Please quote the exact passage from the declaration of sentiments that you read as saying:

…politics needs to be concerned with the intensely personal.

Even the feminist slogan “the personal is political” doesn’t go nearly that far. By my reading, the Declaration of Sentiments, like the Declaration of Independence before it, puts things in their proper perspective: reform the conditions of life and the political environment, and free people will find their way to happiness in the way they choose. While I normally try to steer clear of Godwin’s Law, I make no apology for my opinion that attempts to reverse the natural order by having the government try to make people “good” has led, in the past, to monstrous results.

Please note, again, that if you read what I wrote as any kind of indictment of feminism, you read it wrong. In my opinion, the vast majority of feminists have no desire for the kind of intrusive ethos that would make the “intensely personal” the business of government. I disagree with Hugo Schywzer here, not the feminist movement.

Anyone who’s read the “Third-Wave Manifesta: A Thirteen Point Agenda” by Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner can see they’ve modeled it after the “Declaration of Sentiments.” There’s a snippet of this in their book, MANIFESTA too.

(In February ‘04, Richards and Baumgardner talked with college students here at a rally in Fort Worth, Texas. Baumgardner began by quoting Steve Earle, saying, “If you don’t vote, don’t bitch.” She went on to remember Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 as a good beginning of the waves of feminisms.)

Yours is a wild leap. The feminist movement doesn’t hold the state responsible for ensuring women’s self-confidence. It does believe, however, that “rights alone are not enough”. And as even Jefferson pointed out, the “pursuit of happiness” was something that the state ought to ensure that each indvidiual had the right to participate in. That wasn’t the same thing as saying “the state shall make each citizen happy.” Similarly, the Declaration of Sentiments declared that a feminist agenda is one in which women’s independence is seen as a presumed good, and the movement ought to struggle to win that independence. But that’s about changing hearts and minds as much as it is about changing laws.

Just to add to it: if a politician tells me they can make the environment better, clean up the political environment, make commerce and taxation fairer, I’ll listen to their program. Politics exists to manage the public square, the shared spaces where we meet. But if the same politician promises to make me happy or make me good, we have a problem. Politics stops at my skin. Politicians have tried to make people happy and make them good before, and it has always ended in tears, an auto da fe, or cyclone b.

But I feel like your last couple of paragraphs are a bit of an ode to the kind of celebrated navel-gazing that white upper-middle class women are so famous for. I mean, given what is happening globally to women, especially poor women of color, is self-confidence the highest and noblest goal? And I know you get called out on this a lot, but your paeans to “independence” reflect a very WASPy (as you say, OKOP) vision of what the good life looks like. Some of us want a better world for all of us, where our husbands and our brothers and our fathers aren’t automatically made out to be our enemies.

When the DOS was signed, the greatest oppressor for white women may well have been their husbands. For slave women, the oppressor was slavery, just as it was the greatest oppresor for slave men. Setting up men as the enemoy is a historic tactic of white-centered feminism.