Thanks to Rebecca Traister for finally using the “M” word in her article and for speaking about feelings that can’t quite be pinned down. Please do remember that both the 19th and 20th Century women’s movements—the so called first and second waves—were begun in response to the mysogyny of progressive white males of the eras.

Nineteenth Century women were harassed and booed when they tried to speak at progressive, white, male anti-slavery meetings. The anti-slavery movement indeed split over the inclusion of women in the meetings. When the Rev. Antoinette L. Brown, the first ordained woman, rose to pray at a national anti-slavery meeting, she was silenced by cries of “Shame on the woman.”

Twentieth 20th Century women didn’t fare much better in the anti-war movement of the late 1960s when they were expected to type their progressive white male counterparts’ words, make coffee, run the mimeograph and be available for sex.

In the time between the two movements, our grandmothers, the second generation of feminists who finally brought about woman suffrage in 1920 after a 72-year struggle, had been silenced by “post-feminist” ridicule. They didn’t even speak of their involvement in a major political movement that had secured the right to vote for 50% of the nation’s population not to mention had incidentally secured the rights for women to own property, work and control their own wages, keep custody of their own children, speak in public and enter the professions. Growing up in the 1950s I perceived suffragists, "suffragettes," as they were diminutively deemed, as crazy old women who marched in the streets. History books gave a paragraph, if that, to the entire movement and most of the professors, male and female, laughed when they talked about it.

BTW the progressive white male anti-war activist I dated in the mid and late 1960s, who never once mentioned the disparity of race or class in the draft, who told me I would give up acting, writing, all my education and aspirations to become a mother and housewife to support his children and his career, became a Reagan Republican, consultant to multi-national corporations and the military, proud of his work in “bringing down the Soviet Union,” and now believes completely in George W. Bush’s Iraq war because, "all Muslims are evil and desire the violent overthrow of the Christian West." He is recognized by his peers as completely sane and exceedingly successful. Thank goodness I followed my inner voice and dumped him. Of course it wasn’t true of all the white male anti-war progressives, but there were enough “sell-outs” from the generation for the Reagan Era to reframe some of the progressive movements of the 1960s (anti-war, women’s, environmental, sexual liberation) as self-serving, bra-burning, tree-hugging, hippie-dippie boomers.

During the same decades that my old beau’s “progressive” attitudes reverted to neo-con, true progressives Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and a generation of women recovered women’s history, made history, broke down barriers for women in the professions, media, sports, education, the arts and the culture at large, and yet are decried in the current “post-feminist” rhetoric of ridicule as “whiny and bitter.” None of these women had time to be whiny and bitter, there was too much work to do, but the cycles of history do seem to repeat themselves.

So my young women friends please do listen to your guts, when you feel your progressive compatriots are being misogynistic, but you can’t quite put a finger or an intellectual label on it. Misogyny isn’t simply “politically incorrect;” it’s degrading, anti-human and abusive.

Yes, by the way, I am a Hillary Clinton supporter.