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"Dear Ms. Steinem,\nYour op-ed in the New York Times this week, &amp;quot;Women are Never Front-Runners,&amp;quot; was all kinds of wrong, from the title to your take on American history. Due to space constraints, I&amp;#39;m only going to be able to address the two most egregious problems. One: you have no business telling any woman that if she doesn&amp;#39;t vote for a woman, she is somehow a &amp;quot;bad woman.&amp;quot; Two: you patronized and insulted women of color.\nYou said that &amp;quot;some women, especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.&amp;quot; Putting aside the alternate universe in which voting for Hillary Clinton is a &amp;quot;radical&amp;quot; act, Ms. Steinem, who are you to judge women&amp;#39;s feminist credentials based on their willingness to vote for the candidate you like? If you really fought for women to have &amp;quot;independence&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;autonomy,&amp;quot; then why do you suddenly want us to be just like you?\nNo offense, Ms. Steinem, but I&amp;#39;m one of those young women you mentioned, and I don&amp;#39;t want to be like you. I want to be like myself, and that while that doesn&amp;#39;t mean I hope to deny or escape anything&amp;#8212;, I can&amp;#39;t&amp;#8212; just means I want to make my own decisions. But perhaps I don&amp;#39;t really count in your tally, because I am&amp;#8212;!&amp;#8212; woman of color. Which leads me to the second point.\nSimone De Beauvoir nailed the problems with second wave feminism before it even started: &amp;quot;If [women] belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women,&amp;quot; she said, all the way back in 1949. You can re-read her work here.\nSure enough, women of color didn&amp;#39;t join your movement, Ms. Steinem, and I&amp;#39;m guessing it&amp;#39;s because you talked to them back then the way that you did in this essay. You said, &amp;quot;the sex barrier [is] not taken as seriously as the racial one.&amp;quot; How would you know, Ms. Steinem, having never been on that other side? You pulled out that old I&amp;#39;m-the-bigger-victim routine, complaining that black men were given the right to vote before white women, while forgetting that black men were prevented from exercising that right because of poll taxes and the threat of being lynched.\nThe battles of the 1960s are over, Ms. Steinem. But there are new battles to be fought that affect all women, young and old, rich and poor, black, white, Latina, Asian. Right now you&amp;#39;re not helping us in those battles. You&amp;#39;re being&amp;#8212;, that word you hate, &amp;quot;divisive.&amp;quot; But you can be part of the solution. Won&amp;#39;t you join us?\nWishing you internal peace in the new year,\nCaille Millner\nWhat do you think of Gloria Steinem&amp;#39;s essay? Speak out in the comments!"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/story/an-open-letter-to-gloria-stein>