I am in Pittsburgh at Netroots Nation with Advocates for Youth, and I just left a panel called "Building A Conversation Across Generations of Progressive Women".  The panel addressed generational divisions that are said to have arisen from the 2008 primary election between then Senator Hillary Clinton and then Senator Barack Obama. This premise is almost exactly the same to panels I've attended at many other progessive and feminist conferences since the '08 election, because apparently we just can't get over these cavernous divisions. I was interested in attending because I both felt some of these "tensions"  when an old boss told me I owed to my mother a vote for Hillary and saw the issue dealt with very well at a panel during Fem2.0, where the discussion focused on hearing different women's stories and decisionmaking processes without judgement.

This panel did not share the good qualities of the Fem2.0 panel, unfortunately, and by the end of the panel I was shaking and fuming to everyone around me. Well, to be honest, I was shaking by the first couple minutes. Here's a short list of why:

1. We walked in to a panel of five white women, four of them over thirty-five. Oh, so we are healing divisions by yet again reinforcing white, older women as those with voices in the women's movement- division in the women's movement did not date to 2008, but to the beginnings of a movement that ignored so many women's voices. Many people mentioned how it is hard to find people to sit on a panel- my response? Tough Sh-t.

2. The responses to the first question, about how to understand why women voted differently in the 08 primaries, included the younger woman giving statistics about Millenials and saying that young women just don't see inequality until they hit the workforce and Gloria Feldt comparing the fact that 90% of African Americans voted Obama to the lack of a single voting bloc among women and seeming to imply that women who voted Obama chose another identity over thier womanhood. I am uneasy with the attributes often given to Millenials as generally more open-minded, less likely to experience overt inequality because I think this only applies to those in our generation with significant privilege. This was also raised by an audience member. Another audience member also called Ms. Feldt on the 90% statistic, because that is inherently creating a false dichotomy between being a person of color and being a woman, but I don't think enough attention was paid to Gloria's second problematic point- voting for Obama did not mean I was chosing something over being a woman, but that being a woman is not the same thing for every woman.

3. When challenged by two women about the lack of women of color on the panel, the moderator said she had 'asked an American-American woman to be on the panel but she could not, and then offered to have that woman write a blog about it to explain her position as an African American woman on these issues to readers, she said no". Then the panel, over protests moved on. This was the equivalent to "I'm not racist, I have a black friend!". It was a cop-out answer and moving on made clear the panel did not want to talk about the divisions that cannot easily and comfortably be talked about.

4. Questions around generational conflict included one about how to get young women to see they were being sexual harassed in a workplace, which was answered with a discussion about young women generally not understanding, or needing to learn about women's history of oppression. Another comment raised about generational conflict was from a young woman, who said that many of people in our generation have expressed frustration with treatment by older women in the movement, which was answered with an equivocation about different women being different and "feel frustrated and cranky" sometimes. This contradiction between the answers to these two questions infuriates me because the behavior of some young women seems to define our generation as a whole as different and apathetic, yet the behavior of some older women seems to just be "individuals" and not a problem worth addressing.

5. They never seemed to really listen to criticism, but instead kept calling on women they seemed to know, who offered platitudes about just trying to be friends across populations and generations. While it may be comforting to end on an optimistic note, this seemed to be trying to erase the tensions that erupted in the room.

All in all the panel was disappointing, in that it claimed to seek to address tensions, but really was just interested in making older white women feel justified in demanding that women as a group meet them on thier terms. Part of the problem is continuing to focus discussion on the identity politics of the 08 primary, because focusing on reconciling women's voting choices based on thier definition of thier identity is focusing on trying to make all women's perspectives understandable to all other woman. Sometimes, our differing life experiences just make this impossible- and that has to be okay. It has to be okay that woman vote for different people, or that young women see the world differently than older women, because that will always be true. The key in these discussions should not be how to erase these differences, but instead how to work with this differences to still fight for social justice. Only then can we move past 2008.