Throughout our lives, we form opinions on a multiplicity of issues. At first, it is typical for our views to reflect those of our parents. Over time, as we are exposed to other views, and reflect on our own life experiences, our views evolve.
For example, we hear our parents' political views throughout our childhood and adolescence, and agree with them until we go off to live on our own, and either hear other views or just begin to experience life differently. Sometimes we adopt new views permanently, or sometimes just try them on temporarily before returning to our parents' views. Other times we may reject both and develop our own unique perspective.
The important thing is that at some point in our adult lives we live according to what we truly believe, neither because our parents believe it, nor because we still feel the need to rebel against them by adopting a contrary belief.
My husband and I grew up in ultra conservative families. Up until our early twenties, we were, like our families, conservative in our political, religious and cultural views. We went to church each Sunday and accepted all the dogmas of our church. We were conservative Republicans and couldn't understand why anyone could be a Democrat. We didn't oppose the war in Vietnam, even as protests surrounded us on our college campus. We thought a woman's place was in the home, not in the office.
While our fellow students didn't really change us, having adult experiences and learning to think for ourselves did. The first break with my parents' political views came in 1968, after the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, when for the first time I really paid attention to the idealism and the fight against injustice represented by these two men. I turned 21 that year and it was the first time I could vote. Had RFK not been assassinated, I would have enthusiastically voted for him, much to my father's dismay. Instead I voted for Hubert Humphrey, only to see him lose to the first man to ever have to resign the presidency. I was still a registered Republican, not yet ready to sever my loyalty to my family, but eventually that changed too.
As we moved into the seventies and feminism arrived in full force, I was open to what people like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan had to say. Even as people in my family and church disparaged "women's libbers" as crazy people, I understood what Friedan was saying about "the problem that has no name." I had that problem. I had a college degree and was raising three children and I thought I would go out of my mind. Motherhood wasn't my strong suit and I felt my brain cells were dying with every diaper I changed.
Though I no longer call myself a feminist (mainly because I believe we are in a different phase now, a post-feminist phase in which we must go beyond agitation to collaboration) I have remained an advocate of women's rights and am always somewhat sad when I encounter women who criticize the women's movement and use derogatory and demeaning terms like "women's libbers." I always ask them if they don't believe women are equal to men or shouldn't have the same rights as men. I remind them that they would not have the opportunities they have and their fantastic paychecks if the women's movement had never happened.
Sure, there have always been aspects of the women's movement I have had a hard time with. While I don't believe abortion should be criminalized, for instance, I simply can't approve of the radical pro-choice stance some women's groups take. As a mother of four children, I think abortion is always a tragedy, and I don't like the way some political groups treat it as if it just another form of birth control. I know this makes me out of line with other feminists, but remember what I said about the importance of developing your own views.
In general, though, I believe the goals of feminism have been admirable ones, and ones that have brought freedom and opportunities to women. The work is not finished, of course, and won't be until discrimination ends and equal pay is given for equal work, but once in a while I am ashamed of what some feminists do and yesterday was one of those days.
Yesterday, I read the statement by Marcia Pappas, the president of the New York chapter of NOW, slamming Ted Kennedy for his endorsement of Barack Obama and accusing him of "the ultimate betrayal." As I read the statement, it became clear that she felt Ted Kennedy owed women an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and that anything short of that was unacceptable. She accused him of "abandonment," of "choosing the new guy over us." She sounded like a woman scorned, someone whose husband or lover just cheated on her. She also said that by supporting Obama, Kennedy was completely abandoning women's issues and that furthermore, he couldn't handle the idea of a woman president.
In other words, the only way Kennedy could have proven his dedication to women's issues was to have endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Everything else he has done for women in all his years in the Senate simply doesn't count.
Whoa! This is the kind of woman that gives feminism a bad name. This woman is effectively saying: "We've waited long enough. We're tired of male presidents and now that we have found a strong woman, we demand that you support her. We don't care if she loses in the general election, or that she is riding her husband's coat tails, or that she supported the war, or that she is a terribly divisive figure, we demand that you support her or everything you have done up until now is a sham." (Boy will she be in for a surprise if and when Hillary Clinton becomes president and doesn't give in to all her demands.)
I thought feminism was about men and women being equal, not about demanding that a woman be given a free pass. I thought feminists would want a woman who got to the presidential nomination on her own merits, not because she is married to a former president, is at least partly running on his record, and sends him out in the campaign to be her hit man. I thought we had gotten past hating men, and blaming them for everything that has ever gone wrong in the lives of women.
There was a time for anger in the seventies. A lot of us were angry then because we were realizing that the unhappiness many of us felt was because we were stuck in the restrictive roles society set down for us. We woke up to the injustice and did something. We demanded entrance into colleges and occupations that banned us. We demanded better pay, and child care so we could go to work. We got elected to office. We educated our husbands and depending on their reactions, either divorced them or joined with them in moving our marriages to a different and more fulfilling place. And most of us got over our anger and started to like men again. We decided that it was better to work together and to appreciate our differences, not just insist we be treated exactly the same.
Sure, there are still some "sexist pigs," (as we used to call them) out there, but Ted Kennedy isn't one of them, and for Marcia Pappas to attack him when he made a decision that he is entitled to make, and that he sincerely believes is the best decision for women as well as men, not to mention the country, is just stupid.
Her letter wasn't the statement of a disappointed or frustrated woman who is passionately supporting her candidate. It was the cry of a deranged women, whose hatred of men simmers continually below the surface.
Feminism is not and should never be about hating men. Nor should it be about electing a female president regardless of who the female nominee is.
I have considered myself a supporter of woman's rights for many years, far more years than Marcia Pappas I suspect, but I am also a woman who thinks for herself, and doesn't live in a binary world of good and evil, black and white, and male and female. Ted Kennedy supports Barack Obama, as many of us do, precisely because Obama is a candidate who transcends such a binary world.
In my twenties, when I identified strongly with feminists and believed in the causes they fought for, I might have supported a candidate like Hillary Clinton just because she was a woman. As I was awakening to the discrimination against women, I went through my own phase of anger against the male establishment and thought we needed to do bold things and stand together. But times have changed and so have I. Now I believe our best hope is to have a fair contest between male and female candidates, with politicians and citizens, men and women, free to support whatever candidate best represents their views. I no longer believe a woman candidate deserves the support of all women and all liberal male politicians. To the contrary, I think that demeans the woman candidate.
I was glad to see the national organization distance itself from its New York chapter because I think the statement of Marcia Pappas disgraces us all.
She owes Ted Kennedy and all women an apology for her ridiculous outburst, which does nothing to help the cause of women.
Real feminists, male and female, make decisions based on more than gender.
