"The End of an Era"

I suppose eras are always ending these days. Quillette has an excerpt from a book by Phyllis Chesler, whose given name marks her era quite well. In the Baby Boom, close to ten thousand girls a year were given the name "Phyllis" some years; in 2012 it was 13.
This is a real change, but a small one. She has seen bigger things.

After 9/11, I felt as if the Afghanistan I’d fled so long ago had followed me right into the future and into the West. That distant and dangerous country began to dominate American and European headlines. Muslim women started wearing burqas (head, face, and body coverings) and niqabs (face masks) on the streets of New York City, London, and Paris.

As global violence against women gained horrendous momentum, many Western feminists became increasingly afraid to criticize that violence lest they be condemned as colonialists and racists. This fear often trumped their concern for women’s human rights globally.... Many feminist academics and journalists now believe that speaking out against head scarves, face veils, the burqa, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and polygamy is somehow racist. I did not foresee the extent to which feminists who, philosophically, are universalists would paradoxically become isolationists. Such timidity (presumably in the service of opposing racism) is perhaps the greatest failing of the feminist establishment.

The bulk of the work appears to be biographical tributes to the Second Wave feminists she worked with, as well as a sorrowful retrospective on what has become of their common work. I suppose she must be intending to close off her own era indeed, given some of her comments. She will not now be welcome on many a campus.