In Season 3, Episode 14 of The West Wing (Night Five), a temp named Celia Walton is working in the White House. Celia is what I think I am going to call a Hillary Clinton “kind” of feminist [1] She objects both to the way Ainsley Hayes looks—she was called back to the White House from a concert—and to the way Sam Seaborn comments on Ainsley’s outfit. Here’s the way the crucial part of the exchange goes.
Ainsley Hayes: I don’t think whatever sexuality I may have diminishes my power. I think it enhances it.
Celia Walton: And what kind of feminism do you call that?
Ainsley Hayes: My kind.
Celia takes for granted that “feminism” comes in several kinds and that she will recognize them when she sees them played out. Nothing she has seen from Ainsley that night identifies what kind of feminist she is. That’s why Celia is puzzled and I am sure Ainsley’s answer doesn’t help her because it not only doesn’t answer the question as asked, but undercuts the basis of the question entirely. Ainsley looks a lot better than this in this episode; this is the closest I could come. You get the idea.
This longer excerpt gives you the setting of the two line exchange I used as an introduction.
Celia Walton: If you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.
Ainsley Hayes: I’m sorry?
Celia Walton: I said, I’m surprised you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.
Ainsley Hayes: I don’t even know what that means.
Celia Walton: I think you do.
Ainsley Hayes: And I think you think I’m made out of candy glass, Celia. If somebody says something that offends you, tell them. But all women don’t have to think alike.
Celia Walton: I didn’t say they did. And when someone said something that offended me, I did say so.
Ainsley Hayes: I like it when the guys tease me. It’s an inadvertent show of respect I’m on the team, and I don’t mind it when it gets sexual. And you know what? I like sex.
Charlie Young: Hello!
Ainsley Hayes: I don’t think whatever sexuality I may have diminishes my power. I think it enhances it.
Celia Walton: And what kind of feminism do you call that?
Ainsley Hayes: My kind.
“My kind” is an answer that rejects the notion that there are a few recognizable kinds. And that brings us to the question of how important “kinds” of feminism are. For that, let me take you to Emily Bazelon’s conversations with women in Pennsylvania after Hillary had lost the 2016 presidential election and had, in fact, lost the whole category of “white women.”
This excerpt is a part of Bazelon’s conversation with Palma Frable of Moscow, Pennsylvania and her daughters, Abigail and Lauren. I added to this last January with a post entitled “Hillary and the “Women’s Vote” in Pennsylvania,” which you can also see here if you would like more context. Here is part of Bazelon’s summary:
Frable also admires Ivanka Trump and felt she was one of the campaign’s “top three assets.” She sees Ivanka as a role model for Abigail in her own entrepreneurial interests. It’s not Hillary’s “Gloria Steinem feminism,” as Frable put it, that she values. It’s Ivanka’s sleek version of female success, which commentators have labeled “commodity feminism” — branding to sell products.
Right away we see the “kinds of feminism” emerge. Moving past the efforts of the suffragettes, who made “women” a constituency worth a politician’s time, the first modern feminism is associated with Gloria Steinem. Pamela Frable associates Hillary’s public stance, both what she says and how she represents herself, with Steinem’s “kind” of feminism and she doesn’t like it.
But there is another kind of feminism, which Bazelon says commentators have labeled “commodity feminism.” [2] I have more commonly heard it called “lipstick feminism.” It is another “kind” and it is the kind Pamela Frable likes. She seems to have put Hillary Clinton up against Ivanka Trump as alternative visions of where this nation might go and to have chosen Ivanka.
Once again, Ainsley’s designation “my kind of feminism” loses out.
But there is another reason I called Celia a “Hillary Clinton kind of feminist” and it shows up in another part of Bazelon’s conversation with the Frables.
All of this [Trump’s wish list] matters far more to her than anything Trump said about women or was accused of doing to them. Anyway, given Bill Clinton’s history, how can Hillary complain?
“I have disrespect for Hillary for not doing more for herself, not standing up for herself with him,” Frable said. “That’s more damaging than goofball words Trump came up with.”
However Frable thinks of feminism—and this is not the lipstick variety–Hillary’s behavior does not represent it. How can a woman who put up with a philandering husband expect the support of women? Hillary did not “stand up for herself,” as Frable sees it, and thus is no model for herself and her daughters.
And besides that:
“I’ve been paid the same as men, I’ve managed men,” Frable said. “I’ve not had any trouble working with men.”
So as Frable sees it, she has passed the feminism test that Hillary failed.
