February 11, 2016--The Excitement Gap: "I Want My Own 1960s"

I have a niece who is in her mid-20s. She is enthusiastic about the election. More so than during any of the six or seven years she's been eligible to vote.

"Why's that?" I asked recently, suspecting I knew the answer.

"I'm attracted to Bernie Sanders' ideas and ideals. He's serious about issues and his resonate with mine. I also like his mien."

"Understood, but what about Hillary?"

"I suppose she's all right," she said making a face.

"Suppose?"

"I'm turned off by her condescending outreach to young people. Very much including my generation of women."

"I've been hearing that. Of course I have. By now, who hasn't?" So I asked, "Tell me something new."

"I don't know if this is new but he, and I suppose Donald TRUMP," she made a face again, "is bringing a lot of excitement to the race. Not for the specific reasons Gloria Steinem said. To meet boys." I waited for her to make another face.

"What are your reasons?"

"As we've discussed before, I know about the '60s and the Kennedys and the music and counterculture of that era. I know about the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement. How politically it brought down the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. In many ways I wish I had lived then," she shrugged, "But of course I didn't. And then there were the Women's Movement and the battle for abortion rights and before that the Civil Rights Movement. I wasn't there for them either, but I have been around to support Gay Liberation and same-sex marriage."

"I'm not sure I know where you're going with this."

"My point is that those were not only important times but exciting ones. I know not all of it was joyous--protestors got beat up by police in some cases and by hard hats in others. And of course college students were shot and killed by the National Guard at Kent State. I do know about that. But there are a lot of serious problems now. The familiar list of problems from friends and other young people trapped in student loan debt and underemployed so they have to live with their parents. And there is the feeling that our place in the world is slipping. And above all else there's the growing gap between the top one percent and the rest of us. Bernie's big theme. Something he's right about and that most people on the left and even the right are feeling frustrated and angry about."

"Isn't Hillary talking about these things too?"

"I suppose. But with her it doesn't feel genuine. Or uplifting. Like she'll say whatever she thinks she needs to say to get elected."

"But again what about the excitement part?"

"Though she didn't express it in the best way, actually how she said it was insulting, but Gloria Steinem was on to something."

That surprised me. "What's that?"

"That it was, it still is, exciting to be involved in a movement to chance things. To engage in it with friends and, in the case of young people, with others who through social media can work together using social network websites, including those that tell you where to gather for meetings and rallies."

"I get that. It was exciting to march to end the war even if there was the threat of getting clubbed and beaten."

"You had your '60s," my niece said, "And now I want my own 1960s. You had your anti-war movement and I want the equivalent. You got arrested for what you believed in and even if there is danger I want to have that kind of cause to believe in and get mobilized around."

"I can understand that."

"My generation--so-called Millennials (I hate that name)--have been characterized by middle-age people as being self-indulgent and entitled. For some that may be true. But with concern about the climate, the economy, the people left behind, the rights still to be won, and crises all over the world, we finally have our causes and . . ."

She trailed off. "And?"

"And, it's exciting. Very. And that counts too."

February 8, 2016--The Gender Trap: Albright's Inferno or Where the Boys Are

At a campaign event on Saturday in Concord, NH, when introducing Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, scolded young women for supporting Bernie Sanders.

With the grinning Clinton at her side and New Jersey Senator, Wall-Street favorite, Cory Booker on stage left applauding enthusiastically (see below), the 78-year-old former secretary mocked Bernie Sander's political revolution, saying that electing the first female commander in chief would be "a true revolution."

Feeling it, she added--

"We can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of younger women think it's done. It's not done."

Feeling it even more, she apocalyptically shouted, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other!"

A "special place in hell"?

Later, to double-down, in an interview with NBC News, Albright said that "women could be judgmental toward one another and they occasionally forget how hard someone like Mrs. Clinton had to work to get to where she is."

Note that she referred to Ms Clinton as Mrs. Clinton. A bit of a hint about how hard she felt Hillary Clinton, wife of Bill, had to work to get to where she is.

Not to be outdone, Friday night on Bill Maher's Real Time, 81-year-old Gloria Steinem, perhaps the feminist movement's most prominent remaining icon, while explaining how women tend to become more active in politics as they grow older (this not verifiable by facts or data), claimed that younger women were backing Senator Sanders mainly because they could meet young men--"When you're young, you're thinking, 'Where are the boys?' The boys are with Bernie."

This self-revealing comment suggests that this might be some of what motivated Ms Steinem back in her day, but it also ignores the obvious evidence that half or more of Bernie's youthful supporters are women. The polling numbers show that.

This suggests, in Steinemian terms, that in reality "the girls," more than "the boys," are with Bernie and perhaps, to Ms Steinem, more comfortable projecting herself back to the 60s, it's deja vu again. As a reminder, check 19-year-old James Kunan's 1969 best seller, Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, in which he confessed that a lot of guys showed up at the "revolution" to meet girls and get laid.

To be honest, that was at least half the reason I showed up at my Alma Mater, Columbia University, during the campus-occupation "revolution" of 1968. I did meet some girls but didn't manage to get any. Though I did manage to get my hands on one of President Grayson Kirk's cigars. Symbolism abounds.

This parade of strident, aging feminist supporters is the reason Hillary Clinton, to her tone-deaf chagrin, has thus far been unable to appeal to young women. Or to young men.

