I'll tell you right off the bat that I'm a radical feminist. I'm also “of a certain age” - one of those older women who's been fighting the good feminist fight for decades.
For much of this political season, I'd mostly made up my mind to vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. I do believe quite earnestly that nothing will truly change until women take charge of running the world, so voting for yet another man - especially a straight, white man - is never my first choice.
My indecision about whether to vote for Hillary Clinton has, at last, been decided by the latest round of attacks on women. Not the attacks from the Republicans, but rather, the attacks from the Hillary Clinton campaign, which has positioned her as the only “politically correct” candidate to vote for if you're truly a feminist.
Far worse, however, have been the insulting remarks to and about younger feminists who have decided to support Bernie Sanders.
While Madeleine Albright warns “there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other” (reminiscent of Bush's infamous “you're either with us or against us” remark), Gloria Steinem jokingly referred to the young women who support Bernie Sanders as going “where the boys are.”
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Clinton herself has made equal pay and family leave key issues of her platform, as if she is the only candidate who cares about women. But even her “feminist” positions are qualified.
While Sanders is unabashedly and uncomplicatedly in support of women's full reproductive rights, including abortion, Clinton makes it clear that she wants abortion to be “safe, legal and rare - and by rare, I mean rare.”
Moreover, calling it a “sad, even tragic” decision perpetuates the religious fundamentalists' successful campaign to demonize abortion and shame women who undergo a procedure that has been a natural part of women's experience for thousands of years across the globe.
Ironically, Clinton's more-feminist-than-thou narrative is quite sexist. It is based on an assumption that feminist women are concerned only with issues directly and specifically related to women and girls, that we cannot and should not be concerned about issues affecting all of humanity and the planet we all inhabit.
We are exhorted to rally round her support for “women's” issues, while ignoring her conservative positions on the economy, health care, international trade, Wall Street, corporate influence, and the prison industry, as well as her unwavering support for war.
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Most appalling about the Clinton campaign's derisive attacks on women is that this is the same message that sexist men have been sucker-punching us with for thousands of years: We're silly, misguided females who need someone strong to tell us what to do, how to think, and whom to vote for.
And, like our treatment from patriarchal sexist men, we're belittled, marginalized, and called names if we don't agree.
Most dangerous about these attacks is the divisive narrative it falsely frames as an age-based battle: seasoned, older wise women working for real revolution, versus inexperienced, naive young girls turning their backs on their sisters for a man.
But in my decades of fighting feminist battles, I've discovered that, as a working-class, radical feminist, I do not share the same agendas as the “mainstream feminists.”
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The truth is that “mainstream feminism” is a euphemism for white, middle- and upper-class establishment women, and therein lies the conflict.
Mainstream feminists focus on a narrow range of issues that are most pressing to their own classes and levels of privilege, with abortion and equal pay being the two most important.
Other feminists - especially “womanists” (as many women of color prefer to say) and radical feminists - believe that every issue that matters to humans is a women's issue. This holistic approach sees multiple issues as interconnected and, ultimately, as impacting the lives of women and girls.
While mainstream feminists fight for abortion rights, womanists and radical feminists fight for reproductive justice- the right to have or not have children, the right to raise a family in a healthy, sustaining environment, and the right to not have their children taken away.
Mainstream feminists focus on equal pay - particularly for white-collar jobs.
Womanists and radical feminists fight for economic justice and a living wage for entire communities.
They fight to eliminate all the conditions that keep women and their families in poverty and second-class status: institutionalized misogyny and racism, little or no access to health care (Bernie says single-payer now; Hillary says the time's not right for that); and crushing student debt (Bernie says free tuition at all public colleges and universities, Hillary says free tuition at community colleges only).
They fight to eliminate the prison-industrial complex (Hillary and Bernie both want to abolish private prisons, Jim Crow policing, and mandatory sentencing); trade policies that undermine unions, eliminate labor laws, and environmental protections, and that have made women across the globe the primary low-wage, disposable worker (Bernie has consistently opposed offshoring jobs, NAFTA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership; Hillary shifted from supporting NAFTA and the TPP to more recently opposing certain provisions of the TPP).
They fight to eliminate a rigged economy and legal system that favors the wealthy and penalizes the poor. (Where to start? Bernie wants Wall Street and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, to get them out of politics, to break up the monopolistic banks, etc., while Hillary's longtime quid-pro-quo relationships with Wall Street and corporate super PACs makes her recent calls for campaign-finance reform sound like the hollow promises of a politician who'll say anything and shift any position to get elected).
They fight against the endless wars that hit working-class communities the hardest and, globally, impact women and children the most. (Sanders opposed every war since the invasion of Iraq; Clinton voted for every war while she was senator.
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Age has nothing to do with this divide, unless you believe that only youth has the vision and courage to rise up against an entrenched and corrupt status quo.
This divide among feminists is mostly about class, race, privilege, and one side believing that political expediency trumps all and the other side believing that we do, in fact, have the power and the responsibility to bring about the change we've only dreamed of.
Bernie does certainly take positions I'm adamantly opposed to, including his support of the F-35. As a democratic socialist, he is not opposed to the capitalist free market, while I, as a socialist (huge difference), believe capitalism is a system of exploitation that has no place in a socially just world.
If I could vote for the perfect ticket, it would be Elizabeth Warren as president and either Jill Stein or Bernie Sanders as vice president.
But until then, I will vote for yet another straight, white man - Bernie Sanders - because he's actually more the feminist, and far more the progressive, respectful candidate than the Margaret Thatcher politician who divides women and shifts with the political winds at their expense.