UPDATE: Feminism, Child Development, and the Legacy of Shulamith Firestone - Dana Goldstein

Feminism, Child Development, and the Legacy of Shulamith Firestone - Dana Goldstein:

Does It Matter When Education Reformers and Activists Send Their Own Kids to Private School?

by Dana Goldstein

The scandal-prone Michelle Rhee does it. So does Leonie Haimson, the combative leader of the advocacy groups Class Size Matters, Parents Across America, and NYC Kids PAC, which oppose almost all the ideas Rhee supports, like increased standardized testing, teacher pay tied to test scores, and larger class sizes for effective teachers. Many left education writers have criticized Rhee for enrolling one of her daughters in the exclusive Harpeth Hall girls' school in Nashville, which boasts of tiny class sizes and a focus on critical thinking and the arts. But Haimson says her own decision to send her youngest child to a private high school is different, because unlike Rhee, she believes all children, especially the poor, should benefit from the small classes and progressive pedagogy many private schools provide. Indeed, Haimson has devoted her life to this cause, and isn't planning on stopping her activism simply because her own child is now enrolled in private schoool.
I am a product of socioeconomically diverse public schools and have written about why opting-out of 

Feminism, Child Development, and the Legacy of Shulamith Firestone

by Dana Goldstein

Like a lot of other people, I was riveted bySusan Faludi'sNew Yorkerreporton the work, life, and death of Shulamith Firestone, a Second Wave feminist theoretician and organizer whose name I knew, but whose legacy I was barely cognisant of. Faludi deals beautifully with Firestone's repressive Orthodox Jewish upbringing, her struggle with schizophrenia and social isolation, and the unfinished business of her particular brand of radical feminism, which declared that "pregnancy is barbaric" and childbirth is like "shitting a pumpkin."Those notions are shocking and perhaps ridiculous, but I nevertheless found insight in Firestone's observation -- decades before Judith Warner'sPerfect Madnessand Elisabeth Badinter'sThe Conflict-- that the increasing fetishization of childhood in the developed world has brought with it an unrealistic set of burdens on mothers, just as women finally earned the right to full lives beyond the domestic sphere. Describing Firestone's classic,The Dialectic of Sex, Faludi writes:

The book’s longest chapter, “Down with Childhood,” chronicled the ways that children’s lives had become constrained and regulated in modern society. “With the increase and