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1 Introduction Formal barriers to women’s social and political participation have crumbled, yet society remains, to a signi¤cant degree, gendered in the roles that women and men play. Women’s and men’s choices regarding work and family are largely responsible for maintaining and reinforcing the differences. Women continue to have less social, economic, and political power than do men, and these differences are the apparent impetus for feminists’ criticism of certain choices women make. Many feminists recognize the importance of focusing on and challenging women’s choices in order to change the status quo. However, most feminists hesitate to criticize women’s choices directly or to blame women for playing a role in their social disempowerment. Feminists who fought to get women more options and control over their lives are reluctant to tell women they are making the wrong choices and directing their lives poorly. Therefore, instead of telling women they are making substantively bad choices, feminists most often challenge women’s choices by pointing out perceived procedural ®aws in the conditions under which the choices were made. Feminists criticize women’s choices most often by arguing that the choices were made under conditions that were illegitimately constrained. Ostensibly at least, feminists argue on behalf of seemingly neutral principles like liberty and equality and remain agnostic about how women should live their lives.1 For example, instead of criticizing women’s choices directly as incompatible with a meaningful life, feminists focus on the conditions under which women make their choices and argue that the conditions are neither suf¤ciently free nor equal to render the choices worthy of social respect. By advancing less controversial procedural and neutral-sounding arguments, feminists mask their real concerns about the substance of women’s choices, relegating such concerns to something of a hidden agenda. This book seeks to expose the hidden agenda of contemporary feminists, not in an attempt to argue that their conception of human ®ourishing is a dangerous or sinister one, but in an attempt to argue precisely the opposite. Encouraging women to live in accordance with a grounded and well-de¤ned conception of human ®ourishing—what I call “perfectionism”—is the most effective way to redress the gender inequalities that stubbornly persist in our society. To this end, I not only seek to expose the perfectionist principles that undergird feminist writings, I also seek to articulate a concrete set of perfectionist principles that would improve the quality of individual women’s lives and improve the social standing of women as a whole. I hope these principles can serve as a starting point for a more honest assessment of women’s choices and the rami¤cations thereof. By the early twenty-¤rst century, American women had had access for several decades to virtually the same professions as men. Women are admitted on the same terms as men to vocational and professional training programs, and employers are legally prohibited from refusing to hire or promote women on the basis of gender. Yet, despite the seeming parity of such public-sphere opportunities, there remains a substantial difference in the degree, type, and remuneration of women’s and men’s participation in the labor force. Women spend fewer hours per week in paid employment than do men, they work in occupations that remain, to a considerable degree, segregated by sex, and they earn a fraction of what men do.2 Certainly some of the differences in women’s and men’s labor-force participation are due to old-fashioned employer discrimination. Undoubtedly, some employers do refuse to hire women for certain jobs, pay women less than men for the same job, and condone the sexual harassment and intimidation of female employees.3 But employer discrimination does not explain all of the differences in kind and degree of women’s and men’s participation in the labor force. Discrimination is not the only reason that women have failed both to achieve economic parity with men and to fully integrate the workforce. At least some of the differences between women’s and men’s levels of labor-market participation result from different choices women and men make about how to structure and prioritize their lives.4 Even before entering the paid labor market, women and men make choices about what skills to develop and how much time and effort to invest in their future careers. To some degree, women and men continue to segregate themselves into different career paths, and many occupations remain...

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