The Sisterhood Split

At a Washington reception last month for a well-known national women's organization, the chair of the board asked Maureen McFadden, a communications executive with the organization, which candidate she'd voted for in the recent primary. McFadden, hoping to avoid an awkward moment, answered that she'd voted by absentee ballot. The board chair pressed ahead, "Did you vote for a boy or a girl?"

"I paused for a long time," says McFadden. "Then I told her I voted for a boy -- I wasn't going to lie." McFadden, who has worked on women's issues for twenty years, says the room went silent and the board chair chastised her. "It was clear that I had betrayed feminism by voting for Obama. It became obvious -- if you didn't vote for Hillary, you were less than a feminist and only marginally a woman."

It's no secret that Clinton's candidacy has caused waves in feminist circles. Media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Post have reported on the rift between feminists voting for Clinton and those supporting Obama. Blogs have weighed in, and feminist listservs are aflame. As a feminist blogger and writer, I've been watching the tension unfold--but with no great surprise. This election "rift," far from being a new wrinkle in a feminist utopia, is a fairly predictable response from a movement already disunited. The Clinton-Obama divide has shone a spotlight on feminism's dirty little not-so secret: the movement's longstanding power imbalance, in which a few organizations and leaders decide what counts as an acceptable platform. Indeed, feminist support for Clinton--coming from the usual suspects like the National Organization for Women (NOW), EMILY's List, Gloria Steinem and former Ms. magazine editor Robin Morgan--has been organized, strong and far-reaching. What's been less than savvy, however, is the reaction some feminist Clinton supporters have expressed toward their Obama-endorsing cohorts. I've seen Obama supporters called everything from naïve to traitors to the cause, and the majority of this ire has come from mainstream professional feminists.

For example, in a widely disseminated article that inspired responses ranging from effusive to horrified, Morgan diagnosed young women who support Obama as "eager to win male approval by showing they're not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can't identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power..." Gloria Feldt, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, penned a piece for The Huffington Post in which she warned women they would be missing out on a historic moment if they didn't vote for Clinton. "Will women give this Moment away freely once again?" she pondered.

The intensity of feminist infighting has even prompted a call for reconciliation. "Morning in America: A letter from feminists on the election" in last week's Nation, written by feminist heavyweights, called on women to "refocus on the bigger picture." But the letter--written after a breakfast of blueberry muffins served on "the good china" at Steinem's house, with nary a woman under 40 in sight--represents the exact problem it purports to seek an end to: the narrowing of feminist viewpoints. Moreover, feminists make a mistake in prematurely calling for unity. Instead of glossing over the problem with the rhetoric of sisterhood or having an elite group declare the dispute settled, let's own the conflict and use it to make real progress.

Rebecca Walker, a founder of the Third Wave Foundation, says, "There are no new issues on the table. What we see in this election is the zenith of the decades-old struggle between women of different sensibilities." Walker believes today's election friction is simply a consequence of mainstream feminist leaders and organizations not listening to critiques from younger women, women of color and grassroots activists about the exclusivity of thought within the movement. "The issue at hand has to do with [institutional] feminism's inability to respond adequately to the claims brought against it," Walker says.