“Feminism is a bad word” is old news. Or not.
The detractors of first female president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, have been raking her over the feminist coals. In a refreshing pro-feminist report from the Harvard Crimson, Daniel J. Hemel writes:
“The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent,” cries Heather MacDonald of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute. The conservative National Association of Scholars charges that Faust comes to the presidency “out of a career whose foremost characteristic has been its strong feminist bent,” while The Crimson’s own Christopher B. Lacaria ’09 has called Faust “a career academic and mid-level administrator culled from the women’s studies henhouse.”
Forget, for a moment, that most intelligent people believe in equal rights for women and, like Faust, technically fall under the rubric of “feminist.” Faust has been branded with the F-word by writers who have clearly never read her work.
Love that.
And then there’s Amanda Marcotte’s article, Why I Had to Quit the John Edwards Campaign, up today at Salon. From Amanda:
One question that’s hard to avoid is how much of the venom had to do with the fact that McEwan and I were young women entering into a field (Internet communications) that’s viewed as almost monolithically masculine. From my vantage point, it appeared that sexism was one of the primary motivating energies behind the campaign. Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note of my gender or suggested that I would be a more pleasant woman if I wasn’t so “angry.”
I suspect (and these two pieces demonstrate) that feminist backlash will be at an all-time high soon, if not now. The good news is that it’s for good reason. Feminists are kicking ass: A female speaker of the house, female president of Harvard, HELL, possibly a female President of the USA.
