If you’re a young woman who voted for Obama, it’s not because you agreed with his policies or thought he’d be a good leader. You voted for him because he’s black and because you don’t understand that sexism exists. Or at least, that’s what Anne E. Kornblut at The Washington Post says.
In an inaccurate and offensive article that rehashes the same tired arguments that young women decried in 2008, Kornblut writes that a nation of ungrateful daughters disappointed their mothers by abandoning Hillary Clinton and turning a blind eye to the country’s history of sexism. Yes, seriously.
As the primaries played on that spring, the same scene played out in living rooms from coast to coast. Mothers and grandmothers who saw themselves in Clinton and formed the core of her support faced a confounding phenomenon: Their daughters did not much care whether a woman won or lost. There was nothing, in their view, all that special about electing a woman — particularly this woman — president. Not when the milestone of electing an African American president was at hand.
…Raised in a world where women made up more than half of all undergraduates on college campuses and half of the students in all law and medical schools, where discrimination was illegal, where nearly half the work force was female and their mothers had been free to work — or not — younger women were not drawn to Clinton by any sense of history, and they recoiled at being told they should be. Feminism had long ago been declared dead, then rendered meaningless. (Emphasis mine)
So young women didn’t think a female candidate was an important political moment and only voted for Obama because of the “milestone of electing an African American?” Really? You know, I would love to see the statistics to back that up. Because without them, it would appear that Kornblut is making a wildly inaccurate generalization. (Not to mention, hello Oppression Olympics! Apparently people only vote by identity?)
What’s truly unbelievable is how Kornblut expresses the disappointment and betrayal of older women by disappointing and betraying young women. Diminishing our political beliefs as nothing more than ignorance and hero-worship is not only false, it’s offensive. Like women who voted for Clinton, women who voted for Obama had their own nuanced, thought-out, intellectual, political reasons to do so.
The feminist movement’s existence and future is dependent on young people. Instead of insulting their intelligence and belittling their politics, let’s tell the truth about their passion, knowledge, and adeptness. Because I can’t imagine that a generation of young women is going to want to stay (or become) part of a group that consistently describes them as stupid.
Related: The Sisterhood Split, The Nation
Newsflash: young women can think for themselves, GirlDrive
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24 Comments
I guess the good old sexism at the Washington Post will never die.
This divisiveness and infighting is *the* most desired manifestation of all difference-based hierarchies. It is how elites rule – by creating acrimony among the oppressed. Women vs. blacks. Old women vs. young women. Rich women vs. poor women. White women vs. women of color. Beautiful women vs. ugly women. Thin women vs. “fat” women. Etc… So long as we fall into these traps we will remain oppressed and we will never actualize our innate potential. Solidarity is subversive.
As a 2nd waver I am consistantly frustrated by this kind of thing. When I was younger than most of you I was a press secretary to a (anti-war) presidential campaign. The idea that younger activists don’t have equal intellectual and strategic strength is deeply troubling. Just keep on your current path and hopefully they’ll figure that out eventually. (and – Promotion Alert) – one of our Care2 bloggers, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux writes often and well about this issue.
Thanks for calling this out. This is the exact reason that younger women, working class women, and women of color do not see themselves in what is widely recognized as feminism in this country. If, for some ridiculous reason, the only thing that drew me to a candidate was how much of myself I see in them, as a young working class community organizer, I wouldn’t see a whole lot of myself in the former head of the Wellesley Young Republicans. But of course, as a young woman, I couldn’t possibly understand a time when women like Hilary’s mother were forced to be homemakers. Except that my grandmother, at the time a working class immigrant woman, worked three jobs to support her family after leaving an abusive husband, not much choice there. Thanks Jessica, for pointing out that young women aren’t abandoning feminism, we’re just asking for it to be smarter and more relevant than simply blindly supporting the advancement of anyone with our reproductive organs.
Do you agree with Obama’s policies?
Shorter Anne Kornblut:
I’m so much smarter than you girls.
So what does Kornblut have to say about women who voted for Biden rather than Palin?
I’m over 70 and a former NOW president and I voted for Obama..although he’s been a disappointment I don’t think
Hillary would have been better. I don’t even like Emily’s list.
Feminism for me was about equal opportunity. Not about getting even with men for past grievances. We didn’t like it when men excluded us from politics why the hell do we think excluding them is advancement. Not all older women think alike. Many women of my age identified with Hillary. A lot of us didn’t. I did not vote for Obama because he is black. I thought he was the better candidate and I wanted something new…not Bush/Clinton/Clinton/Bush/Bush/Clinton/Clinton again. I don’t think younger women were betraying us. I am proud to have taken part in working to make sure they had the opportunities they now enjoy and I’m happy to support their choices. We wanted them to have the freedom to make choices now Gloria Steinhem and her followers need to step aside and enjoy knowing they have the education and opportunity to make choices that weren’t available to us.
