I've always been inpsired by the early feminist movement...

I've always been inspired by the early feminist movement; it was something that I wished I could have been part of. I was jealous of my mother's generation, my professors', of clear battles to be fought. I heard their complaints that they felt abandoned by my generation, the generation of "i'm not a feminist, but", the girls who were too busy with their lives, their self-made lives, the lives they felt they owed no one but themselves for. I saw that guiltless attitude around me for the gift it was, but I always felt that responsibility. I feel oddly abandoned once again, now, but by that generation, the one that I thought had steeled me. My mother and my godmother are slowly distancing themselves from Hillary, and I feel betrayed. I feel surprised at this betrayal, and shocked by the depth of my hurt. I feel, somehow, that they aren't living up to their end of the bargain. They promised me role models, and they have been. But in this action I feel that they are saying to me that there is an end. That maybe life has been hard. That maybe they feel a little wore down. That maybe there is this new energy out there, this man and all that that entails, and I can recognize that small surrender because I've felt it before, felt its pull. But what my mother meant to me today when she told me she had switched sides was that it had been silly, to think that she could get away with it. That Hillary could get away with it. That I could get away with it.

- Alix E., Boston, MA