The title should probably be burning bridges.
I’m a fan of reason most of the time, which is probably why I’ve never been attracted to the dogma of old wave feminist’s, and why, although annoying, Linda Hirshman and her ilk are irrelevant to me.
In Throwing Clinton Under the Bus To Spite Mom, Debra Dickerson just pushes me further away as she tries to clarify in her own gentle way exactly what Hirshman was saying in Yo Mamma: Hillary Clinton as the battleground in the war between mothers and daughters.
I oversimplify, but so do young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty. Caricatures work both ways, missy.
I personally don’t want to pole dance, never have as a matter of fact, and thank god my grandmother, who gave me my first and only copy of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, never called me honey.
We old school feminists aren’t going to get anywhere saying what we think, which is: Honey, you haven’t seen sexism yet. Diplomacy is for your allies as well as your enemies.
Though I thank my mother’s generation, and my grandmother’s for that matter, for preparing the way for more opportunities, I see it as the progress of generations. Historically in any aspect of life there is progress. This progress you are all so proud of, deservedly so for those of you who actually had something to do with it, does not beholden us to your ideologies for life, to think so is a thought dysfunction.
Progress happens, and though we should always respect our parents, our mothers, our fathers, our grandparent’s, when they deserve respect, we do not have to continually, and without end, express our gratefulness and respect by following their path, and adopting their opinions.
The respect I have for my mother, and my grandmother’s, comes from the way they raised me. I was encouraged to think, never given the answer, told to evaluate, research, and develop my own opinions. I was not indoctrinated with any particular point of view. It is misguided, if not full of an abnormal pathology in the way of Norman Bates mother, to expect to otherwise.
I thank you that the height of the walls is such that I have to stretch to hit the glass ceiling.
I thank the Pilgrims on some level too, yet I don’t advocate burning witches.
This is getting old ( the dialogue not you just so you’re clear on that).
It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.
The Feminine Mystique, 1963
I vividly remember an episode from eight? years ago, when a New England newspaper interviewed high school girls about various gender equality issues, and prominently (gleefully?) printed the majority result on its front page: “Work? I’ve got too much to do to bother working!” A result sure to gladden the heart of the diehard MCP, and sadden that of the diehard NOW member.
I worry that few people consider how socioeconomic forces, particularly the state of science and technology, may drive gender and race relations. The correlation between poverty and gender inequality is, I argue, no accident - and you, Cooper, doubtless have the stats at your command to support this. The historically more “level” state of gender and racial equality in North America, according to some studies I’ve read, has more to do with the scarcity of labor, the invention of machines to perform the labor, and the ability (and, especially during wartime, the necessity) of women and non-whites to run those machines, than with any philosophical discussion of “rights”. Indeed, black Africans and Chinese suffered, in this view as I understand it, precisely because they were brought in to provide a sufficiency of labor in non-mechanized trades (plantation agriculture; railroad building).
And sex is a whole different matter in an age where pills are available to protect against disease and untimely pregnancy.
I suppose mentioning such things won’t inspire people to examine, with any care, the factors that support their current privileges and can be used to expand them. At best, it’ll get me flamed. At worst …
well, I understand that Afghanistan has little money and little penetration into its culture of contemporary science and technology. And it loses 1 in 200 women to complications related to childbirth. As was the case in America in 1800, before the Industrial Revolution.
If we are not wary, it can happen here.
I merely wish they would look at the whole picture, instead of their small corner of it.There’s much larger picture than they paint with this constant whining.
History, is not just of women, and though gender issues are a part of history the narrow focus, and the continual, and what I find ridiculous assertions, that young woman who don’t tow the fem line are useless poll dancers…
I’m out there. There are few pole dancers - metaphorical or otherwise - believe me, no matter what the media says. And if there were too be, from where did they come? The same women who are now bitching about them.
Contemporaneous poverty related to gender is highly skewed to the female African Americans making it clearly more a socioeconomic, race based post oppression issue.
We must always remember history, it’s always relevant, but there is not always a pattern inevitably to be repeated.
Should certain types of oppression occur once again, and we must be ever aware that it is possible, it will not be based on gender alone - and that is the point. Really.
World view, larger view, whatever.
Cooper, Thanks for this. you know I have struggled to understand the issues from my own warped and male perspective. Reading this makes it so much clearer. And easier to come to grips with. Please keep this debate going as it is an education for those who needs to know more and want more. I am not picking sides. Just sitting around the fire and listening in - if you don’t mind.
Oppression does occur.
Today.
