This review of a newly released book, written by Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don’t Cry, provides an interesting glimpse into the continued infighting between “old” feminist and “new” feminists. I think I’ll take a read through the book – it will be interesting to see how Traister believes sexism among the left torpedoed Hillary’s presidential aspirations. Her complaint that the left (and the presumably the media) was willing to suspend belief and fawn over candidate Obama’s rhetoric, while looking very little at his record, resonates, though I’m not sure the difference between treatment of Hillary and Obama is as much a woman-man thing as a personality thing, or even a race thing, since part of candidate Obama’s promise was to heal racial wounds, something that Hillary simply couldn’t offer.
Yet on this notion of young feminists dismissing old feminists, it seems strange to me because other than a matter of tone, I just don’t see much of a difference between the agenda that’s being pushed by the standard barriers at groups like NOW and the supposedly “new” feminists. They both support the same agenda–a bigger government safety net with cradle-to-grave care and massive intervention into the economy to replace market-decisions with the wisdom of bureaucrats. What am I missing?