When I studied social theory and political philosophy in college I read Marx and I studied Locke and Hobbes, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman, I studied Horkheimer and Adorno, Weber and Veblen, Hegel and Foucalut, Shakespeare and Melville, Erickson and Freud, and all manner of dead white guys. But the thinker who kept emerging through course after course, the one I kept turning back to, the one who inspired me, the one who (uh oh) got me in the habit of run-on sentences, cryptic constructions, and parentheses by the bucketful… the one I’d accidentally started reading just before I began college, and continued to read after graduation, was another dead, white, but not male European, Hannah Arendt.
I learned so much about the world from her, and so much about humanity, and so much, especially, about America which she saw through sane, clear, sometimes hopeful but also often frustrated eyes.
She’s the one who taught me about the aspirations of the American revolutionaries — often breathtakingly illiberal, prejudiced, peculiar, and pecuniary privileged white males who, nevertheless, deliberately sewed the seeds of tolerance, inclusion, and liberty that we’re still inventing new applications for.
If I could find my copy (too many of my books are in boxes waiting to go up on new shelves) I’d cite the exact figure — I want to say Adams but I’m not sure which and besides it might have been someone else — but whoever it was said of the risk of revolution
Let us be soldiers and politicians
So that our children may be farmers and craftsmen
So that their children may become poets, painters, philosophers, and lovers
And no, that’s not exactly verbatim, but it’s absolutely in the spirit.
And I bring this up because of a note from Jessica Valenti of Feministing over the goaded-from-the-outside “generational” battle that’s being waged at the moment by largely-but-not-exclusively my generation 2nd-Wave feminists and largely-but-obviously-not-entirely Valenti’s generation 3rd-Wave feminists over most recently whether support for Senator Clinton is optional or mandatory.
But instead of complexity and nuance, the next piece we see on young feminists and the election is little more than a gleeful screed against all young women. Debra Dickerson writes:
I oversimplify, but so do young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty. Caricatures work both ways, missy.
She goes on to call young feminists “honey,” “chicks,” “childish,” and greedy. All in one post!
That 3rd-wave feminists risk forgetting the awesome obstacles and the incredible fight their sometimes-literal mothers fought for so that they could become lawyers in lipstick and business leaders with Brazilians is dooming one’s self to repeat history. That 2nd-wave feminists fail to acknowledge the landscape they created for their sometimes-literal daughters, and the new opportunities as well as obstacles those newcomers face, risks… mere perpetuation of history.
The irony, of course, is that immediately after the American revolution the one-time vanguard of Adams’s promise to future generations — rightly proud beyond measure of their accomplishments… immediately started carping that… their children were only farmers and merchants and their grandchildren only poets and artists. So it’s only fitting that the revolutionaries of feminism, no less proud of no lesser accomplishments — should do likewise. That is not, however, history repeating itself it is, as Hannah Arendt taught me, just part of the human condition. Future generations, however, will acknowledge and vindicate both feminists of the 2nd- and 3rd-waves. It would be nice if those of us alive today gave thought to showing those generations how it’s done.
