Regarding the feelings of mature feminists such as myself, Shakespeare said it best: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth is it to have a thankless child." Young women who think that they have those good jobs because they're oh so much hipper and smarter than we were now want to "talk"? The self-absorbed beneficiaries of our decades of struggle and frustration, who couldn't acknowledge what they owed to those who had opened the way for them, now want to mend fences? The spoiled kids who blithely take for granted opportunities we could only dream of but who relentlessly mocked in Hillary Clinton the very qualities that won them their place in the world now want reconciliation? Oh, please, Dahlia. Grow up. Choices have consequences. We who struggled for decades making very hard choices understand that.

African Americans, on the other hand, know their history and revere the pioneers whose efforts made Obama possible. They rallied to Obama, regardless of any misgivings they might have had about him, because they knew him as the culmination of their long communal effort. They knew that his triumph would be the triumph of the cleaning women and handymen who trudged to work for a year in Montgomery rather than ride the buses, of the people maimed for attempting to eat a hotdog at a counter. They understood that and acted on their understanding. But you young women who are too smart to understand your own history and grasp the historic meaning of Hillary's candidacy now can't acknowledge your own failing. At least one good thing came out of this. The torrent of misogyny unleashed against Hillary may give you some slight inking of what our lives were like. I hope you're smarter next time. This time, your mother is not in any mood to kiss your boo-boo.

top post in hitting all the hight points with perfect accuracy. Well done indeed!

It's been impossible to point out what Black America did and why they did so during this nomination process without having a half dozen or so hysterical non-thinkers instantly accuse one of being a filthy racist. But, nonetheless you precisely stated exactly what was going on with both the Black community and with the current generation of 'fair weather' younger feminists.

The sad thing, however, is that Dahlia and her arrogant, smug, pampered, catered to, and spoiled 'sister' peer group honestly do not understand what was really at stake in this race, nor what they blithely allowed to slip through their fingers nor just how deadly was their betrayal of older feminists.

I think that Dahlia may have an uneasy inkling of the possible consequences of hers and her peer-group's actions now that the dust is settling, as evidenced by her non-apologetic apology, but she doesn't yet realize just how badly they have hurt and insulted the older generation, nor are they more than just vaguely aware that there are truly dire consequences coming their way and that the older generations of feminists are not going to just forgive them and forget.

Gad, have you read all the justifications here?

It's now all Hillary's fault. She bears the sins of all who mocked her.

Maybe if her last name was Edwards, clever people wouldn't have thought it was OK to name a nutcracker for her? Maybe if her last name was Kennedy, it would have been OK that her husband was a womanizer. Maybe if her last name were Gore, it would have been OK if she got an assist in national politics.

That poor woman, maybe she needs to take a vacation instead of being a good soldier in the Democratic Party.

This makes me think of the mothers of the second wave. You couldn't have expressed their sentiments any better. Indeed, this whole experience should be a warning to the current wave of feminists. The message is:

Note the contempt the second-wavers held for the generation above them. Note the derision, the condescension. And note how you feel about them.

Do you want your daughters to treat you the way they treated their mothers and the way you're treating your mothers?

DC Dame, I understand your post to mean that women of my generation (I'm 29) need to be thankful of and appreciative for the efforts and struggle of your generation to fight for the equality and respect that my generation enjoys every day.

Do I have that right?

I guess the issue I take, then, with the rest of your stance (aside from your use of terms such as "self-absorbed" and "spoiled," which strike me as ad hominem but I'll let them lie for now) is that we (as presumptuous as it is to speak for my entire generation) thought that we were expressing our appreciation: by going to college at higher rates than men; by striking out into all fields in the workforce; by expanding the work you started by reaching out to those whose lives had been limited by racial, sexual orientation, or other biases; by struggling to create acceptance for the kind of work-life balance that would allow women to achieve their domestic dreams alongside their career and political ones; by using our own brains to decide who we wanted to vote for instead of relying on our husbands or our boyfriends to tell us what to do.

