Tag: Baby Boomers

IN SEARCH OF A NEW MILLENNIAL FEMINISM

I still can’t get the image out of my head. Newspapers keep using the picture in their serialized election retrospectives: shocked and distraught young women crying their eyes out under the glass ceiling of a New York hotel ballroom, Hillary Clinton’s election night headquarters. Like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark, this was the glass ceiling that didn’t shatter. They had gathered there, giddy and hopeful, ready to watch up close the election of America’s first woman president. It wasn’t just a loss for them; it was a dream rudely interrupted and demolished by a larger-than-life symbol of every sexist, misogynistic pig of a white male they had ever known, heard or read about.

I want to believe that those millennial women will embrace that moment of pain and anguish, and use it as a catalyst for a new wave of feminism. Thanks to trails blazed by their mothers and grandmothers, the world is a far less foreboding place to women in their 20s and 30s. Doors once closed are now open. Rampant sexism, although far from dead and buried, is no longer baked into our social norms. This generation of women never experienced the hopeless cruelty of systemic oppression that spurred giants like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, and countless others, to devote their lives to fighting for change. When things are just a little bad, most of us suck it up and soldier on.

It’s about to get much more than just a little bad. That’s not just because the glass ceiling didn’t break on November 8. America’s president-in-waiting is the embodiment of almost everything the baby boomer feminists fought against: degradation, sexual harassment, verbose inequality. It’s all crawling out from behind its rock in full daylight now. Progress comes through an accumulation of baby steps; regression through a gigantic leap backwards. The leap back has begun. To me, that’s what the tears streaming down the faces of those young Clinton supporters were all about. The fulcrum of change suddenly reversed course, and the ride back is going to be anything but pretty.

This is about so much more than the country’s failure to elect a woman president. Women are ridiculously outnumbered in the Congress ( only 19% are women), state legislatures (24%), governors’ offices(12%) and in the upper echelons of academia (26% of college presidents are women) and corporate America (4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women). Those numbers not only measure an agonizingly slow march to equality, they tell an even bleaker and pervasive story.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, formerly on the faculty at both Yale and Harvard Law School, conducted extensive studies in the 1970s on the effects of the underrepresentation of women on organizational effectiveness. Kanter found that when women were the few among the many men in a work group, their participation and effectiveness were significantly diminished simply by virtue of being outnumbered. This phenomenon held, she found, in any situation where those from a demographically identifiable group were the “few among the many” from the majority group. Simply being a “token,” Kanter discovered, meant reduced participation, status and ability to shape the group’s outcome.

I did a mini-replication of Kanter’s study 35 years ago. I tracked a number of small task groups, some dominated by men, some by women and others with a relatively equal balance. I measured the amount of time each participant spoke, interrupted others, offered solutions, among other indices of participation. In the groups dominated by one gender, those in the minority greatly limited their participation and the overall effectiveness of the group process was severely limited. In the balanced groups, however, there was a more equalized level of participation along with a desire to reach consensus and, as a result, a higher level of effectiveness.

The lesson from the research is simple: the country is losing out by continuing to have decision making bodies that don’t look anything like the rest of the country. The damage from a Congress that is 81% male isn’t just the lack of opportunity for more women to serve. The real blow comes from the kind of laws that flow out of a legislative body that resembles an Elks Club.

It’s not too hard to imagine what lies ahead for us right now. Funding for women’s health, always a battle in “good times” is in for a severe blow. Mike Pence and his ilk are already salivating about defunding Planned Parenthood. Another faction would love to put the screws to what they see as the Justice Departments’ overzealous use of Title IX to combat sex discrimination on college campuses. With Jeff Sessions as attorney general, that’s an objective easily met. Donald Trump says he will see that Row v. Wade will be overturned as soon as he puts his stamp on the Supreme Court. As a frightening foreshadow of what’s to come, a Tennessee woman is now facing criminal charges for attempting to abort her pregnancy with a coat hanger.

