Feminist As I Wanna Be

It's inconvenient for me to have just disavowed feminism today, as I tend to follow the school of "Nobody hits my little brother but me," but, having listened to ISI's "Are We Getting It Right?: The State of Women and Gender Studies" podcast (audio and video available here), I want to give myself a day's grace period in which to tell feminists (in this case Amy Richards) how to be:

I hope that some day it [Women's and Gender Studies] won't be necessary, I hope some day that Women's Studies will not be a separate discipline but will be integrated into other forms of academia. I hope that women's colleges like Barnard can cease to exist. But I feel like in the short term of looking for inclusion and identity, it is something that we need.

I've said before that I like the idea of having Gender Studies departments, which is why I'm so discouraged that Richards thinks that the only reason to study femininity is to better equip ourselves to destroy it. It makes sense that someone who reduces the tradition of femininity to victimhood-full-stop would want to phase out women's colleges, but it's a strange way to think about the feminist agenda.

I see my generation really choosing single parenthood, really choosing not to be married, really choosing to delay marriage, because they actualy saw both the damage being done, from marriage and not-marriage. It's when you try to conform to something that it becomes so damaging, and if we're more authentically choosing what we want, then we're more likely to be happy.

Sometimes traditions fail people, but it's almost always more interesting to think about how people can fail their traditions. If Richards has no qualms about having written off that kind of tragedy completely, she is operating on a set of literary priorities with which I am not familiar.