Both Jessica Valenti and Jill Filipovic are quoted in this Linda Hirshman piece in today’s Washington Post: Looking to the Future, Feminism has to Focus. It’s a strange piece, not least because it begins with the tenuous suggestion that Hillary Clinton’s failure to capture the Democratic nomination is evidence that feminism is not as viable a political movement as it ought to be. Having started out on an angst-ridden note, however, Hirshman notes that “millenials” (those born between 1977 and 1996) are “re-engaging with feminism”, and notes the “wonderful defiant” quality of Valenti’s writing.
There’s a brief — too brief — summary of the whole post-WAM fiasco too, and then a rueful, if self-indulgent acknowledgment of the perhaps oversold, but surely not illusory generation gap in feminism:
I started out feeling very lukewarm toward Clinton, but every time someone on cable television called her a bitch or a pimp, my interest in her candidacy went up. A lot of the feminists for Obama were also horrified at the tone of the Clinton coverage, but they maintained that you could be mad at Chris Matthews and Tim Russert and Alex Castellanos and the guys on the Internet and in your office but still support Obama. I am, as my young feminist friends and Obama supporters keep reminding me, old.
I hear ya, Linda.
I intend to vote for Barack Obama in the fall. Though John McCain was the class of the Republican field, holding a few key sensible positions (particularly on climate change) that differentiate him from the Club-For-Growth-pod-people who control most of the GOP, his positions on women’s issues and the war make him an unattractive candidate.
But in my heart of hearts, I’d rather have Hillary Clinton. I loved her speech yesterday, and the women’s studies professor in me was delighted with the deft primer she gave on the women’s movement.
McCain’s the best of the bunch. Unfortunately, he decided to pander on climate change just when the proponents of AGW have had to swallow hard and admit that the current cooling spell is masking global warming–which is STILL GOING ON, HONEST.
He needs better advisers.
McCain has had one of the best environmental records among senate Republicans for years, and was opposed to ANWR drilling back in 1995. He’s not pandering, these are his sincerely held beliefs, which is why my organization (Republicans for Environmental Protection) endorsed him. Would that he would move three more steps left, and he might have my vote.
Hugo. The problem with AGW is that it does not exist. Spending money on it is wasting the money, unless you work for one of the groups currently lined up to get the boodle.
There are always the poor–which is usually a reason to cut defense spending if not congressman porkbarrel’s road to nowhere–and you’d think humane progressives would rather spend the money on the poor instead of graft for a non-existent problem.
Environmental issues always have a down side. The spotted owl issue was bogus. Even in the court case, it was admitted they had plenty of varied habitat, but the problem was the greens wanted to protect old-growth forest and you can’t hug a big tree. Spotted owls were fuzzier. A lie, in other words. And a lot of people in the lumber industry lost their jobs. LOST THEIR JOBS. Where does that fit into the equation?
Anyway, you can restrict our energy production to the benefit of Saudi Arabia, or you can insist on clean production here.
Uh, could we not engage in massive thread drift here? Stick the environmental critiques in a post in which environmentalism is more than parenthetical!
McCain is what the sports press would call a “tomato can”. The GOP is in self-inflicted disarray under the best of circumstances, with a failed presidency, an unpopular and calamitous war, a stumbling economy, and a fractured and divided base. McCain is old and looks it, is sticking mulishly only to the most unpopular, weakest and most divisive of Republican policies over the last 7 years (e.g.: the war, illegal-immigration amnesty), while alienating the free-marketers with comments about “greedy Wall Street people going to jail” and importing drugs from Canada. Even the evangelicals never really had any truck with him. The only real big McCain faithful are the “let’s kill more Muslims” neo-cons, like Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol, who are salivating for a war with Iran.
He’s going down. In flames. And that’s why so much of the liberal press wanted him.
You know, the main thing that drives me crazy about the sheer hatred that some older white feminists have for Barack Obama is that they didn’t have it for John Kerry four years ago. And I can only assume this is because Kerry didn’t break down any barriers, while Obama did. I’m thinking of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s remark, following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, in which she expressed disgust with the fact that she had to “see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.” She wanted to deprive black men the right to vote, leaving it only for white men, if it was not going to be extended to white women. Evidently, things haven’t changed all that much in the past 140 years.
Tom Head,
That is an absolutely, patently ridiculous statement. Maybe you’re hanging out with some different feminists, but in neck of the blogsphere, not only did a) the majority of feminists I read support Barack Obama but b) they were more than capable of differentiating between critizing his sexism and castigating him as a person. Also, most feminists I know (white and POC) talk frequently about the intersextion of -isms, whether racism or sexism.
If you didn’t think there were some pretty heated critisms of Kerry in the feminist community, you surely were not paying attention.
I’m not going to defend the racism of early feminists, or heck, even the racism of current feminists. It’s not like you can just one day say “Oh, well racism is bad so I’m not going to be racist anymore” it is a constantly evolving process, and one that’s made even more difficult by the society we all live in. But to assume that feminists have had difficulty with Obama because of racism, or that we aren’t thrilled that he’s breaking a barrier is foolishness and very insulting.
Antigone, I didn’t say the majority of feminists send this message. I said, and I quote, “some older white feminists” send this message.
And while there were some heated criticisms of Kerry among feminists, I don’t remember very many people suggesting that anyone should not vote for Kerry over these criticisms. It was understood that, for all his faults, he was “one of us.” Obama is not being given the same privilege, and I think it’s pretty obvious why he isn’t.
By the way, I’m pretty sure that we could look back and find that many of the feminists who are attacking Obama now over the fact that he once called a reporter “sweetie” enthusiastically defended Clinton in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal. Again, the double standard is pretty obviously a racial one.
Tom Head-
Again, most feminists I know were ambivilent AT BEST about Bill Clinton. I’m not going to say that feminists are always anti-racist, that would be dumb. But, the point does remain valid: sweetie is a sexist thing to call someone, no matter what their background.
…which gives white women of a certain generation a “feminist” excuse to vote against the black candidate. Yeah, I know how this works, Antigone; I live in Mississippi, so I’ve seen this many times before. We’ll just have to see if it plays out on a national level.