I spent a good part of this week discussing this with some of my very smart friends, and the consensus seems to be that you can’t call yourself a feminist if you also call yourself a conservative, because, apparently, the word “feminist” is owned by liberals. It’s something to do with bra burning back in those crazy ‘60s, when all of the feminists were hippies who spent their free time having sex and staging protests. So if you’re a Democrat and you care very much about women and their progress, then you’re a feminist. But if you’re a Republican and you care very much about women and their progress, then you’re not. I think my very smart friends might be right about this, in part.
For women of a certain age (O’Connor is 76), the association between feminism and hippie liberalism may be, perhaps, simply too great to overcome. And for the women were the hippies (or chose not to be), the concept of feminism may just be too raw, still, for them to ever consider it in anything but political terms. But what about for younger women, who weren’t hippies, and who weren’t even born yet when the hippie feminists were setting their undergarments on fire in 1960’s?
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Risa Green, author of Tales from the Mommy Track on MommyTrackd.com, lives in Los Angeles. In the last four years, she has produced two children, called Harper and Davis, and two novels, called Notes from the Underbelly and Tales from the Crib. She is currently working on a third (novel not child).
