Earlier today, I wrote a post in response to AC Kleinheider’s column. It was getting lengthy, so I broke it into two parts. Below is Part II. Click here for Part I.

It’s not very often that I find myself agreeing with Tennessee bloggers, Betsy Phillips at Tiny Cat Pants or Newscoma. While always provocative, they represent more of the old-school feminism that I rail against most days. However, today they are nearly correct in responding to Kleinheider’s asinine post about conservative women in Tennessee.

To a large degree, Aunt B gets it:

Which brings us to the second thing happening–basic, humanitarian feminist ideals have permeated so far into our culture that even non-feminist women have basic, core feminist values they expect for themselves. They expect to speak and be listened to. They expect to be able to run for office and win. They expect recognition for their own work and to have that work attributed to them and not to their spouses. And they expect to have enough freedom of movement to be able to travel around and campaign.

Yes, Aunt B, to some extent feminism has been successful. But this success is hardly what the founders of the women’s liberation movement wanted in the 1960s. We’ve achieved equality in society. I find it a failure of the conservative movement that it took radical liberals to bring about this change. Equality should be inherent in the conservative platform of individual rights and free enterprise. It’s ironic that conservative women are the success story in this 50-year struggle. That’s what smarts for feminists. It’s a bittersweet victory if conservative women are the first ones to achieve their arbitrary goals and break the numerous ceilings that keep popping up.

Few can have problems with equity feminism.  I fully support those positions. What Aunt B fails to mention are the two different types of feminism, which Christina Hoff Sommers notes in her book, Who Stole Feminism? She and a few other authors explain the difference between  equity feminism and gender feminism. Aunt B is discussing equity feminism, which I support and most people on the planet support. She hints at the differences:

And third, feminists are still enough of a bogey-person (ha) among conservatives, that Republican woman can go a long way–thanks to feminists–while insisting that they are not like those FEMINISTS!!!! Even though, they clearly are. I mean, you folks who lived through the 60s and 70s, when men were hollering about how feminists just wanted to be men, isn’t it hilarious that the first militant female congressman is Marsha Blackburn? And she’s a “Congressman” as some kind of anti-feminist stance? Hilarious.

Gender feminism, the victimization of women, the attacks on men and the relentless pursuit of abortion, is the f-word “bogey-person” that Aunt B references. As someone recently told me, “There’s feminism, all the equality stuff, and then there are femi-nazis.” This is an important distinction that shows feminists have not 1) done a very good job of educating people about what their ideology means or 2) They desperately want to hide the fissure in their movement and admit that one side is so far left that most Americans disagree with them.

We’re now two generations out from the women’s liberation movement. In the 90s and early part of this decade, feminism was simplified to “being a woman who makes choices for herself.” Sarah Palin represented what the modern feminists had been preaching for so long. She’s active in her community, balances a career and a family and enjoys a “partnership marriage” with a husband who doesn’t mind changing the diapers.  Palin was the first test of modern feminism, and they realized that they didn’t like what she represented. So on August 2008, the feminist movement collectively changed the definition that they had been preaching for twenty years. It was no longer good enough to be “a strong woman who made her own choices” but a woman who represented what was eerily similar to the platform of the Democratic Party.

It’s frustrating to see these mixed results. Yes, society has changed. Yes, society did need to change, but the claws are still out because the examples are conservative.  As Aunt B notes:

I mean, yeah, as a feminist, it does make me roll my eyes to see all these TNGOP women building off of the successes feminists have won for them while at the same time pretending to be the same old women they’ve always been.

Sigh…society has changed, and many conservatives with it. Just because you’re stuck in the 80s, doesn’t mean we are. Younger generations have much more nuanced views towards thorny issues like staying at home vs. working. I guess you could call that a feminist victory, but it’s really a reflection of societal change, generatonal differences and sheer economics.

Its genuinely hard for a woman to stay at home now. Due to inflation and higher costs of living, it’s not really possible for most families to exist on one income. Our standards of living have increased since the 70s/80s, but real costs of education and housing making working absolutely necessary. I’ve written before about the debt load that young people are facing. Student loans are a major factor in why young people are postponing marriage and why young mothers are forced to work. Very few conservatives are still going to debate the working mom vs. stay-at-home mom debate. It’s a decision that should be left up to individual families.

Is it best for children to have one parent at home? I believe so. Does it matter if the parent is the mother or father? I don’t think so. I think the two post-feminism generations have extremely different views on gender roles and the second shift work. The concept of sex discrimination never really crosses our minds, and we don’t view our professional and political activities through a gender lens. Many older feminists are extremely angry at those changes, but it’s only inevitable as time pushes generations farther away.

What feminism has done is force women to walk a narrow ideological plank. While feminism claims that it advocates the right for women to make the best choices for themselves, it only advocates for choices that align with progressive politics. It may be possible for a woman to decide to work or a woman to stay at home. But her choices to work outside the home will be the only socially acceptable one out there.

As Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, two leading Gen X feminists, explain in Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism, a woman may be pro-life and a feminist, but the moment she advocates for pro-life issues, she’s no longer a feminist. The moment that a conservative woman advocates for issues that are not deemed acceptable by the larger feminist movement, she can no longer carry the f-label.

It’s a problem when the definition of a movement is so vague that it covers everyone, but then it’s members only selectively invite women to the club. Either feminism stands for everyone or it doesn’t. The movement really needs to make a choice.

Tags: Amy Richards, Betsy Phillips, Christina Hoff Sommers, feminism, Grassroots, Jennifer Baumgardner, Newscoma, Who Stole Feminism

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Economics, Palinistas, Politics, Tennessee, feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.