An astonishing 85 percent of them are with Bernie.

Talking at them, shaming them, and assigning them to hell will likely mean that 100 percent of young voters will soon be with Bernie.

It's not that young women (and many young men) are unaware of feminist history and how far the Madeleine Albrights, Gloria Steinems, and Hillary Clintons have come, or how hard that was, or how significant their achievements have been--how they blazed a trail and punched many cracks in the glass ceiling, all those good and remarkable things--but it is 2016 and young people do not want to be reminded constantly how much they are beholden to their grandmothers'' generation. (Yes, grandmothers--time is whipping along).

They want to live their lives, frankly taking advantage of the opportunities and ways of living brought about by their predecessors. They do not want to be told to look at everything through a gender lens. And they decidedly do not want be hectored by being told what to do, what to think, or what to feel. By men or by women.

It's their time.

November 13, 2014--T-Shirts Make the Man

Like so many other things in Silicone Valley this trend likely started with Steve Jobs, for many years Apple's guiding genius.

Once, twice a year he would stride out on stage at their headquarters in Cupertino, CA, for a show-and-tell that featured the latest iPod, iPad or iPhone. Prior to that this was not what traditional CEOs did to launch their latest products. They would hang back in their corner offices and leave it to the sales and PR people to announce new Game Boys or office software.

Jobs, super salesman and egoist that he was, did this himself in dramatic fashion--in dark ambient light with only him, the Apple logo, and the newest MacBook Pro theatrically illuminated. And rather than appearing in a bespoke suit and Turnbull & Asser shirt and tie, he wore lived-in jeans and a body-revealing black mock-turtleneck shirt with the sleeves pushed up.

This became just as much his signature look as Gloria Steinem's aviator glasses or Donald Trump's comb-over. It also set the tone for other IT magnates. Everyone from Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg subsequently took to rolling out new products and services casually dressed. Zuckerberg shows up in his legendary hoodie or, more recently, in his Steve-Job's jeans and short- or long-sleeved T-shirt.

As reported in Tuesday's New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg, in spite of appearances, thinks a lot about his--if I can call it that--attire.

He wears an identical gray T-shirt every day. He said, "I want to clear my life so I have to make as few decisions as possible beyond serving this community." (My italics)

I get it--not having to think about clothes clears his mind. He avoids the angst of needing to think should it be the gray T-shirt again or maybe a blue or black one. It also saves closet space--one drawer is all he needs for a half dozen or so.

In the Times piece he did acknowledge Steve Job's inspiration--well and good--but claimed he is also influenced sartorially by Barack Obama.

Yes, he did comment about the "simplicity" of Obama's wardrobe. He didn't elaborate, but I suppose he means that Obama always turns out in one of his signature navy or dark gray Hart Shaffner Marx suits. Like Zuckerberg that too enables the president to make as few decisions as possible while serving the community. In his case that community being the United States of America.

In the meantime I worry about poor Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google. Both are far from buff, a bit roly-poly and though they try to look sleek and youthful, when they appear on stage to reveal the latest in cloud computing or Google Glasses in their version of Jobs-Zuckerberg outfits, they look a bit disheveled.

But at least they don't try to stuff themselves into T-shirts.

October 3, 2104--Gloria Steinem's Legacy

Gloria Steinem turned 80 recently (everyone says still looks no more than 65). Partly in acknowledgment of that and also because she was and continues to be a major figure in the history of the Women's Liberation Movement, Rutgers University's Institute for Women's Leadership raised money from a variety of sources to endow a chair, a professorship in her name. It will be in the fields of media, culture, and feminist studies.

Everyone in attendance when the chair was announced (this did not include Ms. Steinem) felt it was not only well deserved but important.

As the director of the Institute, Alison Bernstein said, as Steinem turned 80, "what struck me profoundly was that there needed to be a legacy. When you do a chair you basically are saying this is a curriculum that needs permanence, it isn't going to go away." (My italics)

I worked for and with Dr. Bernstein during her and my days at the Ford Foundation. From her I inherited the women's studies portfolio of grants and an initiative that sought to see mainstream into the undergraduate curriculum some of what scholarship had learned during the preceding few decades about women's history and their many contributions to culture and the larger society.

Mainstreaming suggested that some of the earlier battles to support women's studies research had been won--women's studies programs and courses were by the 1990s widespread in academia and it was time, Ford and leaders in the field felt, to move from separate-and-more-or-less equal status to a permanent place in the undergraduate program.

In other words, in contradiction to what Alison Bernstein said last week at Rutgers, there isn't a pressing need now to endow a chair in women's studies as an expression of legacy or to assure permanence. Permanence's goal should be just what that old Ford initiative was about--to become part of the core curriculum, to move in from the margins. Not to continue to construct separate-but-equal realities.

Honor Gloria Steinem for certain--fund scholarships in her name for women and men, offer her honorary degrees, name classrooms for her, feature her work in special programs that chart the history of late 20th century feminism, but resist the temptation to make permanent separate streams of academic research and instruction.

The work still remaining to be completed to foster women's equality is to press the fight for equal pay, challenge corporations to continue to promote more women to the executive suite, and elect more women to Congress and, perhaps soon, to the White House.

But little of this agenda is appropriate for the university. It is up to women and men in all facets of life to join in actions designed to breach these final barriers.