Reply #20: am also a 'tweener'

[salin]

very tail end of the baby boomers... went to work in DC after graduating from college - and while it was the Reagan era - tehre were a whole lot of liberals in and around the Hill where I worked (the House was solidly dem, and the senate kept flipping back and forth). The ERA had already died - and while I supported the ERA (though I didn't know about it until after the push to get it passed had already died out) I took comfort in what I now see as tired rhetoric that said that the Amednment wasn't needed, as the rights were already in place / covered by other Amendments. After a year or so in DC I realized that all of my liberal female friend would say... "I'm not a feminist... but I believe" and would state a bunch of feminist policy beliefs. It made me uneasy - this distancing from the word - this sense that the word had become a code word for "militant (gay - implied in the distancing but never spoken) feminist". Discomforted by this disconnect - supporting the cause but denying the tag - I decided I would NEVER claim that. So that experience pulled me into the fold - and made me pay attention more and take forgranted less those who opened doors for us.

It seems so long ago that I came to that awareness. I think that things, even among progressive young women, had gotten even worse in the intervening years (in terms of distancing from "feminism" and assuming the battles were over.) Glad to read your words - and I relate very well. Same as you I was only a kid when I saw the images of the bra burnings, and talk of the ERA. Had I not found myself in the middle of politics in DC at an early age - and personally confronted with the oddness of folks like me - embracing feminist issues - but claiming "But, I am not a feminist" ... I might be, like you, just becoming a lot more clear now, about how much can quickly be lost in terms of our rights, and questioning the comfortable belief that the battles were already over.