Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Can . . . Not . . . Compute . . .

This and this represent just one of the things that is working to convince me that 2008 will be a key turning point in women's history to come. Perhaps it's the true end of the feminist movement, as defined by the second wave.

2008 is the year when race and gender when mainstream with the Clinton/Obama campaign, requiring women's historians the world over to rub their eyes when they saw Elizabeth Cady Stanton facing off with Frederick Douglass on the front page of the New York Times' "Week in Review." Now we see a modern-day Phyllis Schlafly, a school board activist following a long line of politically active anti-feminists, becoming a candidate for VP. YET: it's no longer cool rally your female troops by hating feminists, as Schlafly notoriously did at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977.

So now the GOP embraces the Republican feminists who it slowly ejected from the party during the 1970s? All of a sudden, socially conservative women embrace Hillary Clinton and the idea of working mothers? At the same time that the Schlafly faction is loud and proud and fighting for even more socially conservative programs on the GOP platform?

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