Two Dilemmas
This, finally leaves us with two dilemmas. Hillary’s legacy is the first one. She could be seen as an early feminist; a pioneer feminist. She faced challenges no woman of her era had ever faced. She used the earlier successes of the feminist movement as her guide and added new experiences and new successes to it. Frable might very well have said of her experience as a workplace feminist, “I have succeeded because I stand on the shoulders of the giants of the movement who preceded me and who made my success possible.” She could have, but she didn’t. She saw Hillary’s kind of feminism—Celia Mason’s kind of feminism—as outdated and unnecessary. Especially when an attractive new “kind” of feminism (Ivanka’s kind) is available.
The second dilemma brings us back to Ainsley Hayes. She too is “post-Hillary.” Not only that, she has rejected Ivanka’s “kind” of feminism and every other “kind” of feminism. Ainsley might have said that the day when there are recognized kinds of feminism has passed. That might have been necessary for the pioneers, but today, every woman is free to invent her own approach and free, also, to call that approach, “feminism.”
The word, in other words, ceases to have meaning in the sense that it identifies some behaviors as falling within the category and others as falling outside. For Ainsley, the day of “categories” is over.
So what does that mean for feminism? It’s hard to say. If feminism allows women to 
recognize some women as feminist and others not and also to claim women who are pursuing that understanding of feminism as sisters, then it will continue to be powerful as a movement. “We” will refer to “other women who are feminist in the same way I am.” There is no reason to refer to the approach of other women as “wrong,” only as misguided. “We,” my sisters and I, can show them a better way. I think feminism as a movement will require distinctions that function in that way. If the women in this picture call each other “sister,” the movement model will continue to be powerful.
Or, alternatively, maybe Ainsley is right. The day of “kinds” of feminism is over. Every woman today is the beneficiary of feminists who have gone before her; she is also free to choose her own path and to call that path “feminism.” There are no more “kinds.” If I call it feminism, it is feminism. That makes Ainsley’s answer to Celia the perfect post-movement answer: “What kind? My kind.”
There is nothing about this imagined end to the “kinds” of feminism that means women cannot continue to work for broad economically defined goals, like equal pay and generous maternity leave, the kind that does not sacrifice the post-maternity career. But these are economic goals and the goals that are dealt with in these examples are cultural goals; they are goals that raise questions of personal style.
If that is where we are, then “a woman’s right to choose” has grown to include her right to choose her own kind of feminism.
[1] There’s a good reason for the quotation marks around “kind” and also for introducing Hillary Clinton into the discussion.
[2] I’ve never heard the term. I get it. It’s a play on the Marxist notion of “commodity fetishism,” which makes it both a clever play on words and a refutation by obscure reference, which is certainly the easiest kind of refutation.
[3] Ginger, (Kim Webster)who is seated at the desk next to Celia tosses in, “I call it stiletto feminism,” which is even more provocative.
d just take one step back. No…one more.” At that point the dumb guy takes that last step back and falls backward off the cliff and dies (saying something funny or something pathetic, depending on the kinds of movies you are used to seeing).
rection, not a location. We are admonished to “be more tolerant” as if tolerance were a good thing all by itself. Obviously, it is not. There is such a thing as too much tolerance, just as there is such a thing as too little.
ask, “How much more tolerant should I be?” Or, to revert to the “carry” meaning of the Latin source of “tolerate,” how much longer must I carry this burden. (Or, alternatively, how much heavier a burden should I carry.)
For a society, the question worth asking is “What will happen to society if we tolerate this?” And one possible answer is that it will lose its ability to function. Societies are ongoing propositions. They need to be affirmed and supported and criticized every day and when any of those things fails, the future of that society begins to dim. It is that perspective that Aristotle has in mind in the quote I am showing here. When people withdraw from society as if it will run itself, the society begins to come apart.
On June 2, Bill led with this cartoon and a sustained argument against “darkness cursing.” I feel a lot of the same things Bill feels, but when I read the column, my mind went off in a different direction. So, with my thanks to Bill for a good column, I would like to pursue that other direction this morning.
private and public. And when I had gotten that far, I heard George H. W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” speeches (one in accepting the Republican nomination and one in his inaugural address) in which he advocates private activity rather than public (political) activity. Or possibly local rather than national.