I find this rather funny, if only in the sense that many of the young women with whom I’ve been studying law this past semester (at a fairly prestigious institution, I might add) have disappointed me to no end, regarding their views on the hard battles we feminists who have gone before have won. But, alas, they disappoint me no more than many of their mothers. For what we first or even second (as, I, as a child of the 60s, not a teen or woman of that decade) generation feminists learned was that there was no way, no how, that ALL of our generation supported our goals and vision of egalitarianism.
So, yeah, I voted for Obama – and frankly – regret it, though there was no one better. But while I might have buyers remorse (though there was honestly no better choice) the whole idea that those of us of a “certain age” are bitter and resentful of younger women is as much a product of misinformation as anything else the misogynist media puts out these days. Guess what – we made our mistakes all along, and you get to do the same. If we lose ground on reproductive choice, it will be as much my generation’s fault for not cherishing it as it is your generation’s fault for taking it for granted. And we move forward from there. But it’s silly to be pointing fingers at each other. We all have bigger fish to fry.
Kornblut may be trying to start one of those arguments because it’s good for getting more readers to the Post. That’s what my cynical half thinks.
On the actual topic, there are all sorts of reasons for voting a particular candidate. What made the primaries so very difficult, on a symbolic level, that both the candidates had the change of being Firsts in this country: either the first person of color or the first woman. It would have been great to have both at the same time. I hope that one day the president will be female and that nobody thinks that is anything odd or spectacular. That day probably will not be one any of us will see.
I am 49, and I voted for Obama. I have never really thought that much of Hillary Clinton, beginning with her enduring her husband’s repeated and very public betrayals, and after she sent me a flyer with a big picture of the White House and a blurb about her thirty-five years of experience in politics, I just lost it. She did NOT have thirty-five years of experience as a politician since she’d spent most of her husband’s tenure as governor of Arkansas as a corporate lawyer, and I was furious at her attempt to piggyback onto his success.
More than that, this is a woman who willingly courted the endorsement of the very man who attempted to bring down her husband’s Presidency, Richard Mellon Scaife of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. That is not whom I wanted as President, and if I had to do it all over again, I still wouldn’t vote for her.
As for Geraldine Ferraro, her playing of the race card during the campaign was just vile. Who the hell is she to complain about not electing a woman to the Presidency? Why didn’t SHE run, or get someone like Kathleen Sebelius to give it a try?
Thanks for the comments, y’all. And I just want to make clear that my beef here is with the article – not with “older” feminists. Nor do I think all older fems voted for Clinton or feel resentment towards younger women. That whole thing felt more like a mainstream/institutional bent, actually. (I write about it a bit in the linked Nation piece)
MB, totally agree that whether now or in the 60s – feminists were never the vast majority of American women. I feel sometimes like there’s this nostalgia for a time that never really existed…
Even if this were all about identity politics, a true feminist would care about the advancement of blacks AND the advancement of women. After all, the status of blacks in the U.S. affects countless black women. A true feminist cares about racism and sexism and all types of oppression.
I am a white woman, but I am offended by the idea that I should care more about advancement for women than advancement for blacks. They are both equally important. The election of the first black president was a great moment for feminists. It’s sad that Kornblut can’t see this — maybe she should spend more time listening to young women.
I wonder how Pat Schroeder would have fared in place of Hillary. Perhaps it wasn’t that a woman ran in 2008, but which woman.
not to mention that “played out in living rooms from coast to coast” is some mighty poor writing, beyond the fact that the concept is asinine, that is.
Anne Kornblut’s work is hardly ever worth reading. I never pay any attention to what she writes except when someone intelligent like Jessica Valenti takes her down. I forget she’s there except when she appears on Tweety’s wee programme,usually already muted. If she didn’t write anything ever again, the world would be a much better place and writers like Jessica Valenti could occupy themselves with much more worthwhile material.
So, thanks (I think) but, really, you needn’t bother. Kornblut’s not worth the effort; neither is her publication.
This
where nearly half the work force was female and their mothers had been free to work — or not —
kind of blows my mind. I don’t personally know one working woman, or for that matter one working man – who is free to not work.
Where exactly does this Kornblut person write from? ‘Cause, you know. This ain’t too bad! Once you get used to it. We oughta have music like this at home. I mean, Earth, man. Hello world!
Kornblut is only 36 — about five years older than Jessica. How does that short gap place her in the “older” feminist category?
Dreidel, I never wrote that Korblut was older…she’s just peddling in old stereotypes.
