Feminists' Fight With Everyone Else

I’m honestly having a really hard time understanding, as Slate calls it, the rise of the Angry White Woman. I knew that older feminists would likely flock to Hillary Clinton, despite her problems as a candidate and as a feminist symbol.

But this? And this? And this? Feminists are really going to vote for John McCain, a man who voted against an equal pay bill? That doesn’t sound like feminism at all. What do these women feel they’re being denied? More specifically, who do they think is doing the denying?

Linda Hirshman, writing for the Washington Post, argued that feminism became too inclusive. A quick look at all of the comments on this blog will tell you that’s a rather unique view. As Hirshman notes, women of color rejected mainstream feminism because it only addressed the issues affecting middle class white women, and she says younger feminists insistent on the inclusion of all the issues facing oppressed people, along with middle class white women abandoning the movement when they achieved their most pressing goals, helped the movement spin out of focus. Most confusing is her call to arms. Do we focus only on the problems of the bourgeoisie? Is being a woman more critical to those who would propel the movement into the future than any other way they might self-identify? Are white, middle-class women’s involvement still the key to progress? She seems to think so. But white middle-class women’s particularly non-inclusive view of women’s issues is unintentionally, or intentionally, demonstrated every day. As a Slate commenter pointed out, it usually leaves black women out of the conversation entirely.

Hirshman’s is, at best, a counterproductive view. The problem for me, and probably many other women my age who would be feminists but for those kinds of statements (like Hirshman’s and like Steinem’s) from our forebears, is that the older feminists seem to be misidentifying, or have forgotten, the problems. We haven’t nearly accomplished all of the goals of the second-wave, and Clinton’s campaign brought out the ugliest, most-cartoonish sexism we have seen on a national stage a long time. But what that illustrated is not that sexism is worse than racism, as if you could possibly compare the two. What it should have illustrated, as the reaction to other recent stories have illustrated, is who exactly is still in charge.

It’s shameful that we haven’t had a female president, and that we have so few women in political life (though, for the record, there are currently eight female governors; there have been three African-American governors in the history of the country.) That just illustrates that the country is still mostly run by older white men. That narrative, to the exclusion of all other viewpoints and perspectives and backgrounds, is still the central one in the country. Those furiously angry white women act as though, since a black man beat them to it, the country will never elect a woman because we’ve already broken the race barrier. What? I’m sorry, was there a race? Does one thing happen to the exclusion of the other? I thought the point was to break all barriers.

Maybe middle-class white women under 30, those who have never faced a world in which they couldn’t have an abortion and who have never met an American woman who couldn’t vote and who probably didn’t face problems getting into the college of their choice because of their gender, just don’t see the problems facing them as being exclusive to all other problems of oppression. That would be a really good thing. But it doesn’t mean they don’t understand the problems facing women. It doesn’t mean we can, or should, stop working for what women need. Instead of fighting over who has it worse, it’s past time for the movement to address the racist issues within it and reach out to as many women and men as possible to face the most entrenched challenges; the problems of domestic violence and poverty and equal pay and equal access to all fields that affect all women, and the problems that disproportionately affect poor women and women of color.

Why can’t a vote for Barack Obama be a vote for feminism? One can’t, as a candidate, address the racism seen here and sexism seen in the Women’s Media Center montage. Those are views held by people who can’t really be swayed. But you can do things to make your government more open, to engage more people, and to try to address the structural problems that affect the most vulnerable in America, whatever their gender or race. Surely that is a good thing for Angry White Women too.