Word: rejection
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While Bowdren correctly criticizes Boyle's assertion that "Harvard feminist" and the feminist movement say women must reject traditional female roles, Bowdren's characterization is not much better. After touting her own knowledge and stating that "the word 'feminist' carries a lot more baggage," Bowdren does a laughable job of reducing feminism to what she thinks "most feminist" believe: "men and women are equal because deep down men and women are the same...
...record straight, for anyone who has and will misconstrue the term: "feminism" has many different strands and meanings, and cannot be pigeonholed into one narrow definition. While Bowdren admits that feminists form a "disparate group," she continues to address and reject one kind of feminism, that which includes Boyle's superwoman/have-it-all idea. In reality, there are liberal enlightenment feminists, cultural feminists, radical feminists, and more. There's a place for Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Daly, Katie Roiphe and Madonna in feminist discourse--all of whom, I would argue, can be called "feminists" in one way or another. For your information...
...exclude either personal or professional role from my life experience," writes Boyle, "would be to reject my definition of feminism." For Boyle, being a "conservative feminist" means a career as "wife, mother, doctor, and soldier...
Then there is intent. In September, California's Supreme Court ruled that a health-food store owner could not reject a job applicant if her fatness was the result of a faulty metabolism or a psychological systemic problem, but could if it was the person's fault. Imagine the cottage industry of fat experts, the obesity counselors, next door to the sexual-harassment ! counselors, at the office, trying to decide whether someone is fat by predisposition or from eating too much Haagen-Dazs...
Perhaps the most telling sign that even America's softest hearts are hardening is a radical reframing of the debate into terms that reject a sympathetic view of the homeless. In the '80s, the issue's leading spokesman was Robert Hayes, founder of the Coalition for the Homeless, who identified the three main causes of homelessness as "housing, housing and housing." People who challenged that thinking were accused of blaming the victims. Today the leading voices are authors Alice Baum and Donald Burnes, who claim the very word "homelessness" is a misnomer coined by activists to persuade the public that...