I am loading these examples in favor of cursing the darkness, but if cursing is all you do, it is even less effective that lighting a candle. The question the private response/public solution formula gives us is this: what do you do if the only meaningful resolution of the issue is systemic. No changes, in other words, that are less that systemic will help. Unless something like this assembly of candles means something.
peace between Protestants and Catholics. [1] Orange is a color that has been associated with Protestantism every since William of Orange defeated James II at the Battle of Boyne in 1690. [2] Green has represented Irish republicanism since March 7, 1848, when it was flown over the Wolf Tone Confederate Club in the city of Waterford by Thomas Meagher. [3]
We could try to finesse our way out of it. Here is the flag of France. The blue band is on what they call “the hoist side.” According to my quick review of the flags of the world, there is no flag with these colors in this alignment where red is on the hoist side. That would make the new U. S flag unique in the very narrow sense of the word, but you would have to look really hard to see which nation is being represented, and that’s not a good thing for a country’s flag. [4]
If the flag were to represent liberals and conservatives, it would be representing words that have been with us for a long time, even though the meanings of the words have varied with the times. If the flag were to represent left leaning and right leaning parties, it would, again, be using words that have been with us for a long time—since the French Revolution, in that case.
If none of those is familiar, I urge you to stop reading right now and go to the New York Times opinion column by Sarah Vowell, which has one of the best opening lines I have seen in a long time: “Greg Gianforte doesn’t represent this state. O.K., he does now, but you get what I mean.” This is not a picture taken at Holladay Park Plaza. We use tablecloths.
true in the narrow sense. We have paid for those meals and that money is gone. You don’t get any back by not eating all thirty meals here. Getting a refund really would be “saving money” but that’s now how it works. On the other hand, when you set aside what you would really rather do, you are also wasting a valuable resource and you don’t get those opportunities back at the end of the month either.
If the choices I made are to be embedded in my personality, so that I am expected by those who know me, to make choices based on a well-known standard—“Isn’t it just like him to…”—I would rather not use a standard that I market as being a cheapskate; I would rather be known as a hedonist. For one thing, the outcome of the cheapskate rationale is always the same. Use 30 meal credits a month. But the outcome of the hedonism rationale could vary a good deal from one circumstance to another.
s/Venus books. She thinks you have committed an offense of some kind. You would like to explain that you have not, but she is miffed and won’t hear anything you say until you apologize. So apologize. Then you get to say the thing that needs to be said.
So if the Democrats’ problem is a hearts and minds problem, how do we reach the hearts and minds of the abused and ignored low income voters? They are, as I see it, the only part of the Trump constituency to which the Democrats have access. Besides that, they were part of the the original Democratic coalition.
That’s not a hearts and minds view. The actual politics of providing or refusing abortions is complicated by the federal system, which requires the Supreme Court to tell the states what they may do and what they may not do. The Court cannot say that abortion is acceptable if there is a good reason and otherwise it is not. But Democrats could say that. That’s the position President Clinton was widely understood to support when he said that abortions should be “safe, legal, and rare.” That is not a criterion the law can live up to, but it could be the rhetorical home of the Democratic party.
President Bartlet has been on edge since his daughter Zooey was kidnapped and held for ransom. She was found and rescued, but the event left Bartlet shaken and his marriage in tatters. Going to Oklahoma to “serve people” was what he wanted to do more than anything and he found it so rewarding that he wanted to keep on doing it.
duties of a servant rather than to compete with each other to be the top dog. As always, you get real clarity when you specify the opposite of what you are trying to say. When you say, “Not this, but rather that,” you have made the meaning of “this” much clearer. So it is with “serve others” and “rule over others.” Look at the alternatives in this passage from Matthew 20:
When he agreed to go back to being President of the United States, he agreed to take on the authority that being of service required of him. Flying back to Washington in Air Force 1 doesn’t look humble, but on this occasion, that is exactly what it was.
Of these roles, which is best characterized as “serving others?” Neither, if you follow my argument this far. The person who is a natural leader, but who lays those preferences aside to take up the role of healer, is serving others. And so is the person who is a natural healer and takes on the role of healing the casualties that are the natural part of the small group process. It costs the leader more to serve as a healer. If you count his willingness to pay that cost as meritorious, then he has more merit. But he has not served more or better than the person to whom it comes naturally. The confusion I am trying to oppose is graphically represented in this cartoon.
I first began to be interested in this passage when I noticed that the New Jerusalem Bible (my favorite) has a translation of “knew” that was new to me. Like everyone other Protestant my age, I grew up with the King James Version, which has: “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man…” [2] The Revised Standard Version has a modern version of the same sentiment: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man.” This is something the servant knows to be true and it attaches to the character of the master and is evidenced by the master’s repeated actions that support it.
It would be asking a lot to ask that the servant put his master’s interests ahead of his own and I am not asking that. I am saying only that if “avoiding punishment” is the servant’s own top priority, then information about what kinds of activity the master will punish is very important. Instead of that, the servant relies on “I had heard.” That doesn’t sound like risk aversion to me.
The servant is the recipient of his master’s money and the name of the game is investment and profit. I can see that Matthew would have a good deal of interest in that. Matthew would have been troubled by people who “wanted a little piece of Rabbi Jesus’s kingdom” but who wanted to pretend that no obligations went with that “little piece.”
