Youth Flocking to Sanders Because 'You're Right, Bernie, You're Right!'

[artislife]

4. Interesting article on young feminists

Last edited Tue Jul 7, 2015, 06:08 PM - Edit history (1)

Hi I am a new member. I support Bernie Sanders, I am a Mexican/Native American/Irish woman who read here during the 2008 and 2012. I live in a Washington State, so until a few weeks ago I was very happy with Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray. (TTP votes).

I know there are a lot of flame throwing going on and it reminds me of the other two election cycles. But I felt so strongly to show that people who don't self identify with only one group (woman) or (Latina) can see our choices in more than one linear line.

To the article.http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/2016-hillary-clinton-feminists-20150515
Alexandra Svokos was six years old, growing up in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, when she became a Hillary Clinton fan. It was 1998, and Clinton had published Dear Socks, Dear Buddy, a collection of children's letters addressed to the first family's pets. Svokos became so obsessed with the book, she recalls, that she wrote her own letter—not to Socks the cat or Buddy the Labrador, but to Clinton herself. When she got a reply on official White House stationery with the first lady's signature, Svokos was thrilled.

Clinton was an early feminist icon for many women of Svokos's generation—long before they even began to think of themselves as feminists. Svokos, who's now 23 and a fellow at The Huffington Post, grew up with parents who called themselves feminists and practiced gender equality in the house, balancing household responsibilities and encouraging Svokos and her two sisters to "fight for what we deserved." Mostly, she says, feminism meant "girl power" to her—and that meant, in turn, rooting for Clinton when she made her first run for the presidency in 2008. Svokos was in high school then, and her ideas about feminism were still pretty simple; she admired Clinton "because she was a woman, rather than knowing much about what she stood for."Eight years later, Svokos's notion of feminism has evolved—and the prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming president no longer fills her with unbridled excitement. Svokos says her ideas about feminism began to change when she studied economics at Columbia University, beginning in 2010. As she learned about economic inequality in the United States and around the world, she says, she began to see how gender, race, and class were intertwined—how, for instance, expanding access to birth control can stimulate an economy by enabling women to pursue their own careers.

Feminism came to mean something very different from girl power. And Hillary Clinton came to look like the symbol of an older generation of women more concerned with female empowerment—in particular, with white, middle-class, American female empowerment—than with broader issues of social and economic justice. Svokos says she'll vote for Clinton in 2016, but she's not expecting her to make social justice and inequality true priorities if she makes it to the White House. "I find her lacking, in that I realize she's not likely to push for the kind of change I'd like to see," Svokos says. "At the same time, though, I believe she knows how to manage politics and will be more than capable in the position."
HILLARY CLINTON came of age during the peak years of second-wave feminism. The first wave began in the mid-1800s, with women's suffrage as the goal; the second stretched from the 1960s to the early 1980s, and focused on reproductive and workplace rights. Writer and activist Betty Friedan is usually credited with catalyzing the second wave with The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, the landmark book called for women's liberation from housework, with Friedan famously writing: "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.' "As the feminism of Friedan and second-wave stalwarts like Gloria Steinem moved into the mainstream, some began to criticize it as a movement tailored to white women of means. Who, they asked, would clean the homes and care for the children of Friedan's liberated middle-class housewives? Where was their liberation? Such questions fed into a larger critique of second-wave feminism: that it saw white American women's concerns as representing those of all women.

(snip)

Social media changed the landscape of feminism. Young women who might not learn about feminism in their schools or communities could find primers on Tumblr blogs with names like intersectional feminism 101. Their feminist awakenings thus involved, from the start, debates about second-wave feminism's perceived failures of inclusivity. "Anyone who entered the feminist conversation in the Internet age has immediate access to not only research about those failures, but also to a lot of the conversations about them," says feminist organizer and writer Shelby Knox, who's 28. "The barriers are a lot lower for participation in the movement."

And there is more. Please click on the link if you are interested in reading it. I am not sure if I am supposed to copy the whole article or just the beginning or just quotations. I never really paid attention because I wasn't able to post. If this needs to be edited, go ahead ---no hard feelings, just a little learning!