that's Virginia Wolfe and not Shakespeare, so I guess we're mixing our extended metaphors now. No wonder. It's a bit of a far-fetched notion that only wealthy women raise their own children. It's a quantum leap to assume that all women or even most women feel oppressed by the daunting prospect of raising their offspring or that they're in a constant competition with their husbands to prove who has the biggest…paystub, but I'll give her statement a 9.0 for the audacious dangle in her participle. Just remember. It's not real work if you have to file jointly.
No. No. I dangle them too. Of course, I'm not a highly educated, self-supporting and able bodied lawyer. I'm just an idiot housewife who knows full well that stay-at-home moms not only work but are the personification of true feminism…and who is suddenly questioning why no one has ever bothered to explain my yoga rights which must now surely be forfeited en lieu of dog walks and an emery board…so this certainly affords me an excuse if not a room of my own. You see what happens when you don't have a union fighting for your right to manicure, but I welcome the opportunity to schedule Wurtzel's promised smack down for the heresy of letting her overhear that I think I work. I'm sure that Susan B. Anthony would be thrilled to learn that drunken husbands have been replaced by feminist lawyers. And since Ms. Wurtzel has duly noted that the only reason my husband married me was because I am dumb and easily steamrolled then I guess I shouldn't point out what I think is the obvious to such a grand scale thinker as she.
But I will. It is my way, anon. Elizabeth Wurtzel snarkily explains that she feels most betrayed by full-time wives who possess a measure of education because they ought to know better than to subjugate themselves to masculine authority within their marriage of which she has opted out...of… for her state of supreme "integrity and independence" which comes with her solitary and sterile life filled with good clean work and meditation on the feminist sacraments. You see, I hate to contradict Elizabeth Wurtzel as the great authority on wage-earning worthiness, but I wasn't born into my marriage and I wasn't chattel to be traded and controlled. I worked for close to a decade in customer service. I worked for half a decade in a corporate environment. This was before I married and began raising my own children which I have now been doing for more than 10 years. I possess a relatively full spectrum of work experience. If I haven't seen it all then I've seen enough to know that it's best not to assume I know how much effort a person puts into her day.
I know what it's like to clock 16 hour days just to make enough money to not afford food. I know what it's like to work every holiday. Funny. None of that happen while I was employed by the corporate America in which Elizabeth Wurtzel's throne of moral superiority resides…in. When I took my job for the Man, there was a free meal in the conference room almost every day because we were going to have to work through lunch which included such drudgery as flow charts and power point slides…quelle horreur. When I worked more than 8 hours, I was paid…overtime. And who had time for a mani-pedi or yoga class with all those birthday parties and educational luncheons and holiday gatherings and celebration dinners and golf outings and happy hours that filled my social calendar. So strenuous. It's a wonder I survived.
It's hardly unusual for a person to believe that she's smarter or works harder than other people, especially if she lacks empathy…and perhaps creative consideration for alternative life choices which fall outside her feminist template. It may be the first time, however, that I've witnessed such an example of violently hedonistic self-aggrandizement, but that may come with the preternatural territory. Wurtzel has decided that it's her business to make sure that "all people, with whatever foolishness, are able to provide themselves with gas and food and lodging," without any cooperative agreements forged with their spouses; it's clear that she's got a full plate of other people's money that's keeping her preoccupied.
Busy, busy, busy. A friend of mine – fellow housewife – put it brilliantly once, "Everyone has a full plate. It's just that some people have little salad plates and others have enormous turkey platters." Considering all the surplus time that lawyer and feminist Elizabeth Wurtzel's seems to have to rate the one percent's social worthiness, she might do well to contemplate the dinnerware before her. It could be that for all her visions of grandeur, she's just nursing an aperitif.
