JoB
I have been thinking about why women of your generation don’t connect with Hillary more or with the label of women’s libber.
And i think you nailed it Kayleigh when you said “It never feels to me like a very satisfying feminist victory when women succeed on men’s terms”.
My daughter said much the same thing.
In her position, i would have given face value to the male “solution first and work towards it goal” and then gone off and done it my way quietly… while still making him believe i was engaged in his game. I would have done twice the work.. maybe three times the work. He would have been more comfortable and i would have “battled” with him less.
I like to think i would have ended up in the same spot.. but one has to wonder. She worked like a dog to get where she got and i don’t know if she could have done twice the work to maintain a front and still achieved what she did.
I admit to feeling massive mom frustration and thinking “what is wrong with these young people… you would never have made it my day” while i was supporting her sometimes daily on the phone.
I was flat out wrong.
In my day…that was the only way we could do it. And Hillary comes from my day. You had to literally be better at doing it their way to get ahead.. while still sneaking in your own perspective along the way. I think the duplicity that takes may be at the heart of young women’s lack of comfort with her.
Your way takes it’s toll too… i know how emotionally draining it was for my daughter to keep fighting to look at things her own way… but you would have never had the chance without our way breaking ground first.
It is a difficult thing for me even now to just speak my mind.. though my family would tell you differently:) To speak authentically without worrying how it will be heard by male ears is not an easy thing for us.
I found my voice. I still consider how men will hear it and try to speak in a way that they can hear.. but i don’t think the post above is one of those.. do you? When we speak authentically, it makes most men uneasy. My brother would call that post fanatical:) and he loves me.
I raised sons. I would like to believe my sons and other women’s sons will change that eventually, but it is a slow process. and in the meantime, an authentic female voice makes men uncomfortable…
Hillary didn’t find her voice until most young women had stopped listening to her and the media had polarized us all. And that’s too bad. I suspect, had she found it sooner, things might have been different.
Ah..the land of might have been.
However, my sons do share parenting, can and do cook and spend a great deal of time actively involved with their children.
maybe we didn’t do so badly after all for a first giant step:)
not a first step, mind you. In the Pacific Northwest we owe a lot of our female independence and spirit to rosey the riveter. it’s easy to forget that a lot of our wartime shipbuilding occurred on the west coast and a lot of the women who came here to build ships didn’t go home or back quite back into the kitchen when they were done:)
and they taught us, their children.. that maybe something else was possible. ok.. so they didn’t dream further than teacher or nurse… but they did dream… while drilling into our heads that marrying and children came first:)
I think that wartime shipbuilding industry is why you find such feisty maverick women on both coasts. Add in midwest (that’s where a lot of them came from) perseverance (called stubbornness in my family) and it’s quite a combination:)
Each generation builds on the last.. but doesn’t necessarily honor the last.. and i think that is especially true with women. We have to break so far out of the mold to make progress that we forget about what it took to make us believe we could:)
I still want us to get there now… with this woman. But if we can’t, then we will have moved closer to that goal. Perhaps next time people will be only uncomfortable with the idea.. not petrified and angry.
i keep trying to have historical perspective… but inside, i am pissed. And the rage that we should still be fighting to even have a voice is one of the reasons why i think that if Hillry ends up our candidate she has a greater chance of winning than anyone thinks.
The ballot box is one place where we can speak without having to be concerned what the men around us will think…. the ultimate privacy. and i think that is what frightens the men who run the Republican party.
Everyone knows you just can’t trust a woman:)