There is no joke there. And no one in their right mind would try to keep a woman from being able to stand on her own and make her own choices.
I won't deny there was a time when women were second class citizens, and I don't espouse a return to those days.
My objection to the feminists of the 70s was their obvious disdain for the traditional, going well beyond a demand for independence and equal opportunity. They compared marriage to prostitution. They considered homemaking unfit for anyone with half a brain. They compared giving birth to shitting out a pumpkin. (Maybe it is.)
If you want to salute them, go ahead. I believe they damaged more than they improved. You keep Betty and Gloria and Bella, I'll take Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham and Phyllis Schlafly.
I don't personally agree with their radicalism, but they were the necessary equal and opposite reaction.
And without them, and much more importantly the many, many more less radical activists who followed some but not all of their ideas, feminism wouldn't be what it is today - which is exactly what you and I both seem to agree on.
Judging any movement by its most extreme is dipping a toe across the line into stereotyping, LD. Yeah there's a hint of truth to any stereotype but it's like only watching a five minute scene from a two-hour movie. You miss the whole story.
I'm referencing the leading feminist thinkers of that day, GC. Quoting the leaders is not sterotyping. As I'm sure you know, there are far more radical quotes I could paste.
They were social engineers who denied basic, eternal and human truths. They were dead wrong. Give boys tea sets to play with? Give girls toy guns? Please.
You're point works in reverse as well. I believe many younger women today have no idea what the label feminist once meant. I doubt they would choose it if they did. That you choose it is not surprising, but that you have to qualify it speaks volumes about the history of the term.
You may be right. I'm on the edge between what you would call the 70's generation, having been a child then, then, and what you woud call today's youth, being...er...not all that young anymore.
I think the second generation of any movement, like myself and those my age, see the balances more clearly than those who come before and after. Today's youth don't have any way to relate to the feminist leaders of the 70s perhaps, but they also have no way to relate to the world that created them. They haven't seen the changes to appreciate them. And some of the older generation is so steeped in that world before the feminist movement, they fail to see how much has changed.
Although I woud beg to differ that gender specific toys and games have anything to do with basic eternal truths. I have boy-girl twins who play well together when they're not trying to kill each other. 'Nuff said.
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