When did feminists become women?

Want to see some feel good over the top cheerleading for yourself? The California Women's Conference in Longbeach is going on right now, and they are live webcasting the whole thing. Click here for the website.

I'm not sure where these got started - I'll have to check into it - but Texas has been having a similar event for a few years, and I wonder if there are other states doing these also. I'll have to look into that sometime when I'm mindlessly surfing the net.

Anyway, the California event does have some great presentations that will get you thinking. And the webcast is very easy to watch. It's not just a video tape of the event, but an an actual production, which I guess has a lot to do with it being in Los Angeles (okay, I know it's Long Beach, but let's face it, that's the same as LA, even though people in both LA and Long Beach will object to my saying that - but for very different reasons). The point is, there's good stuff and it's entertaining to watch.

But what struck me the most was the tone. Lot's of extreme adjectives, and all as positive as you can get. It's the "professional" version of the cheery positive saccharine of the "Up With People" group from the 70's. Maria Schriver says "extraordinary" in front of everything she mentions, Debra Norville got stuck on the word "amazing," and I think the audience was exhorted to appluad themselves quite a few times over the course of the day.

I am not a scrooge. I don't mean to say I think the tone was bad. I do mean to say it was SOOOOOO much it seemed a bit forced at times, and mostly I mean to say that wow! this is different than the women's conferences of yesterday, which largely worked to fan anger and indignation so that the women, who were then called feminists, would be fired up to go and work for change in governement and business. This conference seems to be all about patting ourselves on the back and "celebrating" the work that's been done - or rather, kind of ignoring that we had to do the work and just quietly accepting that it's there without acknowledging that people who you used to be able to call "feminist" without provoking protest were the ones who had to work very hard to get to this point.

They do still like the word "empowerment," though. That's good. I like that word, too.

I celebrate the place women are now. I do not wish to pretend that it was easy, or that the work is done.