I am just old enough to remember the conclusion of Roe v. Wade and what a relief it was for women, lead by that bold wave of feminists that emerged from the 1960s. It was such an epic cultural benchmark that generations after that didn’t know that the opposition from conservative women was a beast. Phyllis Schlafly was a tough old bitch. A white woman of means who embraced her privilege and was just as vicious an adversary as any man, because this truly is a race/class thing.

So I’m glad that younger women are finally getting the memo, but I think that part of the reason these really fundamentally misogynist agendas have been able to literally flourish is that in next generations, women assumed they’d overcome. Young women assumed such oppression didn’t exist so they couldn’t have imagined how deeply virulent it was. They didn’t grasp how profoundly sexism and straight misogyny proliferates institutionally: hello, Donald Trump. All things old are new again.

In 2016, there was also a really dangerously naive attitude from young women towards Hillary Clinton, “she’s not my kind of feminist.” Clinton was a feminist was of the Gloria Steinem generation: they were the women who did the very heavy lifting in the face of people who wanted to keep all women in the kitchen “bare foot and pregnant.” And I believe well educated — especially white girls — who came up after that were deeply lacking in imagination and unsophisticated enough to believe that the patriarchy had so changed that they didn’t have to worry about it. That the law was there to protect them.

So I am really glad that these gals are figuring this out: figuring out that holding their breaths and not voting because they didn’t get the candidate they wanted is self-destructive in ways they never before imagined. Or that weak men are pathological in the desperate measures they will take to hold onto power, or that there are women that think those men are their protectors.

But most of us over fifty have always known this: no revelation here if you’d been paying attention, or just listened. Now this is your very heavy lift, ladies. There are people who hate you for simply being unwilling to be a “handmaid.” Get used to it.

You hit the streets and you vote these fuckers out of office. You take back the state houses cause that’s where the power is. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves. Get on with it.