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Granted, Tim, the timing is convenient for Patti Solis Doyle's mommy crisis. But couldn't both versions of events be true for Hillary's former campaign manager? Say your life's work is going down in flames—to the point that One Life to Live seems more realistic all the time, and that storyline about waitressing in Paris, Texas, not altogether unappealing. And just when you're at the absolute snapping point, the one bright spot in your life ... wants Daddy? Not that this is a historical first, no, but when you're overwrought, I could see it being a moment of clarity, just as Hillary needed to make a change. (And as Paul Begala said on CNN the other night, when a campaign is in trouble, you can't fire the candidate, so somebody else has to take the hit.)
"The kids needed me'' may be poll-tested, but it's also a narrative I can't say no to—unless, and this is absolutely unfair—a man is telling the tale. For instance, I heard George Allen on the radio Tuesday saying how it was worth losing to Jim Webb because his 9-year-old daughter made him pancakes last Saturday, and that I found pukatrocious.
As for the crazy goddesses, I'm just as fond of them all the same as I was of my Aunt Ginny who spoke to dead people; they've earned those off-the-meds moments, and may even feel they are required. Though snits like that do suggest that somebody's power is being threatened, which is why I also take them as a sign that the abortion lobby worries that Obama—who is 100 percent pro-choice, despite Hillary's claims to the contrary—might fail to get into the kind of big pointless fights that raise a lot of cash for interest groups.
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Rachael I don’t think you’re going to find anyone on this blog racing to second Karen Von Hahn’s simplistic take on feminism, any more than we swallowed the NOW tantrum last night or the Steinem logic earlier this month. The split you’re sketching isn’t really between feminists and traditionalists but between feminists and what Von Hanh seems to want to characterize as overgrown tweens. I think that she's mixed up her criticism of apathetic women with a critique of a new generation of (for lack of a better word) post-feminists. Like you, I am infuriated by representatives of the women’s movement who demand I vote for whichever candidate wears the Spanx. And like you—and Rich Ford, whose wonderful book we just excerpted—I agree that if all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail (in this case pervasive sexism). And that this is a lazy way to view the world. Right or wrong, this generation of feminists can’t be made to see everything through a gender prism, and that’s not because we’re all spoiled, stupid, or too wrapped up with the Spice Girls to see what’s really happening under our noses—or just above the glass ceilings.
Let’s agree that life is too complicated to hammer away at problems—or at Kennedys—for imagined acts of sexism. But can we also agree that Von Hahn, for all that her evidence is dopey, points to the same trend Deborah Howell poked at in this week’s Washington Post (Disclosure: Slate is owned by the Post). It was a strange effort at explaining the massive disparity between young fathers and young mothers who read the paper, but it touched on some of the same themes as Von Hahn (including the observation that “women read magazines avidly, and as one young woman told me, magazine ink doesn't rub off on her hands.”) I don’t know who depressed me more, Howell or Von Hahn, but I do wonder if their claims are true and a generation of young women are more politically checked out than their male counterparts.
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So, some folks are worried that "feminism is out of style." Gee, could it have anything to do with stuff like this? Apologies if I seem too flippant. But I do sense a common thread between Karen von Hahn's column in the Globe and Mail (go read it if you haven't) and that noxious letter from the New York chapter of NOW: It's as if feminism is an either/or proposition. If you like pink ... if you are anti-abortion ... if you don't quiver with joy at the possibility of a President Hillary Clinton, then you are NOT a feminist.
Is there no room for nuance? A woman should be able to think that it's rotten that there aren't more female CEOs and that we still wipe more bottoms and mop more floors than our husbands without also feeling compelled to believe that The Man is still keeping us down because the abortion clinic gives Juno "the creeps."
Von Hahn bemoans the fact that "girls of this generation ... consider it ‘lame' to align themselves with a woman candidate on the sole ground of sisterhood." I think that represents a rousing success of the feminist movement. It tells me that women believe that it's so possible for a woman to become president that they're willing to wait for the female candidate who best represents their views.
If "sisterhood" means that I have to choose Ms. over InStyle, Hillary over John McCain, and If These Walls Could Talk over Knocked Up, then count me out.
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