I should really bite my tongue today

but I just read Linda Hirshman's latest bashing-younger-women screed at Slate (I know, I'm a few days behind the times), and, god, I'm just so tired of all this (see previous post). Lots of older feminists are remarkable, ground-breaking heroines, and yet, I'm sure I'm not the only one who has personal experience of older feminists who seem determined to eat their young, that being us (and my god, I'm not even young!). But I'll bite my tongue on the anecdotal response, and I will just give you Hirshman's mindblowingly obtuse penultimate paragraph:

I've never been much for pop-psychologizing, but perhaps the yo-mamma feminist rebellion is an attempt by young women to similarly free themselves from their identification with the mother. If so, it's a great argument for shared childrearing, but it still makes for lousy politics. Following Chodorow's reasoning, just for argument, men are free to stand on the shoulders of their fathers, who weren't around all that much, without psychological consequence. And so they do. Liberal and conservative. Al Gore and Al Gore, the Bushes, unto the fourth generation, the Harold Ickes, the unbreakable Kristols, Norman and John ("Normanson") Podhoretz. Only women seem to need to separate and destroy in order to start all over again with each generation.

Hello?!?! Have you ever read Harold Bloom? Freud???? Our current war...has it not resulted from our idiot president's determination not to be his father? And the idea that young women today are the first to rebel against their mothers? What was the second wave of the feminist movement but an enormous round of mother bashing? (OK, it was a lot more than that, but surely that was an enormous component.) So you were allowed to reject your mothers, but we are not allowed to question you????

(And, you know, the ridiculous thing is that I believe I was kind of pro-Linda Hirshman back when all the mommy bloggers were going nuts on her...why yes, so I was, but the rhetoric then and now is a huge problem, and I don't see why someone so smart can't see that.)