To the Editor:
In “The Mismeasure of Woman” (Op-Ed, Oct. 24), Joanne Lipman belittles organized feminism and its legacy to her generation.
Paradoxically, she confesses that she both “took equality for granted” and “looked derisively at the women’s liberation movement,” whose rebels and activists she dismisses with the hoary stereotype, “strident, humorless, shrill women.”
While she was enjoying her “post-feminist” privileges and denigrating the radical actions, litigation and legislative campaigns that made her success possible, others of us continued the fight against all the gender inequities Ms. Lipman seems to have just discovered—unequal pay, the glass ceiling, job ghettos, media sexism (not to mention rape and violence against women)—none of which is very funny. Yet she trots out the old canard that women need a sense of humor before they can demand their rights.
And after expressing no respect for her foremothers’ role in the fight for gender justice, she has the nerve to suggest that women demand respect, as if it was something we old strident feminists forgot to include in our agenda.
When I tally up her demands, it sounds to me as if Ms. Lipman wants her cohort to throw off their “post-feminist” blinders and form a movement. Welcome to the struggle.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
New York, Oct. 24, 2009
The writer is a founding editor of Ms. Magazine and the author of several books about women’s issues.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 