But it seems that aside from, or maybe instead of, this, you just wanted us to vote for Hillary.

We were ignorant in not realizing this, in not seeing what this would mean to you. And I'm sorry for that, personally, as I am sure many in my generation are. I am also sorry that a woman of your generation will likely not become president. But I can assure you that on our end of things, the women of my generation have worked hard to make sure that there are many viable female candidates for every office. We will carry your work forward.

Finally, as for the last line of your comment: I know that you are angry and hurt, but statements of this tenor are not helpful, and I am sad to say that they are also not uncommon. I just recently made a presentation to a group of colleagues, and at the end of it the oldest woman in the room (she is 59) looked me in the eye and in front of God and everyone said, "It's just hard to believe that you know what you're doing because you're just so young." All I could think was that there is nothing I can do: I will never be anything but 30 years younger than her. She-- and I suspect you, DC Dame-- have, inadvertently or not, created a game that none of us younger women can win.

Amysee, the way to express gratitude is to say "thank you." Out loud. In actual words. It is not to go to college and get a good job and fight all the same old battles about child care and housework that we fought years ago and you are still fighting. It is to say--actually say--"I couldn't have done this without you." And "you made this possible for me and I know that, and know I cannot ever repay the debt." That is how one expresses appreciation. I haven't seen very much of that going on around here.

As to my last line, I did not intend to be helpful. I intended to be frank. I am tired of helping people who are not grateful and I don't feel like doing it at present. I did it for decades.

As to what your odler colleague meant: Of course you will always be 30 years younger than she is. She knows that. But someday, if you're lucky enough to live that long, you will be as old as she is, and you will know what she knows but you don't. What she knows is what life teaches--and it teaches everyone in the end, no matter how smart and well-educated and self-confident they started out--about disappointment, loss, humility, sorrow, happenstance. Maybe, with even more luck, it teaches wisdom.

Your colleague, who has lived two days for every one that you have knows twice as much about life as you do. I suspect that something you said in your presentation revealed to her something she took as naive or arrogant or lacking in caution or humility. These qualities are not uncommon in the young. But there was something that you could have done. You could have asked her what she meant, what her experience had taught her that you don't know, what she saw that you had missed. It's always a good idea to ask people with greater experience what they mean when they let you know that they suspect something is wrong.

When we were young, we were taught to respect our elders--simply because they were our elders. Not necessarily to agree with them, but to show them the respect of acknowledging that they knew things that we didn't. That's what you can do. And you'll be surprised at what you'll learn if you do.

DC Dame,

While I suspect you do not want to believe it, amysee and I and others of our generation do say thank you. Thank you. We are grateful. I am a 29-year-old woman in the legal field, with a huge number of older women as mentors. Each of them did fight everything you are talking about. (For the record, some of them still didn't support HRC).

I really do appreciate what I have available to me, and like most of my female peers, I listen closely to my mentors' stories and lessons. I often seek their advice in dealing with a profession that is still, largely, male-dominated. But gratefulness and guidance do not require us to make a decision exactly as you see it. We take your experience and your lessons under advisement, and then we make our own independant judgment. I suspect you acted (and probably still act) similarly.

I am sorry you feel unappreciated, you are not. Presuming to speak for my generation, I hope someday you will appreciate us as well.

It really bothers me to hear people like DC Dame advocating for rigid identity politics. Women should vote for the woman... just like the blacks voted for the black... then, therefore, men should vote for the man? Its very disturbing to suppose that anyone could advocate that sublimation of the plural into the singular in America.

Please don't import tribalism to America.

So working to improve women's lives isn't really what matters-- you just want a nice Hallmark card and a free pass on past and present racism and homophobia, and the progress still left to go in the movement? And we're a bunch of ungrateful children if we don't act appreciative enough?

Respect is a two-way street. You seem to have no interest in listening to dissenting or critical voices, or in appreciating the struggle of a new generation of women. For someone invested in women, it seems that only the viewpoints and fights of a certain generation has any value or meaning to you.

Thank you for that,That was excellent and glad the editors thought so,too!