Stop Me Before I Vote Again

3 A.M. For Feminism
Clinton dead-enders and the crisis in the women's movement.

Amy Siskind, a 42-year-old mother of two from Westchester, stood in a Washington, D.C., park on the last day in May, telling a few hundred cheering people that she would not, under any circumstances, vote for Barack Obama. She was a lifelong Democrat, she said, a donor and a volunteer for the party. But... she was appalled at the leadership's failure to defend Hillary Clinton from the sexism that she believes bolstered Barack Obama's campaign....

Siskind was one of the speakers at a rally that brought busloads of people, overwhelmingly women, to demonstrate near the Democratic National Committee (DNC) meeting that would decide the status of the Florida and Michigan delegations. The states had been stripped of their delegates--a decision Clinton endorsed--because they had broken party rules in holding their primaries early. But, as Clinton lost steam, seating them in full became crucial to her argument for the nomination, and thus, to her supporters, a matter of high democratic principle....

A strange narrative has developed, abetted by Clinton and some of the mainstream feminist organizations. In it, the will of the voters was thwarted by chauvinistic party leaders in concert with a servile media, and Obama's victory represents a repeat of George W. Bush's in 2000. It's a story in which Obama becomes every arrogant young man who has ever edged out a more deserving middle-aged woman, and Clinton.... is not a spoiler but a feminist martyr.

Some months back I passed along a concept invented (as far as I know) by an old feminist friend of mine: "free-alterations feminism." -- the bourgeois, careerist, white-collar feminism of equal access to the executive washroom. Hillary of course is the poster girl for this particular style of feminism, much adhered to by many women of my generation. (Suskind, at 42, is a little dewy for this Gloria "Sweetheart of the CIA" Steinem stuff. But maybe Westchester ages one prematurely. Or it's some kind of time-stands-still, baby-boomer Shangri-La up there.)

Unfortunately, it's hard to believe that the Suskinds of the nation will actually be numerous enough, or committed enough, to deprive Obama of victory. Most of them, I dare say, will turn out to be such deep-dyed lesser-evillists that their tropism to the donkey lever will overcome their female nationalism.

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It's nice that it's such a generational thing, this 70s feminism. Since I always think the kids are all right, on principle, it's a little melancholy to see so many of 'em falling for the Obama snake oil. But most of em haven't after all, been burned before, and that's how you learn. And at least they don't have that nasty blend of middle-class self-congratulatory complacency with preachy, sanctimonious holier-than-thou false radicalism that characterized the Yenta Generation feminists.

Here's a view from the other side, by Amy Tiemann, only two or three years younger than Siskind of Westchester:

Obama v. Clinton Puts Stretch Marks on Sisterhood

"Sisterhood" bound women together during the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.

Fast-forward three decades, and it is time to start asking ourselves what happens when you try to stretch sisterhood across a generational divide and then push and pull it between the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Answer: serious stretch marks.

Yes, Clinton is attracting her share of Gen X and Y supporters as she wages an impressive political battle.

And plenty of older, self-described feminists support Obama. Take Sheila Goldmacher.

"I am a 74-year-old Jewish feminist lesbian and do not support Hillary and have disliked her for a long time as well as her husband Bill," she recently e-mailed Women's eNews. "They have helped to bring us the disaster we now have on our hands by the imposition of NAFTA, which she seems to been backtracking on; the so-called Welfare Reform Act, which has continued to make life miserable for countless numbers of women and children in this country. Stop trying to see this race as only men vs. women."

Goldmacher notwithstanding, plenty of second-wavers have turned the campaigns into a test of feminist credentials....

In "The Feminine Mistake" Leslie Bennetts interviewed a woman who complained she hasn't seen the "young Gloria Steinems."

Of course Tiemann is an Obama-ite. But Steinem and Morgan et al. are Clintonites, so they can't claim any moral high ground. In fact Clinton feminism represents, I guess, the logical conclusion of bouregois-corporate feminism. Women ought to have an equal opportunity to be corporate plunderers... and imperial mass-murderers.

Naivete may be some excuse for Obama fans. But nobody can claim ignorance of what Hillary Clinton stands for.