2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Hillary Clinton isn’t a feminist; she is just politically ambitious [View all]CBHagman
(16,984 posts)I suspect many people don't really know what you term "old-style feminists" were actually doing from the second half of the 20th century on, and it troubles me that in an age when we have the equivalent of multiple research libraries at our fingertips people simply repeat the same things I heard when I was stuck in the dusty stacks with the reference works.
Mid-20th century American feminism, known as the second wave, came about in part because women active in the civil rights and antiwar movements encountered such virulent sexism from their supposed allies.
From the beginning the feminist publication Ms. (still with us more than four decades later) dealt with the issues of domestic violence, welfare, the demands on working mothers -- hardly areas known to one demographic but not another.
Gloria Steinem, currently vilified, often with ageist slurs, for that single sentence in her recent interview with Bill Maher, was writing about female genital mutilation, hardly a white suburban issue, back in the 1970s, when Maher was a freshly minted college graduate. It was more than a little stomach-turning to watch him try to mansplain to her about global issues.
The mission of feminists still isn't done, the obstacles are formidable, but it's simply historically inaccurate to depict the people who've done the work for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years as somehow having let the human race down.
Oh, and the terms humanist and feminist have been keeping company for decades too. Gloria Steinem actually has a funny/sad anecdote about that in one of her essays published in the collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.