You could, of course, wish that you had not been given the gift and all the obligations it carries with it. I think about Frodo, who, when he discovered what “Bilbo’s ring” really was and the burden it was going to be to him, said, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
is green, as all Notre Dame fans know, the official color of Ireland is blue. I didn’t know that. The official symbol of Ireland is the harp and I was just playing around when I added the (s) to “symbol of Ireland” because Guinness has great popularity in Ireland and all they had to do is to reverse the direction of the harp. Note the direction of the harp in these two images.
The harp has been a traditional Irish instrument for a very long time, but I think it has a special status because the English domination of Ireland included a determination to obliterate Irish culture and playing the Irish harp was declared to be a capital crime. When I saw the intensity of Ireland’s love of its harp and of traditional Irish music generally, I realized I was seeing more than just a tradition-loving people. I was seeing an indomitable people.
not prepared to have–not, everybody assured me, “like the Celtic Tiger years of the 90’s–and a stable socialist democracy that is not dependent on England. It is dependent, however, on the European Union (EU), which funded the Celtic Tiger 90s, and Irish news pays a great deal of attention to the EU. I heard speculation of what the EU flag would look like –the ring of stars on a field of blue–when the U. K. withdraws. There may have been just a little glee mixed in with the speculation.
When I travel, I am often taken by signs that catch my interest. I had never heard, for instance of the earliest written Irish script, called Ogham (and pronounced ōm). It is just a series of lines representing letters of an alphabet. But that makes this sign in Dingle–Chinese take-out, no less–a four-language sign. Even in Ireland, where two languages per sign are common, this was worth a good laugh. [1]
There is nothing at all subtle about this statue of Molly Malone in Dublin. It was hard to get a picture of just her–people wanted to have their pictures taken with her as background and who could blame them. On the other hand, if you know the traditional Irish song “The Rose of Tralee,” this picture might catch your fancy. This (see footnote 2) is a rose IN Tralee. We stopped there for dinner on our way back to Adare and I couldn’t resist it.
I saw more redheads in Ireland than I have ever seen at one place. There was an attempt in Portland to break the Guinness (!) Book of Records for the most redheads in one place and one time and I contributed my redhead to that cause, but I didn’t actually see the gathering itself. It will not surprise you that there are a lot of redheads in Ireland, but this one, in Ennis, is named Éowyn and I sincerely hope there is a Faramir somewhere in her future.
me all that much because I am, after all, from Oregon and we do green as well as they do. [3] But nothing in Oregon suggests the division of all that green into very small plots of land marked by rock walls or, as here, by hedges, and you see that all over the parts of Ireland (south and west) we saw.
sources. “Culture” is just things everyone knows and the elements of it don’t come with labels attached. I got a quick lesson in Ireland about how very much of “my culture” is Irish.
Here’s an example from Genesis 38, the story of Tamar, who is one of my favorite biblical characters. The story of Tamar and Judah, her father in law, is not the easiest story to grasp because it requires an understanding of levirate marriage. [2] Our students were perfectly ready to approve of God’s commands that we should not steal, lie, or kill. God’s commands that the younger brother should mate with the widow of an elder brother was not as easy to approve. It is, however, the basis of the story of Tamar and Judah.
Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate how difficult and unappetizing this is. We are asking them to grasp a truly foreign concept—levirate marriage—and understand it as part of God’s covenant with Israel. It is, in other words, binding. And having grasped this concept, to care about it; to see why it would have mattered so much to the writer. On the other hand, there is nothing at all foreign about a woman seducing someone else’s husband, as Tamar did—and her father in law, no less. But to stay with the writer and his values, you have to set aside your own condemnation of Tamar’s behavior and see her as going to great lengths to achieve the goal God had in mind. [4]
of church organization that followed from the Hellenized Jews who first followed Jesus, rather than the kind of church organization that followed from the Hebrews who first followed Jesus. From the split that Luke describes, two entirely different approaches developed and if you are inclined to doubt that, I recommend that you read the book of James, then the book of Galatians. I am reminded here that in our little church in Englewood, Ohio, we used to sing a hymn called “The Church in the Wildwood.” Possibly this woman in on her way to that church.
If you start with how it must feel to have someone tell you that you should not dress the way you want and have your hair the way you want, much less that you should defer to the authority of “a man” just because he is a man—you arrive at a completely modern and understandable and unscholarly anger. But you can choose not to start there. (You probably cannot choose to ignore your feelings altogether, particularly when you begin to apply it to our own times.) But you can choose not to start there. You can choose to start with the situation the writer faced.
