On Friday, feminist icon Gloria Steinem slammed young women for abandoning Hillary Clinton and siding with Bernie Sanders because young men favored Sanders.
Steinem was speaking to Bill Maher on Real Time, when Maher pointed out young women were gravitating to Sanders. Steinem snapped, women “get more radical as we get older, because we experience … yeah, it’s the opposite … men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age and women get more radical because they lose power as they age … when you’re young, you’re thinking, “Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’”
After a firestorm broke out over her remarks denigrating young women, on Sunday Steinem backed down on Facebook, writing that she wasn’t implying “young women aren’t serious in their politics”, adding, “What I had just said on the same show was the opposite: young women are active, mad as hell about what’s happening to them, graduating in debt, but averaging a million dollars less over their lifetimes to pay it back. Whether they gravitate to Bernie or Hillary, young women are activist and feminist in greater numbers than ever before.”
According to an Iowa entrance poll before the state’s caucuses, among voters younger than 30, Sanders swamped Clinton by six to one: 84% to 14%
“When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.'”
Gloria Steinem, castigating young women for deserting Hillary Clinton
Steinem, in the mold of her political heroine, who once bragged, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life,” said caustically, “Statistically speaking, home is the most dangerous place for a woman.”
Summing up her life’s work in a traditional attack on traditional values, Steinem asserted, “Gratitude never radicalized anybody.”