Always read Barbara Ehrenreich when you get the chance...

...especially when she takes on the those who would undermine Feminism, or undervalue its gains...

Feminism, as you've probably been reading for the last 20 years, is dead. Most women today want to smash through the glass ceiling, run for the Senate, and buy contraceptives at will (not to mention abortions, at least if the fetus they're carrying turns out to be "defective.") But feminism? It's just a bunch of hairy-legged, man-hating, harridans screaming slogans that were already obsolete in the era of Charlie's Angels.

The latest nail in the coffin comes from Ana Marie Cox, the famed blogger known as "wonkette," in her snarky review of Katha Pollitt's new book Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Times. (New York Times Book Review, July 2.) All right, I have a personal stake in this: I wrote a blurb for the book, I'm a friend of Pollitt's, and I'm a little on the strident side myself.

Enjoy the rest of Ehrenreich's response...

Cox's piece is also available online, and here is a telling excerpt:

Progressives have certainly seen setbacks in recent years— from the creeping war on contraception to the perception that they lack the stomach for pragmatic policy calls. One could view these as losses in a continuing debate, but Pollitt's columns evoke a siege. "The truth is, most of the good things about this country have been fought for by liberals," she warns in a 2004 pre-election column. "If conservatives had carried the day, blacks would still be in the back of the bus, women would be barefoot and pregnant, medical care would be on a cash-only basis, there'd be mouse feet in your breakfast cereal and workers would still be sleeping next to their machines." [emphasis mine]

Cox's sentence that I emphasized above is just one of those examples of a so-called progressive pundit accepting, without question, the Right's framing of an issue to their own benefit. First: that such losses are merely "part of a continuing debate," rather than an accurate reflection of the actual shift of the political center toward the Right. Second: that Pollitt would "evoke a siege" with her writing, when one of the main epithets the Right hurls at the Left (especially progressive women) is that we are angry. (In order to forego a discussion of the validity of such anger?) That she mentions that the quote which follows is from a 2004 pre-election column, perhaps instead demonstrates Pollitt's prescience. If you actually read Cox's blog in the past, and can contrast her material with Ehrenreich's, which one of them would you rather have speaking for the Left and for Progressives?

OH BEAUTIFUL

Most Americans can remember the first stanza or so of America's other national anthem, AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. The spacious skies, the amber waves of grain, the fruited plain, and so on from sea to shining sea. Unlike the STAR-SPANGLED BANNER, its tune is easy enough that most people can actually sing it and hit all the notes. AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL was written by a woman named Katherine Lee Bates, inspired by the view from the top of Pike's Peak, a 14,000 odd ft. peak that overshadows Colorado Springs, Colorado. She was the daughter of a Congregationalist Minister; she herself was deeply religious but as an adult could find no home for her faith in any church. She was a prolific poet, and a professor of English at Wellesley, but other than this unofficial national anthem, her work and her name are forgotten.

Katharine Lee Bates lived for twenty-five years with Katharine Coman in a committed partnership that has sometimes been described as a "romantic friendship." Bates wrote, after Coman died, "So much of me died with Katharine Coman that I'm sometimes not quite sure whether I'm alive or not."

Many Americans who mouth the remembered words of her love song to her country would condemn this woman today, three ways from Sunday, as my Grandmother would put it. Today, many good Christians in these United States would deny her faith as false, see her hope as evil, judge her love as sinful.

But there are other words in Katherine Bates' song that are not sung or remembered by Americans on days like today, the 230th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (which also has a lot of words to it that most American citizens don't bother to read or remember).

Words like:

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

or:

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife.
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!

or:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

or:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!

or:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!