Nina Darnton Speaks For Progressive Women

Thank you, Nina Darnton, for expressing so plainly and intelligently how many old school feminists make our younger generation of strong, independent-thinking women feel: that we aren't free to express ourselves without time or "experience" as a credential. Many don't care to take into consideration that many of us have already been through a lot of shit in our short lives in regards to sexism, and just don't think the all of the old tactics are working toward common goals that benefit everyone. Men don't get the impression from our generation that we want to make them live in servitude of all women. Intentionally or not, some older militant feminists can make a younger staunch feminist feel that men, including their father, brother, husband/partner, friend, are our enemies, and we just know that isn't true, and it promotes an unhealthy fear of half of the planet. I know several men that are more friendly to the feminist cause than many women who would identify themselves as a feminist, and they're even really manly men, can you believe it?

Some of us were lucky enough to grow up in very feminist-thinking households that took from the best of both worlds, a little from the old guard and some from newer, less defined women's movement, as was the case for many generations of females in our family, even before my great-grandmother was born. My great-great-grandmother was a single mother with children from different men, whose mother married into what appears to have been a business type of partnership with her much older husband in order to have help taking care of a household of her three children (she had two more with him), and to allow her to keep her large portion of what is now Mammoth Cave National Park, where our family's old church house still sits a trail away from where both mother and daughter are buried today. She and her mother are responsible for several generations of take-no-shit women by their example of mixing some old fashioned beliefs with an uncompromising demand for some sort of equality. This was a time when it was rare for an extremely independent woman, also believed to be half Native American (my great-great grandmother), to have many rights respected at all, let alone have such a large piece of land in her name. All these things are discounted by some older women who believe it's their right to know more than us younguns, simply because they've lived longer, seen "more". No one is taking away from their experiences, so why must they take away from the lessons that four generations of strong women have given me simply because I am only 30 years old? I have never fallen for that bullshit, and I hope as I age I never fall into that way of thinking.

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