Yo Mamma

Men for Hillary collected a group of articles/comments on articles about the split between second and so called third wave feminists over Hillary.

I do not consider these third wave women feminist. None of them have ever ORGANIZED to create institutional change to further women's rights. Some of them have written books - big deal. Their claim to fame is criticizing feminism, something they clearly do not understand, not for being feminists. The sooner real feminists understand this and get back to organizing instutional change projects the better it will be for all of us.

Third wave feminism, is sort of like being a witch - you say "I am a feminist" 3 times and I suppose that makes you one in your own mind at least. Then you get funded by the porn industry. Let these mother hating critics go be the next generation of Phyllis Shaffleys and let us begin to organize around the issues where we can.

This is the excellent article that started a lot of blog entries and sexist commentary from the so called 3rd wave feminists and their male admirers. Go to MFH for links to them.

Yo Mamma -Hillary Clinton as the battleground in the war between mothers and daughters.

By Linda Hirshman

...What is the origin of the idea that because your mama or a member of your mother's generation recommended something, that's sufficient reason not to do it?

In this "Mother-Daughter power struggle" that Mojo Mom seeks to ignite, the feminist movement would just replicate the endless division of the feminists within the generations by dividing the generations themselves into interest groups so small that no politician in the world will ever pay them the slightest heed.

Psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow famously speculated that since women raise children, men form their moral psychology by separating from their mothers while women identify with their mothers and so are caught in a web of relationships. The campaign actually contains a nifty example of this.

In a little-noticed video, when NBC's Brian Williams once prompted Sen. Obama to say if the first picture of himself on the cover of Newsweek made him think of a "loved one," Obama said he thought of his mother. "I think she would have been proud, and she would have cried. Her chin would tremble, and she would get all weepy," he said, with his usual composure.

I've never been much for pop-psychologizing, but perhaps the yo-mamma feminist rebellion is an attempt by young women to similarly free themselves from their identification with the mother. If so, it's a great argument for shared childrearing, but it still makes for lousy politics. Following Chodorow's reasoning, just for argument, men are free to stand on the shoulders of their fathers, who weren't around all that much, without psychological consequence.

And so they do. Liberal and conservative. Al Gore and Al Gore, the Bushes, unto the fourth generation, the Harold Ickes, the unbreakable Kristols, Norman and John ("Normanson") Podhoretz. Only women seem to need to separate and destroy in order to start all over again with each generation.

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