Nothing says boomer narcissism like identifying a particular problem in one's own sphere of understanding and deciding it must be entirely new and unique. At least that's the only way I can begin to understand Hirshman's completely absurd assertion that "Only women seem to need to separate and destroy in order to start all over again with each generation."

It would take far too long to detail how western history and literature (from Oedipus to Henry IV to HW Plainview) has faithfully told and re-told the story of men rejecting the worlds and lives of their fathers. Certainly, it is a failure of Western culture to have for so long ignored the parallel stories of mothers and daughters, but to attribute to that story a uniqueness that denies the experiences of fathers and sons is to remake the mistakes of the dead white men that the second-wave feminists worked so hard to debunk.