Just look at that Latter Day sect down in Texas. The women from there who’ve appeared on the Today Show say they are there by choice.
I don’t believe them. Especially not when they do not answer a number of the questions presented to them.
The horrors of 13 year old girls forcefully married off to 50 year old Tom Greens should never happen in this country. It’s an oppression of the worst kind.
There’s a pole dancing place a few miles from here–people are so hard up when I walk past I get wolf whistled. But I hav walked around the neighborhood, and Southern poverty though it might be near a beach is much much worse than anything I have seen in New York
Thing is when times are tough people turn to many things I personally don’t like. Would rather have women pole dancing than manufacturing crack–saw a documentary on a crack factory. Know crack from the vials on the street and in buildings in the UWS in the early 90’s and my work at SSI where the claimaints would talk about crack and drive by shootings as if they were normal.
Times are going to get tougher and I’m scared
Love your respect for your mother and grandmother. It’s great to be raised that way but so much harder as everything is a constant question with no fixed answers
The radical right who have all the answers rule here yet there is that pole dancing place and more sex shops than I ever saw in Times Square in the bad old days–proportionately
I always know when a marriage is in trouble by the amount of times they call each other honey. Funny but that particular term of endearment has always bothered me
Back to sex–my first couple of jobs not for a family member–during college summers or drop out time were all about being harrassed–have funny sick stories about them. Then I graduated and found that having a mind that works–and being polite was what counted. Polite doesn’t mean not being assertive–many women of my generation and the ones just after assumed that if they were well mannered they would be considered wimps
I have no respect for authority only for those who earn it–but I have always studied the culture of whatever work place I inhabited. Realized that many people, men and women, make their own ceilings by ignoring the office culture
People have always asked me how I can’t identify myself as a feminist when I would refuse to take a man’s name and would go around showing women how to save their money so they would never be dependent on a man. The name thing is just a personal belief and it was preached into me since childhood that money brings freedom
I used to want to save the world. I have settled on helping people I personally know forge a better life
Oppression has never been a thing of the past–it simply means being beaten down by a system or systems. In the past it happened more to women but now I fear it’s happening to everybody without whatever means to feel a certain amount of security–and am being vague on purpose as there are so many factors
Great Cooper post, Cooper
The fact I can see progress happen significantly in my life is progress itself. I see changes being made almost every year, which is kind of encouraging, I’d say.
Do they know what is happening in the trenches in the real world?
The fight is still be carried on, just in a different way. I think you almost have to be a female to get this post.
I guess on some level seeing all they worked for in the hands of pole dancing party girls is just irritating. I just don’t see as many pole dancing party girls.
The pressure, and the oppression, is all on the women these days. The oppression you fight differently than your mother’s gen did, and the pressure from your mother’s gen - itself oppressing
And pole dancing is merely a flash -in-the-pan fad afflicting the women of GenX and beyond? /cough
Dickerson’s tone strikes me as being broadly dismissive, and condescendingly ageist to boot.
Seems to me that Linda Hirchman’s rhetoric comes from a place that’s disquietingly similar to that which the old school feminists railed against.
I too have a mother. And while she’s been appalled whenever misogynistic anti-Hillary statements were made, when Super Tuesday came around she voted for Barrack Obama because she thought he was the better candidate.
sk: That oppression occurs is not in question.
mojo: As always we must keep our eye on the ball. Trying to humiliate your children rarely does any good.
John: Yes, that’s some of it.
Dave: It’s not just her though. Lucky I don’t read much of that I just came across a post on several article of the same type. Usually I’d just roll my eyes and move on.
EW: I just get so tired of looking at it, and I’m not a fan of Hirshman anyway.
I like the new make over /blog design Cooper….
my favourite two women are my Mother (74) and my daughter (16)…….
completely different generations yet my son (18) and I get on famously with them both….probably because they are independent thinkers….and doers…
I don’t think either of them would address another female as ‘honey’ and certainly not “missy”…
the problem lies in the stereotypes (usually the women who think and behave like sheep) and sadly there are a lot out there..
Men don’t seem to subject their successors to that “pile on” syndrome, like women do.
If you haven’t see the movie Betty Page–it’s about sexual deviancy–and has me thinking about many things–including deviancy is really in the eyes of the beholder
Think it’s my favorite film in many a year
And Obama is the better candidate. People who fall for Hillary can’t read or listen or…
It’s all about them, not the issues.
Just for the record, when the generation of women just before yours talks about fighting for progress, they mean that they lectured people who left the room instead of trying to kick them out.