Mixer Feelings by Linda Hirshman:

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As my blogging time comes to an end, I'm going to tell you a secret: I love Martha Stewart Living. June just came, and I put aside my New York Review of Books without a moment's hesitation. "Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain" is just going to have to wait while I read the stuffed tomato article. Dinner guests next week will have the strawberry shortcake, if I can only find the star shaped cutouts and then have them delivered in time so the fruit peeks out the top in a patriotic design. I have the great big mixing machine that probably could make cement if necessary.

At least I don't do the craft projects. Making your own lacy luminario bags I think is this month's temptation for the hard core Marthas. Although the feature on the center pieces had me going for a bit. I do love to set the table. It's like making a collage.

Surprised? If you are, it just means you've been drinking the Kool Aid the right so liberally, pun intended, dished out about feminism all these years. Mother and stepmother of three, happily married for almost twenty years, and even my ex-husband remarried to a feminist, I used to love to read the stay at home mommybloggers' speculations on my wizened, sexless, childless life, until the word leaked out.

I love to cook. Have loved to cook since I got out of my mother's kitchen and into my own. Not like she was a bad cook; she made the best potato salad in Ohio. I still make it, with a little help from my obsessive compulsive husband in the celery chopping department. You might say that potato salad and berry shortcake (I now see there are blueberries in the recipe, too, so it's red, white and blue, get it? If I burn it, I wonder if it will revive the flag-burning business the right was so revved up about a few years ago) ANYWAY, the salad and the shortcake are my Manolos, where a lovely pleasure traditionally (but not necessarily) associated with feminine history lurks.

I felt more ambivalent about it until the recent spate of books and magazines from the younger generation of feminists came out. Turns out, "Female Chauvinist Pig" author Ariel Levy blew the budget on a Carolina Herrera dress for her wedding and in "Full Frontal Feminism," Jessica Valenti is opposed to engagement rings, but admits to a real commitment to jewelry as a category. "ManifestA" authors Amy Richards and Jennier Bamgardner had their bikinis waxed.

They seem to know you don't have to choose between every pleasure of the material world and the pleasures of effective, principled, independent lives. Read my book! You can not run a Martha Stewart household and make a living in the market economy. And no woman should be so bedazzled by her stuffed tomatoes that she thinks of spending her life on them. But once in a while? These young women have got it. (They may not be the first. I seem to remember seeing Gloria Steinem a hundred years ago in a Geoffrey Beene dress that you'd run over your grandmother for.) But here they are -- brilliant, committed, and having a wonderful time in the material world. I'm a little old for the party, but, if this is the current version of having it all, I am all for it.

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