I grew up listening to my mom and her best friend talk about the times when they burned their bras in my grandmother’s oven and participated in women’s rights rallies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Thirty years, two kids and five master’s degrees later, the two women I look up to most are disappointed in the direction my generation of women has adopted.

“We fought for you to be able to go to college and work, to be taken seriously as women. Now, girls like Britney Spears are degrading women as sex objects and dumb blondes,” my mom said a few months ago after watching a commercial on MTV. “I don’t think you understand how serious this is.”

The feminist movement is over and women now hold high-ranking positions in politics and business. More women than men attend college and just last week, history was made when Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Considering how much headway women have made in recent years, it is surprising how they are portrayed on TV and in the news.

Instead of making Condoleezza Rice or Hillary Clinton the “poster-girl” of our generation, we have popularized Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton. Women are characterized more by the women on MTV’s “The Real World” and other trashy reality TV shows than by Joyce Carol Oates and other women who have made significant contributions to our world. Consequently, today’s women are not given the respect we deserve, respect that our mothers earned.

Perhaps the problem with my generation is that we don’t understand how loaded the word “feminism” really is. To our mothers, feminism represents a struggle for equality. To my generation, it means man-hating and male degradation. Pat Robertson, a well-known televangelist, stated in an interview, “feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Coming from a conservative fanatic, his theory must be taken with a grain of salt. However, Robertson inadvertently recognizes heated resentment that surrounds the “F” word.

Women today are fearful of being labeled a feminist because of its negative connotations. “But it’s not necessarily about being independent and single, it’s about having the choice,” my mom once said. “The mom in the kitchen can be just as much of a feminist as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.”

It seems to be “either, or” with my generation: either you’re a man-hating, cold-hearted businesswoman or a dumb blonde on “Girls Gone Wild.” The only thing I can think of that would prompt this dichotomy to evolve is the attitude that the feminist movement had toward the middle-class stay-at-home mom. Modern women are torn between being that sexy single business woman who is married to her career, but makes six figures to show for it, and the stay-at-home mom who raises a good, healthy family. It seems like there is no balance.

Why can’t a woman work and still raise good, wholesome children? Why has the family mom who was put on a pedestal in the 1950s become a symbol of failure? The women of my generation have yet to realize that that’s not the case, and consequently we’re lost.

I read an article the other day in which the author, George Rolph, wrote, “watching television I am struck by how many times in one evening I see a woman or a bunch of women attack everything their male colleagues or counterparts say and then go on to whine about how men do not respect them.” This quote represents the confusion my generation has about what feminism means.

For some reason, we only inherited the negative aspects of the feminist movement and have yet to understand the deep, underlying principles that started a revolution.

If we are to be taken seriously, we need to take a step back and think about how we got to where we are today. Our mothers and grandmothers did not succeed by whining, they succeed because they were steadfast in their convictions and persevered for equality.

Unless we realize that every woman is entitled to fulfilling her own dreams, even if that means cooking in the kitchen, we will continue to be characterized by the likes of Paris Hilton.