Older, younger, whatever. Obama wasn’t a feminist and he’s even less of one now than he pretended to be on the campaign. He clearly finds reproductive healthcare as icky as he finds LGBT issues, and both of these areas of his squeamishness were obvious if you were watching him during the campaign. It was evident that he opposed health exemptions for abortion, was way into conscience clauses, took contraception funding out of the stimulus at the first hint of fuss, and remains comfortable with people who offensively describe abortion as a Holocaust. His acceptance of ex-gays was plain, as well as his refusal to acknowledge faith leaders who were both gay and people of color, presenting it as a white thing through his choices of fig leaf counterbalances to Donnie McClurkin and Rick Warren.
It took his administration days to come up with something intelligent to say about the gay genocide law in Uganda for pity’s sake, and how *ing hard is it to oppose executing people over their romantic choices or HIV status?
While advances for people of color should be seen as feminist victories, I can’t see Obama’s post-election actions as such because he isn’t a feminist. More, he’s actively hostile to certain key gender equity issues and is no economic populist who might help broadly share our national prosperity – something that would help all historically disadvantaged groups. Instead, he acts like a corporatist jerk who doesn’t seem to care much about things like that.
Here and now, it’s pointless antagonism for Kornblut to drag this stuff up, particularly since if you’re going anecdotally, I’m almost her age and had my biggest arguments about my support for Hillary Clinton with women who were older than me. But so what. Some of us didn’t like him, and some of us did, and no one can definitively say why that was. What people thought of him a year ago hasn’t got much to do with whether he’s a feminist now, which he seems not to be. I’d have been happy to have been wrong on that and, especially with the Biden nomination, I was hoping that I would be. No joy, imo.
Thanks for writing this post, Jessica.
Hillary AND Obama were at the bottom of my list, for nearly 15 months (from when Obama first came to Ohio in 2/07 re: his campaigning). And it had nothing to do with gender or skin color for either. Biden was at the top of my list in large part because he pro-actively talked about nuclear proliferation, which is something I have long felt politicians do not discuss or act on enough.
I agree with the comments that attribute Kornblut’s book’s posture to selling it, not that she doesn’t believe and buy it all. But as a 47 year old who for the first time just ran for and won elected office (sure, in a small city – but I’m all about being “in the arena” now), it’s almost as though this book is a has-been before it was even written.
If we’re going to examine Palin and Clinton’s presence in the 2008 election cycle at all anymore, it should be to see what women are doing right now as a result. Are more of us running? All signs point to yes. Are more of us winning? I don’t know – but I know there are groups out there who do – ElectWomen, The White House Project, EMILY’s List, NCSL, Rutgers center on women, and on and on.
We need the book that talks to the women who are running now to find out how, if at all, Palin and Clinton’s experiences affect what we’re doing.
In my case, I worked on running gender-neutral – for example: no mentions of being a mom, just of having three school-aged kids. I wanted the focus to be on why I was running, why I was qualified and what I hope to accomplish.
On the other hand, Krystal Ball is a young (27 year old) Democratic woman running for Congress in what I’m told is a +12 R district in Virginia, and she is all about the mother part. And yet look how an NBC-posted story reads:
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local-beat/Krystal-Ball—-the-Future-of-The-Hills-Most-Beautiful.html
Now – maybe it’s me – being 47 – I’m out of touch. Maybe I should have a “whatever it takes” attitude. I don’t know – I honestly don’t.
But my first instinct was, “wow – really? I’m working my ass off to show that I’m as good or better and my gender doesn’t matter, yet here’s someone who is kind of making it all about the gender.”
Maybe we need whatever we have in our arsenals. But the problem with how the media and society at large perceives us will remain, yes? No? Maybe?
And I didn’t vote in the primaries because it was obvious that Clinton and Obama were both what we didn’t really want or need.
I voted for Obama in the general election as usual, as a vote against the Republicans, who are even worse. Usually. Except I no longer can see how a Republican would have been worse. At least if McCain had won, progressives would be admitting that these policies bite.
Kornblut was generalizing. Not all younger women, or women who voted for Obama of any age, voted for him because of race and wanting to be on the right side of an issue perceived to be more important than sexism.
Some, however, did. I’ve heard from many such. Including older women, such as my mom, who said she’d have voted Clinton over any guy, except a black guy. And other female Obama supporters, who admit they truly don’t know the policy differences between him and Clinton.
It’s tempting to dismiss Kornblut’s piece out of hand, because she does oversimplify. And I’m going beyond the four corners of her piece, since having read “Notes from the Cracked Ceiling,” I know Kornblut’s positions are actually more nuanced. But if we’re honest, we’d acknowledge: she has something. Women are one of the least cohesive groups, and much less likely to group around one of our own. There’s a reason why this is, and ignoring that so that we can claim Kornblut is “offensive” misses the point.
Great post! It’s sad when either of your choices will be interpreted by what you are and not how you think. If I had voted for Hillary many would assume it was because I too am a woman. I voted for Obama and am sure some people will say it is because I too am bi-racial. You just can’t please everyone.