You’re Not Grateful, But You’re Welcome

At a friend’s urging, I recently read the book, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Rebecca Traister. It’s about the election Hillary Clinton lost to Barak Obama. But it’s also about the tiny edge that a woman of power has to walk, and it’s about the evolution of feminism.

Of course, I remember the election. I remember the contrast between Hillary’s pantsuits and confident stride with Sarah Palin’s soccer mom femininity and cutesy aphorisms. It was ridiculous that a presidential candidate was being compared with a vice presidential candidate, but of course it was also inevitable given that they had their gender in common.

I remember one friend, one I thought a feminist, shrugging and explaining that she would support Clinton, but her voice was just so shrill. Shrill. Yep, in a country where every good broadcast announcer with credibility has a deep, masculine voice, Hillary was an affront to our ears with her lack of testosterone-laden bass tones.

The lack of support by the left was more wounding at the time than the predictable snide remarks by the right.

As the book says, “If there hadn’t been so much stone-cold silence, so much shoulder-shrugging ‘What, me sexist?’ inertia from the left, if there had been a little more respect accorded to the unsubtle clues being transmitted by 18 million voters that maybe they were interested in this whole woman-in-the-White-House-thing, then the right would not have had the juice to charge this particular device.”

For older feminists, relieved that finally, finally, there might be a woman in the White House, the defection of younger women was a shock. Many younger women didn’t find our version of feminism relevant to them. Many younger women denied that they were even feminists at all.

For those of us old enough to remember needing a husband’s permission for a credit card or a house, it was galling to have younger women wallow in the rights we fought to give them.

I remember my shock when my daughter decided to take her husband’s name rather than follow my example and keep her own. I hated it. Hated that somehow she was marking herself as “his” rather than her own person, and that she had no expectation that he would do the same.

She wasn’t alone. A whole swath of her generation thought it charming to be retro, as though owning urban chickens and making bread was part of the same lifestyle as shedding your maiden name.

Back in the election, Clinton was losing even more support to Obama as feminism and racism knocked heads.

As Traister says, “There was the valid sense from Clinton supporters that people didn’t sling racial epithets as easily as they called women bitches, that nobody joked about watermelons and fried chicken with the get-a-sense-of-humor brio attached to PMS and castration jokes. And the equally valid sense from Obama supporters that racism toward Obama was deeper, more insidious than what could be put on a bumper sticker, that Hillary’s privileged racial and economic caste meant she could probably handle the period jokes.”

Feminists seemed to be fracturing between those who wanted a woman, yes, but they were also black and wanted someone with their skin color in the White House; and between older feminists who remembered that the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 but that the Equal Rights Act was still in limbo, and the younger feminists who thought their older sisters humorless and stuck in the past.

In short, we older feminists felt like the younger women were ungrateful brats.

Their decisions were a slap in our face. Even my daughter’s decision about her married name was a slap. Because their decisions were not ours. Their decisions seemed to take for granted what we fought so hard for.

And then, the epiphany.

That was what the fight was all about in the first place.

As Susan B. Anthony said. “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It’s to make them ungrateful.”

So, to young women, including my daughter:

You’re not grateful. But you’re welcome.