On Vox, Kate Cronin-Furman and Mira Rapp-Hooper are (yet again) making the case that millennial women, and other women who aren’t voting for Clinton, aren’t feminisming right. That they don’t understand feminism at all. That they’re too young and oblivious to gendered oppression to comprehend the issues that our foremothers of first and second wave feminism worked so hard to address. That today’s feminists are, in short, much like the authors’ younger selves: idealistic, but mostly clueless.
We both self-identified as feminists from an early age, but it was a feminism mostly concerned with solidarity —with survivors of wartime sexual violence, with women campaigning against female genital mutilation in their communities, with girls forced to work inside the home instead of going to school. It didn't feel like our rights or well-being on the line.
But it turned out they were — we just didn't know it yet.
Once again, we’re seeing White Feminism™, completely oblivious to its own privilege and dying relevance. To that end…
Dear Kate Cronin-Furman and Mira Rapp-Hooper,
We are well aware of the gendered inequality in this country. Judging by your article, I'd say that most of us who are intersectional feminists are far more aware of most inequality than either of you. How condescending can you be? Hillary is NOT a feminist icon, just because she's a woman. She's shown, repeatedly, that if she is an icon for anything, it's money and power.
All you've managed to do with this article is further alienate yourselves from modern, intersectional feminism, and the feminists who evolved your movement into something far more inclusive, and, I believe, far superior to the white, middle-and-upper class, exclusive, tone-deaf feminism of the second wave. Not that those movements didn’t make many necessary and valuable changes to our society; they most certainly did. What you seem to miss, though, is that the changes you made were made mostly without considering poor women, women of color, queer women, and trans women. In fact, that movement often explicitly ignored the concerns and issues of anyone who wasn’t white, cis, and relatively financially stable.
Perhaps you, and all your second wave colleagues, could stop TELLING the rest of us what we think, and start ASKING - and actually listening to what we say. I'm no young woman, anymore. I'm nearing forty, but the young women have the right of it, and you are flat-out wrong. What you're doing, here, is worse than the mansplaining to which we've all become accustomed, precisely BECAUSE you're feminists, and ought to know better than to tell other women what they think, or why they think it. Shame on you. Shame on Steinem. Shame on Albright.
Most of all, shame on Hillary, for not being the woman who would, if elected, advance the aims of today’s feminism. There are thousands of reasons why many women - not JUST millennials - refuse to vote for Hillary in the primaries. I could list them for hours, and still not come close to naming them all, so I won't try. But here's a little sampling:
- As board member for WalMart, she helped to wage a campaign against labor unions. The Walton family, who have faced multiple lawsuits for discrimination against women, and are the beneficiaries of the most comprehensive corporate welfare in the nation, are some of her most staunch - and generous - supporters.
- As a policymaker she has consistently favored policies devastating to women, the poor, people of color, and LGBTQIA persons.
-
As first lady, she helped Bill Clinton to gut actual welfare, to actual families. The vast majority of people harmed by that action were women, children, the disabled, people of color, or existed at some intersection between one or all of the four.
-
She lobbied congress on behalf of her husband's crime bill, which encouraged states to lengthen prison sentences, expanded the death penalty, and eliminated federal funding for inmate education, among many other things. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, wrote in The Nation: In her support for the 1994 crime bill, for example, she used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals. “They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” she said. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators. And it worked. The Clinton presidency saw the greatest increase in incarceration in our history.
- In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates makes a compelling case that Clinton lacks even a basic historical comprehension of racism, let alone the tools to address all its modern incarnations.
- Her record concerning the issues of Latin-Americans is also dismal. Her stances on immigration mirror those of many of the GOP elite, she supported Honduras’ 2009 military coup, and publicly voiced the opinion that undocumented minors should be sent packing as soon as possible.
- As First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State, she has shown support for trade agreements that inevitably lead to worse economic conditions for the most vulnerable in our population, and often those in other nations.
- While Clinton has been quoted as saying that Women have always been the primary victims of war, her policy decisions have shown that the victims don’t matter; she has been almost exclusively pro-war. Clinton has stated that she is an emphatic, unwavering supporter of Israel's safety and security, ignoring the impact of Israel’s bloody occupation on the lives of Palestinians. As we all know by now, she voted in favor of the war in Iraq, in 2002, and has since said that she does not regret that vote. She has repeatedly claimed that she relied on the guidance of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — infamous for his positions on bombing civilians and supporting governments which torture innocents — for foreign policy decisions.
- When it comes to LGBTQIA issues, many view her as a latecomer to the front lines, and one whose only reason for jumping on the bandwagon was political expediency. While Sanders was berating congress over gay soldiers’ rights in the 1996, and opposed defining marriage exclusively as between a man and a woman, Nineties-era Clinton said: Because I believe marriage means something different. Marriage is about a historic, religious, and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is, as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman.
This list is by no means comprehensive, and doesn’t include, for example, the long list of anti-feminist (in practice) corporations and countries from whom she has accepted millions of dollars, both before and during her campaign, who will inevitably influence her policy decisions, if she’s elected.
We, intersectional feminists both young and not-so, aren’t denying Clinton our support because we don’t know how bad things are. On the contrary, we are quite well versed in the layers and layers of oppression — gendered and otherwise — which her words and policies and opinions and ideas perpetuate, rather than helping to combat.
You see, feminism has evolved beyond the days when it was focused solely on the rights of middle-aged, middle-class, white, cis- women. Those of us who understand that are concerned that you seem unable to grasp that your old model of imperial White Feminism™ is standing on the platform, while the train pulls out of the station. That model is obsolete, and you’re being left behind.
So, please, Gloria Steinem, Madeline Albright, Kate Cronin-Furman and Mira Rapp-Hooper, stop trying to explain to the rest of us why we won’t vote for Hillary.
We already know.
Sincerely,
A thirty-seven year old intersectional feminist whose vote will go to Sanders.