Or "How Feminism Made Alice Walker a Bad Mother"

I saw this article today from the Times in the UK, listed on Racialicious. I have renamed it, because that seems to be what the writer is going for -- so why not make it clear. And maybe that's what Rebecca Walker is trying to say as well -- she obviously harbors resentment for her mother's choices and statements. But the author certainly has some strong definitions of an earlier generation of feminists.

The so-called “first wave” feminists believed that housework was another form of slavery and that women did not have an innate need to nurture but had been conditioned into their subordinate role as wives and mothers through centuries of patriarchy.

This is a popular perception, and that's definitely the understanding of feminism that I had for a long time -- which deterred me from identifying as such. But I suspect that it's not an accurate description in the first place...

I obviously know nothing about the personal relationship between these two women, so I won't even comment on that. My issue is more with the implicit link that is made between Alice Walker and the de facto position of all feminists of an older generation: that they're all about Hillary Clinton and will not tolerate younger women saying different.

"[M]y mother and her friends, they see [feminism] as truth; they don’t see it as an experiment.

“So that creates quite a problem. You’ve got young women saying, ‘That didn’t really work for me’ and the older ones saying, ‘Tough, because that’s how it should be’.”

The debate goes on: Rebecca, who lives in Hawaii with Tenzin and Glen, his Buddhist-teacher father, recently wrote about why she was supporting Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton — and immediately came under fire.

“The response from older feminists was that I, and other young women, were naive in thinking Obama could ever truly represent us, and we should be supporting the female candidate. The belief is that women become more radical as they get older, that we’re naive and we’ll ‘get it’ later on.”

Since they lump Alice Walker in with all the other "older feminists," the presumption from this article would be that, of course, she's a Clinton supporter. But I distinctly remember reading this, which says quite different (and which is very much worth reading in its entirety).

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

Yeah, that last quote is Alice Walker, so there's at least one thing that mother and daughter can still agree on. Not sure why that point was obscured so neatly in this article.