Feminisms (pl), Women and Barack

Correction below:

This diary started off as a reply Tibor75's diary on feminism and was derailed by server problem. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that my comments might deserve a diary, and so led me with a bit of wariness to try to address this issue in more detail than I could in a short comment.

I do approach this diary (as I said) with some caution, being neither a woman nor a feminist in the theoretical sense (I am of course a feminist in the generic sense). That said, here is my effort.

First, let's recognize there is not one feminism, but many feminisms-or perhaps just variations on the general theme of feminism. There are notably feminists (in the stronger sense) who have been quite critical of Hillary Clinton. See for example
Betsy Reed's article in The Nation and the statement by Feminists for Peace and Obama

It seems to me that the more one has read in feminist theory, the less likely one is likely to actually support Hillary Clinton**. It comes as no surprise to me that Barbara Ehrenreich seems to be one of the primary progenitors of the above statement. This is interesting since Ehrenreich is one of the best feminist writers-or one of the best writers in general period-on issues of class and poverty in the US and Hillary's appeal has been to working class white women.

Here is my best sense of why working class white women-especially women over 50 go strongly for Hillary. And whether we agree or disagree with their view of the world, we and the Obama campaign ignore their view at our peril. If these women are not heard then Obama's campaign has a problem.

I was surprised (since my participation on blogs is only sporadic) to see MyDD and Talk Left supporting Hillary, and its not clear how much of their support (clearly some) seems to be motivated by gender. But it did provide a place to start to understand how women supporting Hillary view the world (go to Hillary is 44 to get a general sense of their world view).

Let me see if I can make the case:

Hillary has worked hard all her life and accomplished great things in politics. She is (in their view) the best qualified candidate. To understand this, think about one of the landmark discrimination cases (sorry, the case name escapes me) where male college educated graduates were promoted to bank management trainees when female, older, non-college educated graduates had been training them. That case, I think, epitomizes the workplace experience of many women. And that is how they see the Hillary campaign. Obama, for them, is the college educated, younger man, taking a job they can do just as well or better-and they have to train him to do it.

** Correction from the original statement the more one has read in feminist theory the less one is likely to support Obama. Sorry for the confusion.

We can rail all we want about the limitations of second wave feminism. We can rant (as I have