Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

(Yet) Another Op-Ed Takes On Sheryl Sandberg and Lena Dunham’s Feminism. Meanwhile, in Ohio…

We have, on the one hand, an Ohio legislator, active in getting an anti-abortion “heartbeat” bill approved, offering the following response, in 2012, to a reporter who’d asked him why he imagines women opt to get abortions: “It’s a question I’ve never even thought about.”

(More context tells you that he gestured first at “economics,” which suggests maybe he had thought about it for a moment or two… but also that he chuckled and referred to himself as not being a woman, implication being, why should he be expected to know about such lady-matters? So there’s that.)

Ah, but on the other hand, there’s a brand-new Guardian op-ed making new and urgent point that Sheryl Sandberg, Lena Dunham, and Amy Schumer are not representative of the average woman’s concerns and, from this, concluding that “liberal feminism” (aka a certain former presidential candidate who I hear bravely goes without makeup these days) is effectively the same as conservative not-feminism.

Why am I juxtaposing these two items? Because I think it’s really, really important to address the limitations of glass-ceiling feminism in ways that don’t involve dismissing the need for women in positions of authority. Can this be our goal? Please? Just a suggestion.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.