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Katha Pollitt kpollitt at thenation.com
Tue Nov 23 20:43:19 PST 1999


T -- I don't know how old you are -- you present yourself as quite a youngun, but this is the Internet, you could be 90 -- but I'm prepared to believe that times have changed, that 25 year old men are settling down with 35 and 40 year old women all the time. Do you have any stats to support your contention?

As for feminism preaching itself out of a job -- in a couple of hundred years maybe. What makes older women so peeved at young women who are "anti-feminist" is not that those young women are refusing to pay homage, but that the young women are wrong about what the condition of women in this country really is. They think they get equal pay, but they don't. They think they can "do anything" -- but they can't. they think there's no going back, and in some ways they're right -- women are never going to drop out of college in great numbers to marry at 19 again. but in other ways they're wrong -- welfare reform, for example, is a tremendous "going back" to the beginning of the century, when poor women were expected to support their kids by whatever means they could find or give them up to foster care or orphanages. I don't think abortion will be made formally illegal as it was pre Roe v Wade. But can abortion be subjected to so many restrictions and hurdles that lots and lots of women end up unable to get to a clinic in time? Sure -- that's already happened in much of the country.

the "anti-feminist" young women don't care about that, though, any more than they care about welfare reform. It won't affect them -- so it doesn't matter.

Will feminism be irrelevant someday? Oh, maybe in 500 years. 600 years, if todays posts on age and gender represent general masculine views!

Katha



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