Carrie Lukas has an excellent item on a Washington Post review that highlights the intergenerational feminist bickering that apparently is at the heart of Rebecca Traister’s new book, Big Girls Don’t Cry. The book has a big boo hoo about how Hillary Clinton supposedly faced sexism on the campaign trail, even though she and Barack Obama espoused similar policies. The good point that Carrie makes is that the young feminists and older ones don’t espouse different policies. Carrie notes:
Yet on this notion of young feminists dismissing old feminists, it seems strange to me because other than a matter of tone, I just don’t see much of a difference between the agenda that’s being pushed by the standard barriers at groups like NOW and the supposedly “new” feminists. They both support the same agenda–a bigger government safety net with cradle-to-grave care and massive intervention into the economy to replace market-decisions with the wisdom of bureaucrats. What am I missing?
What comes also across to me is the just plain silliness of the young feminist author of the book. She is on the trail at a rally for Michelle Obama:
It was November in rural Iowa, and between the Hopperesque towns in which we were stopping we drove through farmland, and brittle leaves blew across the road. I had thrown some CDs into my bag, and at some point on the drive to Michelle’s next stump stomp, on a crisp bright day following this crisp, bright woman, Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A Changing’ began to play. I was thirty-three years old; I had no memories of the 1960s, in which the modern civil rights movement took hold, or of the 1970s, in which second-wave feminism bloomed. But I felt for a few minutes as though, on some small highway east of everything urban in Iowa, I was living in the most powerful historic moment of my lifetime, as if the country I’d grown up in, with its rules and limitations and assumptions about who can do what and who can be what, was finally beginning to fulfill Dylan’s decades-old promise.
You get the sense that, readingwise, Ms. Traister has a very limited sense of historic moments, though this one turned out to be historic all right. It was prelude to the most polarizing moment in American history since the Civil War (Look it up, Becky). The reviewer doesn’t like Traister’s superiority to the older feminists and what you’re left with is (as Carrie noted) feminist infighting. It is particularly trivial in the age of Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina, and other independent-minded women on the campaign trail now who don’t share the president and Mrs. Clinton’s vampire-like thirst for larger government.