How cruel! Both from an ‘in the know’ perspective and not! I’m glad your mom sounds lovely & supportive. Moms are awesome sometimes.

My mother did this to me once. “I’ll help you raise it.”

My mom is a full 10 years older than my MIL. My MIL has been pressuring me to have children since I was 20 - almost a full decade. She announced to my mother one year when we were all out to dinner that she started going to church again SOLELY to pray that our condoms break so we can give her grandchildren before she…

to be truthful: ambivalence, pregnancy phobia and a deep love of being irresponsible for hours on end may actually be the main players

Oh god, my SO’s (very liberal, very sweet) mother asked me last year how my mother felt about having two daughters who were almost 30, unmarried and without children. Between us we joined the army, got 2 BAs, 2 MA’s and learned to manage other human beings in our 20’s. I have no idea how we could have possibly fit in…

I just miss crazy shit like this

When I read this piece and others like it, I feel a strange sense of frustration at my mother’s choices. She graduated from high school in the early 60’s. Her college education was cut short by an unplanned pregnancy, and she married her boyfriend—a marriage that went down in flames of infidelity ten years later. Then…

the experience for a woman of color is different than the experience of a Muslim woman and different from that of a gay woman and yet different again from the experience of a privileged woman and therefore, feminism cannot universally speak to them

This is a good point. Part of what initially put me off feminism was the seemingly constant anger, that my mentality was, “I could never be a feminist, I’m not angry enough”. I didn’t even mean that as a put down to other women, I just genuinely thought that feminism required a constant level of negative emotion that…

While I totally understand what you’re saying (and I’m also only 41), I have found that “anger” does more damage to me than it does to them, or forwarding the cause. I tend to try and shift that anger to amusement, rebellion and mild derision.

I find it fascinating how feminism vacillates between denying any trace of anger in the movement (often, and ironically, in a fairly angry fashion), and making performative outrage the model for demonstrating one’s feminist credentials. Please don’t get me wrong - the wrongness of sexism does not hinge upon how nice…

I think it’s important to note, as the author has, that our generation is removed from the generation of Mad Men. Where our generation’s feminists can look at things like ironing, baking, etc and acknowledge that both men and women can perform this task, in our mother’s generation it was women’s work.

In 35 years, from 1958 to her retirement in 1993, in a small-town corner of Corporate America, my mother went from the secretarial pool to a position as a market analyst for a major pharmaceutical company, having frequent interactions with their internal advertising department, as well as with executives from…

But mocking those of us who aren't forced to do this is kind of pointless. It's just bitchy.

I’m not sure why some feminists feel the need to mock domestic things like ironing, cooking, baking, etc. I understand that these are not things that women should feel obligated to do in the home simply because they are women, but fuck it. I like baking. I’m making two types of bread today. Dill and garlic. Sun-dried…

Three thoughts:

Your mum sounds rad as hell. Please thank her for the work she and other women did to make things easier and fairer for my generation.

Tina, I read your comments all the time, and you are so not a boob punch I can’t even tell you. That’s exactly what I was thinking about this guy, too.

Yup. Tonight I’m going on a date with a man who attended an Ivy League college and probably has a wealthy background, which I’m judging not just by his school but other signifiers. In fact, I’ve dated a few men of this background, but I went to state schools and make much less than them. Why do they not care? Deep…

That’s maybe the worst celebrity story I’ve read in this thread (that came out wrong but each time I try to rewrite it, it comes out wrong again). My heart aches for 17 year old you and I am so sorry that she was so classless and mean and horrible.