Women's liberation broke with the New Left in 1968, but militant feminism retained many of the left's habits and much of its style well into the 1980s: the heavy-handed theorizing, the scorn for compromise, the insistence that life was lived in blacks and whites and not in grays, the penchant for theatrical display, the faith that sheer will could bring about a perfect - or near-perfect - society purged of wrongs, and the scorn for liberalism and government. In 1968 it was widely assumed that nothing good, absolutely nothing, could come from government, which was a shill for the (male) (white) ruling class. In the women’s movement, liberal democracy seemed, if anything, even more alien and contemptible, since there was hardly a woman in sight in high office. ...

The result is an abiding illiberalism, a profound distrust of the normal politics of compromise and maneuver, even as ’68 feminists have done their own compromising and maneuvering working their ways into positions of great influence in the culture. Feminist politics are still seen, by definition, as pressure politics or protest politics, exerting force from outside rather than working on the inside (those dreaded dull words). Female (and feminist) politicians can be useful allies, but in the terms of ’68, by definition they cannot inspire. Which brings us to the odd story of our first serious woman candidate for president, and the feminists who decided not to support her.

Madison Avenue has long heralded improbable “revolutions” in car design, clothing, and cuisine. Today it celebrates sixties counterculture. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher turned the tables on the New Left with a market revolution that took "power to the people." David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, was, like José Manuel Barroso, the market-friendly European Commission president, a former leftist. A center-right or center-left cabinet today is not complete without a Joschka Fischer or Bernard Kouchner. Scratch a neo-con and he turns out to be an ex-Trotskyist or an ex-something else. Bernard-Henri Levy was student gauchiste in 1968.

Peace, freedom, equality, justice were the watchwords of the time. Yet, even among the young male revolutionaries of the New Left, equality didn’t mean the women with whom they worked, studied, and slept.

Indeed, men’s contempt for women, their refusal to take their female comrades-in-arms seriously, was legendary. Stokely Carmichael, a leader in the civil rights struggle replied to a question about the position of women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) with the single word "prone." A joke, he explained later. Yeah, right.

White men were no better. In one of the most shameful incidents of the time, men at the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) jeered women who sought a voice in organizational policy off the stage with catcalls, suggesting that their place was either on their backs or at the coffee machines. It was an event that gave impetus to what was then the infant Women’s Liberation Movement, tagged derisively and dismissively by male commentators as “Women’s Lib.”

Why does the New York Times feature a half-page, over-the-fold article by Patrick Healy devoted entirely to a derisive accounting of what he calls Hillary Clinton’s various personas, without once mentioning her intelligence, her position on the issues, or her qualifications for the presidency. Why does Carl Bernstein think it’s relevant to remark on her "thick ankles?" Why is the silence deafening when, as Robin Morgan wrote in a recent post, the Clinton-hating Citizens United Not Timid (note the acronym) asked John McCain, "How do we beat the bitch?" and he answered, "Excellent question!" "Would he have dared," Morgan asks, "reply similarly to 'How do we beat the black bastard?'" Now that is an excellent question.

Like all revolutionary political movements, feminism had its successes and failures, its excesses and mistakes. We were blind to class-cultural differences at the outset and were quickly labeled as irrelevant to working-class women and women of color. True, they became the beneficiary of our struggle, but to this day they still abjure the feminist label, even while living its gains. In our anger at the hierarchical nature of the family, we failed to grasp sufficiently the hunger for family and connection that animates most people, and in doing so, gave over the "family values" issues to the radical right. We were so concerned with our own cause that we didn’t fully grasp the pitfalls of the movement toward cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and the identity politics that flowed from that. And we enforced a kind of political correctness on ourselves that blinded us to ways of building a broader, more universal coalition.

In contemporary Mexico, thanks to ’68, we have freedom of expression, a press that can analyze and comment on and protest government actions. And thanks to ’68, Mexican women - who were numerous within that student movement - could enter public life with energy and impact, a great historical achievement in a country with Mexico’s machista traditions.

Out of this impassioned sense of newness there erupted an explosion of hidden grievance from sections of the body politic - women, gays, students - that had either never, or not in a century, been driven to open rebellion. Again, it was the combination of influences at work that made the outbreak so electrifying. While the conventionally organized left delivered the analysis, it was the over-the-top counterculture brashness that pointed directly at the places where it hurt; made ordinary citizens cry out at other ordinary citizens, Don’t you get it? This is how we feel. And now that we know how we feel, this is how far we intend to go, how many bridges we’re willing to burn. (my emphasis)