More "Stretch Marks on Sisterhood" follow-up and fallout

Phew. There has been a flurry of response to my Women's eNews commentary, Obama v. Clinton Puts Stretch Marks on Sisterhood. I feel that I need to address this topic one more time and then let it go for a while, if that is possible.

I feel fortunate to have talked to Deborah Siegel about the responses, because she and I came up with a consensus that it would be productive for younger women to learn the history of the women's movement, and remember to show appreciation to the women who came before us and fought hard to win our basic rights.

And for Boomer feminists, you really need to start seeing us and taking our points of view seriously.

And both sides need to think, act and write with empathy. Linda Hirshman wrote a response to younger women's commentaries selectively quoting us without really engaging us on the issues. But that paled in comparison to what the Mother Jones blog did by reporting on Hirshman's piece without (apparently) reading our original work.

In Mother Jones, Courtney Martin and I are told that we have a "false consciousness" get characterized as "young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty. Caricatures work both ways, missy."

Whoa. Seriously. You'd think this was left-wingers calling out right-wingers here. Writers such as Courtney and myself are working to help feminism stay relevant for younger women! In the 1970's I was the idealistic 10-year old sitting in the basement, reading my mother's back issues of Ms. Magazine. We want to work with you but such thoughtless, knee-jerk, stereotyping is the kind of divisive rhetoric that is getting in the way.

The Mother Jones blog post is called Throwing Clinton Under the Bus to Spite Mom and I want to challenge it in two additional ways. First of all, my own mother is voting for Obama and so is my Obamican father. So this is not a personal Mom-Daughter conflict for me, but I do believe that there is a genuine generational dynamic within feminism that needs our attention.

The ridiculous caricature that Mother Jones pulled off the shelf brings up another pet peeve of mine about the Boomers: they have a serious blind spot when it comes to seeing Gen X leaders and activists coming up behind them. We've made our mark in Silicon Valley (think Google) but seem to be struggling for visibility in the political arena.

On New Year's Eve I did stand-up comedy for the first time, addressing this issue for a largely Boomer audience. I ended with a group chant among the few Gen Xers in the room, "We're here, we're 40, get used to it!" For people who said "never trust anyone under 30" to think I am still a kid would be amusing if it wasn't getting in the way of having them take my political discourse seriously.

While Mother Jones wants to pigeonhole me as a girl gone wild, I am actually a 39-year old mother and entrepreneur with a Ph. D. from Stanford and 12 years of work experience. In 2008 I will be voting in my sixth presidential election -- and in all five contests so far, a Bush or Clinton has won every single one of them.

So it's not just idealistic new voters who are attracted to Obama's grassroots engagement and message of hope. There are many of us with more than a little gray around the temples who are ready to move beyond the era when the Bush and Clinton families take turns being President.

I am grateful for the good things that happened during the Clinton years of the 1990's but I truly believe that Washington is frozen by two decades of loyalty demands to one of these families, or the other.

Bill Clinton's campaign theme song was "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow." We should remember the following lines, "Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone...don't you look back."

Mojo Mom's commentary on Women's eNews

I'm pretty excited today because I've written a political commentary for Women's eNews, an online news service providing professional coverage on a wide variety of issues affecting women's lives.

My piece, featured as "Today's Story," is called Obama v. Clinton Puts Stretch Marks on Sisterhood.

As a Gen Xer, I feel sandwiched between two powerful generational juggernauts. I am still not sure whether our ultimate generational fate is to play referee between the Boomers and their Gen Y children, or choose sides ourselves.

In my commentary I argue that it's time to extend a welcoming hand rather than a slap in the face to younger leaders, even if we don't always agree on every issue across generational lines. In the Obama-Clinton debate, I feel the choice to support Obama has been unfairly dismissed and disrespected by Boomer feminists.

I hope you'll read the commentary and let me know what you think. Women's eNews doesn't have reader comments on the piece, so feel free to share your thoughts here.

Why is a failed executive "worth" 160 teachers' careers?

I have to hope that we are about to reach a tipping point in this country, where we wake up to what is really going on around us. Ordinary families' bread-and-butter issues don't automatically translate into sensational news segments, but we need to wake up to the fact that families aren't doing as well as they should.

Families did make headlines in the South this week, were a new study revealed that for the first time in four decades, low-income children make up a majority of public school students. The "majority" statistic is what made the news, but if you look at the national map, 49 out of 50 states have a low income student rate of more than 25%.


The national rate is 46%. Unacceptable, any way you slice it.

We also learned this week that fired Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal is receiving $161.5 million in stock options and retirement benefits. This is not a successful CEO; this is a guy whose financial bets on the subprime mortgage market resulted in an $8 billion loss and "risked the entire franchise," according to financial guru Jim Cramer, speaking on The Today Show.

How much is $161 million? A teacher making $40,000 a year, working for 25 years, would earn a million dollars in a lifetime. So we've come to the point where a losing CEO is valued at more than 160 times the LIFETIME EARNINGS of a full-time teacher.

I don't have the solutions to this conundrum but it's clear that our national/economic priorities are totally screwed up. It's time we all take a grown-up look at the future of families. Between the expensive and demanding crunch of child care, and unbelievably expensive elder care, I fear that many families are headed for worsening crisis in the near future.

I'll be writing more about this, but in the meantime I encourage you to read mothers' real-life stories posted this week at MomsRising.org. I also highly recommend the October 23 episode of The Diane Rehm Show talking about long-term health care for seniors. Her expert panel talked about alarming trends including an investment trend in health-care communities that sounded like it could do for nursing homes what subprime mortgages did for the real estate market. (Don't take my word for it; listen to the show.)

This may seem like dry policy but it is really important stuff. 78 million Baby Boomers are headed for their elder years. When the caregiving bomb explodes, the repercussions are going to end up in our laps as mothers, wives and daughters.