Friday, June 11

Make it easier for the younger ones coming up...

Here's an interesting question -- in light of my observation below of a Wisconsin law professor whose daughter was recently hired to teach there, that arises from a column by feminist Linda Hirshman:

Sarah Palin, the antiabortion conservative icon, has been proclaiming herself a feminist since the 2008 election. After all, didn't she figure out a way to "have it all"—a passel of children, a first dude, and a big job in the public sphere? Palin sure looks more like Betty Friedan than those liberal mommybloggers pushing their strollers around the Upper West Side all day. Palin recently used the F word again at a meeting of the antiabortion Republican women's activist group Susan B. Anthony List, extending the brand to the conservative women flooding into politics, both at the grassroots and candidate level. "Mama Grizzlies," she called the new conservative feminists, lured from the kitchen table where, unlike her, they apparently spend most of their time, to save the nation's unbalanced checkbook from women-threatening things like health care. Their desire to criminalize abortion is merely a way of showing respect for women who can easily combine unexpected pregnancies with any other life plans, she says.

When Palin went "feminist," the "feminist blogosphere" lit up like a scoreboard at a hockey mom game, as young bloggers struggled to reconcile their oath never to judge another woman's "choices" as unfeminist with Palin's application for sisterhood.
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Fiorina and Palin's pitches reveal graphically how selfish their brand of feminism is. With the addition of a hefty dose of good luck, and, in Fiorina's case, the value of a privileged family background, they made it. So their public policy is not to make it any easier for any woman who comes after them with, say, control of her reproduction or health care separate from her husband's job. Somehow the brilliant light of their narcissism is supposed to blind voters to the fact that there's another response to making it. Here's what real—not grizzly—mothers do: Make it easier for the young ones coming along next.

What exactly does "making it easier for the younger ones coming along next" mean to modern-day feminists?

Merely a level playing field? Equal rights, meaning non-discrimination, under the law? Or does it mean legacy appointments for proper feminists? A good-ole-gals club, akin to the good-ole-boys club that discouraged female entrants for so many years?

No really -- I'd like to know.