If there’s one thing young female progressives love, it’s being told they are stupid and their feelings are wrong and based on their hormones.
If that statement isn’t true, recent comments from former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and famous feminist Gloria Steinem have served only to alienate young women from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and pushed them further toward Bernie Sanders.
As a young female progressive, let me take those statements out of the realm of the hypothetical and into the concrete and real. Steinem’s and Albright’s comments are insulting and anti-feminist and negatively color my previous, mostly-neutral feelings about the Clinton campaign.
Steinem, appearing on Bill Maher’s show last Friday – a problem in and of itself, but one for another day – implied that young women were largely in favor of Sanders just to meet boys.
“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie,’ ” she said.
That’s actually not what I’m thinking. I don’t particularly care where the boys are. I’m thinking, who voted in favor of the Iraq war? Who wants to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Who is backed by corporate interests? Who are the hyper-wealthy afraid of?
Steinem backed off from her stance on Sunday in a post on her Facebook page.
“I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what’s been misinterpreted as implying young women aren’t serious in their politics,” Steinem said.
“What I had just said on the same show was the opposite,” she went on to say. “Young women are active, mad as hell about what’s happening to them, graduating in debt, but averaging a million dollars less over their lifetimes to pay it back. Whether they gravitate toward Bernie or Hillary, young women are activists and feminists in greater numbers than ever before.”
That’s what young women want to hear. We don’t want to hear Madeleine Albright tell us that there’s a “special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
In 2008, Sarah Palin attempted to co-opt that line, which Albright has been saying for years.
Back then, Albright took offense to Palin’s use of her quote, saying that although she was flattered that Governor Palin chose to site her as a source of wisdom, “what I said had nothing to do with politics…The truth is, if you care about the status of women in our society and in our troubled economy, the best choice by far is Obama-Biden.”
Albright evidently cannot see why that same principle would extend to this election. It’s understandable, as a Hillary Clinton presidency isn’t nearly the nightmare scenario that a Sarah Palin vice-presidency would be.
But the sentiment still applies. Young women are hungry for a female president, sure, but they’re hungrier for a candidate who’s committed to attacking income inequality, climate change and criminal justice reform in systemic, meaningful ways.
There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t think other women are smart enough to choose the candidate that will benefit the most amount of women, regardless of the candidate’s gender.