Matt Yglesias says I miss the point about Hirshman. She’s criticizing feminism and I’m holding her accountable to feminism’s record. Or some such. I think this is somewhat fair criticism. But Matt misses the point that Hirshman calls herself a feminist and says that feminism should mean what she now says it should mean.

First, let me disclose where I’m coming from. I took a lot of courses on feminist theory in college, and I’ve tried to keep up to speed on this stuff ever since. Also, I’m the husband of a successful woman who has fought in the trenches with feminist priesthood for years. And, as a result, I have a highly cultivated contempt for feminism (I get to say “cultivated” because who else here has read Toward A Feminist Theory of the State? Don’t worry, I won’t ruin the ending for you.). I think feminism is profoundly un-serious intellectually — even if its practitioners are deadly serious.

So, anyway: “Hirshman is arguing that feminists shouldn’t be champions of personal choice,” proclaims Yglesias. Okay, but as I noted, they used to be champions of personal choice. Indeed, personal choice was once given spiritual and metaphysical power according to feminists. One might even say it defined feminism. Now Hirshman says pretty much the exact opposite should define feminism; that obligations to the collective must now be paramount for “feminists.”

So, ten years ago feminism meant X. Today Hirshman says it should mean “not X.” And yet we still have to call it feminism? What other “serious” ideology can so regularly and cavalierly contemplate meaning its exact opposite in the timespan of a single decade? Hirshman says she a feminist. Well that’s easy when feminism is defined as female-centered left-wingery and little else. If she honestly believes that women should deny their personal desires by working outside the home in the name of the public good and “equality” why not call herself a socialist? Because really that’s what she’s talking about. If you just substitute the word “people” for women you get socialism. But I’ll tell you why she doesn’t use the word socialism. Because feminism means “whatever leftwing chicks say it means” and nothing else. Feminism is — or rather, has become — a cloak and a cudgel used by leftwing women to win arguments they’d have trouble winning on the merits. Just ask Larry Summers, he’s got some free time.

Indeed, back when I toiled in the fields of feminist debate, to say that women owe a larger allegiance to the common good than to themselves was to invite hobgoblins of slippery-slopism and dystopian visions of handmaid’s tales. For as a matter of simple logic, a philosophy which says that women should subordinate their own aspirations — particularly when it comes to their role as mothers — to the national community (or volksgemeinschaft, if you prefer) is a philosophy which can be used to justify forcing women to become breeders for the posterity and prosperity of the nation. Oh, but just to be clear: this isn’t my prediction, it’s just the sort of argument feminists used to make when feminism meant the opposite of what Hirshman says it should mean. And, fear not, even if the day comes when women are asked to put aside their own hopes for themselves and their families for the demographic common good, feminists will surely not call it “feminism.” For feminism is always good, even if it means nothing else.