Feminist Chicks -- Being A Woman Does Not Automatically Mean You Are A Feminist

Since I spent the vast majority of last week navel gazing and reminiscing about Z's birth, I totally missed everything going on in the world of politics. So, Carly Fiorina is now the GOP candidate for US Senate in California, making bitchy comments about her opponents hair and everything in between. Much has been written about Fiorina's disastorous run at HP, but people seem to forget where she was prior to HP.

My first job out of college was writing articles for the employee newsletter of the "Global Service Provider Networks Group" at a huge corporation. That group, later renamed the much-sexier Service Provider Networks Group, was run by Carly. During that time, she was named Number One on Fortune's Most Powerful Women in Business list. The rumor mill at big companies is always nuts, but nothing out of the ordinary. I had no axe to grind with her until she decided to move on to HP and made some dumb-ass comment about how it proved that there obviously "no glass ceiling anymore." Right. I was sitting in a conference room full of women watching Carly say this on tv -- these were women who had attended her meetings, written her speeches, distributed her news, planned her itineraries and the silence was deafening. My boss, an African American woman with two kids, was the first, and I believe, only, to speak, saying, "well, that's news to me."

I've pretty much loathed her ever since, but at the same time, am freakishly fascinated.

Red Vinyl Shoes post, Feminist Does Not Mean "Strong Woman," is an amazing read.

"These women are part of a new wave of conservative feminism, which apparently views women’s advancement in the workplace and politics to be the most important tenet of actual feminism. Basically, these conservative feminist leaders have decided that the advancement of women to the upper echelons of business — something they have already achieved — is what feminism should really be about. Behind the complicated, self-invalidating beliefs pairing the “right to life” with an exhortation to protect women and children and their token glorification of the homemaker is just the basic white feminist desire to finally reach that level of equality with men in regards to power and most importantly, privilege. Once the smoke clears, wealthy conservative feminist candidates will likely discontinue the rhetoric exalting homemaking as one of the most important things a woman can do. By opposing ideas like subsidized child care, access to birth control, and legal abortion, these women will actually make things worse for any homemaker not privileged by race and wealth."

As a white woman who has spent all of her career in corporate America, I feel very conflicted about what it means to be a business leader and what sacrifices I would have to make to go further. I know that I am lucky in my achievements. I respect the women who have achieved more than I have, but I do not believe that becoming the leader of a multinational corporation means that all women have suddenly become equal, and there's no need for a feminist movement anymore. As I said before about Sarah Palin, it really fucking disturbs me, though, that people are falling for it.