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Rebecca Walker, daughter of the author Alice Walker (The Color Purple) describes her journey away from her mother’s rabid hate-filled feminism.
… I was raised to believe that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle. But I strongly feel children need two parents and the thought of raising Tenzin without my partner, Glen, 52, would be terrifying.
As the child of divorced parents, I know only too well the painful consequences of being brought up in those circumstances. Feminism has much to answer for denigrating men and encouraging women to seek independence whatever the cost to their families.
My mother’s feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn’t even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.
I love my mother very much, but I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son - her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.
Well, so be it. My mother may be revered by women around the world - goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it’s time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution. …
… Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.
But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women’s movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them - as I have learned to my cost. I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.
I hope that my mother and I will be reconciled one day. Tenzin deserves to have a grandmother. But I am just so relieved that my viewpoint is no longer so utterly coloured by my mother’s.
I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters - a happy family.
Melanie Phillips lays the blame for cultural rot at he feet of the left intelligencia.
Peggy Noonan writes on three accomplished women, Golda Mier, Indira Ghandi, and Margaret Thatcher.
She was born in Russia, fled the pogroms with her family, was raised in Milwaukee, and worked the counter at her father’s general store when she was 8. In early adulthood she made aliyah to Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz, picking almonds and chasing chickens. She rose in politics, was the first woman in the first Israeli cabinet, soldiered on through war and rumors of war, became the first and so far only woman to be prime minister of Israel. And she knew what it is to be a woman in the world. “At work, you think of the children you’ve left at home. At home you think of the work you’ve left unfinished. . . . Your heart is rent.” This of course was Golda Meir. …
Camille Paglia thinks Hillary has done women no favors.
When the dust settles over the 2008 election, will Hillary Clinton have helped or hindered women’s advance toward the US presidency?
Right now, Hillary is in Godzilla mode, refusing to accept Barack Obama’s looming nomination and threatening to tie the Democratic party in legal knots until the August convention and beyond.
Those who think she will withdraw gracefully in a few weeks are living in cloud cuckoo land. The Clintons are ruthless scrappers who will lock their bulldog teeth in any bloody towel.
In her raw ambition and stubborn, grinding energy, Hillary will certainly cast a long shadow on young women aspiring to high office. She is both inspiring role model and cringe-making bad example — an overtly feminist careerist who never found a way to succeed without her husband’s connections, advice, and intervention. …
Maureen Dowd imagined a conversation between Barack and Hillary.
“What do you want? Please, Sweetie, would you just tell me what you want?”
“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I want.”
“Besides that, Hillary. Seriously, you don’t want your delusion to put John McCain in the White House. Or maybe you do. You have no shot. I’m 60 delegates away from nomination nirvana. You should stop stalking me. I come down to Florida for a victory lap and you follow me down here and call for a recount. Look what that did for Al Gore. If you show a shred of common sense and take a powder now, the party will put you on a pedestal.”
“Pedestals are for losers. You’re on a pedestal. I’ve never been a loser. I refuse to lose. I won the West Virginia and Kentucky derbies, and I’m not going to end up like Eight Belles.”
“Hillary, you’ve been a great candidate, better than your train-wreck campaign. You’re Churchillian in your indomitable tenacity. You’ve inspired women all over the country. In fact, you’ve inspired some of them to hate me. But now it’s time for you to try to muster a gracious exit.”
“Forget it, Bones. …
Claudia Rosett with the lowdown on the UN inspector who’s checking to see if there’s racism in the presidential election this year.
In the Rashomon world of UN flim-flam, some might call it a junket, some might call it a farce, some might call it a political hit job in an election year — and they’d all have a good case. Here comes Monsieur Doudou Diene of Senegal, dispatched to America as a special investigator by the UN’s Geneva-based Human Rights Council (yes, the outfit where the delegates of China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia et al meet regularly to define human rights right down into the sewer, slam Israel, and then repair to the Mercedes and BMWs waiting to ferry them off to dinner). Diene is jetting around on a two-week tour that will — as Benny Avni reports in the NY Sun, and Nile Gardiner describes on NRO – take him to Washington, New York, Chicago, Omaha, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico (we are not told whether he brought beach reading and a bathing suit).
One might hope that Doudou Diene has come here to learn about and report back on the virtues and workings of a free country — a field which for some at the UN Human Rights Council would be virgin terrain. But let’s not get ridiculous. This is the UN at work, and Diene is no de Toqueville — here he is in 2006 parading as a UN expert on “Islamophobia,” by-passing some of the most racist and repressive societies on earth in order to dwell upon the failings of democracies, and his desire for the Danes to corral their cartoons.
Diene will now be touring America to inquire into whether “racism,” as understood by the UN, figures in the presidential campaign. What does that portend? …
The greens have taken over college dorms. WSJ with details.
On Monday the trustees of the University of Delaware voted to approve a new yearlong residence life program. Undergraduates will be asked, in a reprise of “show and tell,” to bring in one of their “favorite material objects” and explain why it is important to them. They will be instructed to discuss intrusive questions like “How do you define love?” and “Who are you voting for” with their dorm-mates. Finally, this extracurricular curriculum will ask students to “pick a metaphor that illustrates their view of sustainability.”
If you have spent any time on a college campus recently, you will realize that “sustainability” is the academy’s favorite new buzzword. There’s the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE); a Sustainable Endowments Institute that publishes a College Sustainability Report Card; an Ivy Plus Sustainability Working Group, and another one for colleges in the Northeast. There are sustainability offices and officers at dozens of schools nationwide.
People unfamiliar with this subject might think that sustainability is just a fancy-sounding term for a smattering of environmentally friendly campus activities. But while it’s true that the word does encompass recycling and higher-efficiency light bulbs, college administrations in recent years have started to give the term a more dramatic meaning.
More than 500 schools have signed AASHE’s American College and University President Climates Commitment, which sets them on a path toward “climate neutrality.” Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University and one of the document’s signers, released this humble statement: “Colleges and Universities must lead the effort to reverse global warming for the health and well being of current and future generations.”
According to Lee Bodner, president of EcoAmerica, an organizer of the pledge, the schools have two years to create a comprehensive plan for “eliminating direct emissions” from their campuses and for integrating sustainability into their classrooms. …