Still, I really do believe the sun will shine again, that we will manage to reverse the backwards retreat and start moving upward and forward, toward an America that prides itself in the values of diversity, equality and justice for all. Getting there means that those millennial tears from election night must be turned into action steps. The boomer feminists were a great opening act. But it’s your time and your move now. Don’t let those tears be in vain.

UNDECIDED MILLENNIAL VOTERS AND THE FOG OF BOOMER MEMORIES

There is a lot of handwringing in the Hillary Clinton camp over a sizeable contingent of recalcitrant millennials whose electoral preferences right now are either a third party candidate or none of the above. I’ve also noticed a few angry Facebook jabs at the younger set from fellow baby boomers wondering what is wrong with kids today? I was all set to the hit the like button on one of the them, but was interrupted by a 1968 flashback, my room covered with Eugene McCarthy banners and my father yelling at me: “What the hell is wrong with you kids today?”

Like it or not, we boomers are handing the demographic baton to our millennial progeny on Nov. 8. This will be the first election where those born between the early 1980s and 2000 outnumber us. According to recent polling, this generation prefers Clinton over Trump by 50% to 18%, leaving a whopping 32% of the country’s largest voting bloc up for grabs. It’s a tough nut to crack for both major party candidates because, frankly, one third of these young voters think the whole system sucks.

Take Jo Tongue. She’s 31, a Fort Collins, Colorado mother of two with another on the way. She told the Washington Post that she can’t make herself vote for either Clinton or Trump and feels “bummed that we’re at a place where it all feels like a joke.”

Then there is Nathan Mowery. He’s 26 and lives in Gainesville, Virginia. He told the New York Times this week that, as a Muslim, he would not vote for Trump, but finds Clinton to be uninspiring. He plans to vote for a third party candidate and, according to the Times, was unapologetic about his decision. “I’m casting a protest vote because it makes it visible to major parties that there are people who are motivated to vote but are unwilling to vote for either of them,” he said. “I hope that whoever runs in 2020 will get their act together and one of the parties will put somebody up that younger voters can align themselves with.”

To the progressive boomer crowd, this is heartbreaking. We lie awake at night, shuddering at the thought of a Trump Dystopia, a toxic cornucopia of everything we have spent our lives fighting – racism, misogyny, xenophobia, autocracy. This is a close election and these votes are desperately needed, not just to stop Trump but to elect as president, for the first time, a superbly qualified woman. Why can’t those kids see that?

The answer is in my 1968 flashback. To me, back then, the major party candidates in that election, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, symbolized everything that was wrong with this country – a horribly immoral war in Vietnam, rampant racism and an entrenched old-white-guy establishment that refused to share power. If I had been old enough to vote then, I would have rejected them both and written in “Clean Gene” McCarthy, the lefty peace and love candidate who lost the Democratic nomination to Humphrey. Through the wisdom of hindsight, of course, that was a bad call. Humphrey, the Father of Liberalism, helped deliver the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and the Test Ban Treaty. If he had gotten a few more votes in ‘68, we would never have had Richard Nixon and Watergate to kick around.

Yet, in that 1960s moment, while our friends were dying in an endless war, many of us young boomers yearned to reject the entire political system that created that cancer. We had no desire to be either realistic or pragmatic. We wanted to start over with something new. That was our vision, our dream. Youth is a time for dreaming, even when it produces bad choices.

I say let’s cut the millennials some slack. First of all, half of them are already supporting Clinton, mirroring the population at large. A far smaller group, 18%, is backing Trump, who according to most polls is over 50% with baby boomers. As far as the progressive cause is concerned, our young friends are doing better than us geezers. That leaves the pox-on-both-your-houses crowd, a third of this gigantic youth demographic. Within the next few weeks, some of them will undoubtedly discover that the House of Trump is far more dangerous than the other one. But let’s respect their process. They aren’t exactly inheriting a perfect world from us. Let them dream, let them learn, let them grow. Even if it means making mistakes. Like we did.