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We may not like to admit it, but we both need the women’s movement. In New Hampshire yesterday, 57% of voters were female, of those, 46% voted for Clinton. Hillary won among all age groups except 18-24 (which she never expected) and 30-39 year olds (36% Clinton, 42% Obama). I have not been able to find cross-tabs by age and gender, but all 30-39 year olds in N.H cannot be male. In Iowa, younger women did not vote for Hillary, and it hurt her there. And last night, although the numbers were tighter, more women 30-39 voted for Obama too.This is my age group, and much of BlogHer’s readership as well. What gives?
I think it’s the way that a vote for Hillary symbolized not only a vote for old-fashioned politics, but for old-fashioned feminism (and old fashioned white feminism- see here for whattamisaid and here for Maria Niles' amazing post). Even last night, I heard some anchor relating Hillary’s focus on children’s issues and health care, "you know, women’s issues” as key to her success with women. Not so fast. ALL voters yesterday stated the economy as their number 1 concern, but too often Hillary has pitched her career to sound like that of a liberal social worker’s in an attempt to appeal to women. To many women of my generation, do-gooder feminism leaves us cold. It’s tired, out of touch, and not nuanced enough for the everyday sexism and scary realities of our world.
As I wrote last week, the “You Go Girl” nature of many women’s political campaigns rings false to a generation more preoccupied with righting our sinking real estate investments than raising our consciousness. Feminism did a lot for women way back when, but it can’t clean up our current messes: quiet harassment, unexplained passing over for big jobs, Chris Matthews. We need to protect our hard-earned status and money, not clamor for more femaleness (check out this enlightening blog post from Eve Tahmincioglu on women in business and Hillary). Some months ago I heard Eleanor Smeal founder of Feminist Majority, the original feminist, say with exasperation to a panel, “we’ve been having this same discussion for 35 years!” and I thought, yeah, you have, maybe time to try a new topic? ‘Cause whatever you’re doing, it ain’t working as well as it should. Women still hold very few real positions of power. When I watched the election returns last night, there were no female big wigs at the anchor’s desk. Women still make 77 cents on a man’s dollar.
But when Iowa's outcome seemed determined to force Hillary's end, women (and men) thought, not so fast. At BlogHer.com over the past few days we have had incredible discussions about Hillary, and whether she deserves our vote. Many think she does, but not because she “cried” (that’s crying? Elisa Camahort said it: I get more teary watching some commercials), and not because Obama and Edwards “ganged up” on her at the debate Saturday night. Please, give us more credit than that.
I think many young women are coming around to Hillary because despite our hesitancy to re-join the Feminist Majority, we know it’s time. Oddly enough, I think it took a reminder from the godmother of feminism, Gloria Steinem, to wake us up. As (male) uber-blogger Markos put it: “You underestimate that sympathy at your own peril. If I found myself half-rooting for her given the crap that was being flung at her, is it any wonder that women turned out in droves to send a message that sexist double-standards were unacceptable?”
It’s time. Older women have understood that and overwhelmingly support Clinton, but younger women have been slower to support Hillary. I think, though, we are realizing that perhaps having a woman in the White House will let us breathe a little easier at work.
Rita Arens (age bucket: 30-39) put it best:
I'm voting for Hillary for the same reason I lost my virginity - holding onto it until I found the perfect guy was becoming such an elevated ideal that I was never going to find a guy perfect enough to deserve it, my purity, my lotus flower, my blooming womanhood. I was going to walk around forever, deeming every man I met not worthy, until I finally ruined myself of finding love anywhere, my expectations unrealistic. So I slept with the guy I was dating at the time. I got it over with. And
