Feminist Icon

by digby

Sarah Palin was a high school basketball star back in the 1980s and when asked about the gender issues in this campaign by Charlie Gibson, she said this:

PALIN: I’m lucky to have been brought up in a family where gender has never been an issue. I’m a product of Title 9, also, where we had equality in schools that was just being ushered in with sports and with equal opportunity for education, all of my life.

I’m part of that generation, where that question is kind of irrelevant, because it’s accepted

How nice for her. Many women (and men) had to fight right wing conservatives like her tooth and nail to achieve that acceptance. If it hadn’t been for them she never would have had all those opportunities and she wouldn’t now be in a position to tell other women that they shouldn’t have them. Like so many conservatives before her, she is more than willing to accept the freedoms and rights that liberals fight for and then turn around and deny them to others.

Still, she does seem to admit that women were allowed equal educational opportunities through governmental action so maybe she could have a chat with her running mate who has a zero rating with the American Association of University Women.

Ok, they’re obviously a bunch of commie symps who “promote equity for all women and girls, lifelong education, and positive societal change,” so who cares what they think, right? But since McCain is the man who chose the first female to be on a national Republican ticket, he must be someone who receives a high rating on women’s issues generally, right?

2007 Senator McCain supported the interests of the Federally Employed Women 10 percent in 2007.2007 Based on a point system, with points assigned for actions in support of or in opposition to League of Women Voters‘s position, Senator McCain received a rating of 17.2005-2006 Senator McCain supported the interests of the Business and Professional Women USA 33 percent in 2005-2006.2005-2006 Senator McCain supported the interests of the National Organization for Women 13 percent in 2005-2006.

He’s quite the champion of women’s rights.

This is one of the things that is making liberal women crazy about Palin. They recognize that her achievement to become governor of a conservative state and a GOP VP candidate represents the fruits of a couple of generations of feminists who fought for her right to be there. And yet her political principles would have ensured the opposite. I guess when you open doors you can’t guarantee that everyone who walks through them deserves to, but it’s galling nonetheless.

Rebecca Traister, who’s been following the “woman’s story” throughout this campaign, wrote a great article in Salon this week about this odd phenomenon:

I am still perfectly capable of picking out the sexism being leveled against the Alaska governor by the press, her detractors and her own party. Every time someone doubts Palin’s ability to lead and mother simultaneously, or considers her physical appeal as a professional attribute, or calls her a “maverette,” I bristle.

But that’s the easy stuff. The clear-cut stuff. I’m far more torn about the more subtle, complicated ways in which Palin’s gender has me tied in knots.

Perhaps it’s because the ground has shifted so quickly under my feet, leaving me with only a slippery grasp of what the basic vocabulary of my beat — feminism, women’s rights — even means anymore. Some days, it feels like I’m watching the civics filmstrip about how much progress women made on the presidential stage in 2008 burst into flames, acutely aware that in the back of the room, a substitute teacher is threading a new reel into the projector. It has the same message and some of the same signifiers — Glass ceilings broken! Girl Power! — but its meaning has been distorted. Suddenly it’s Rudy Giuliani and Rick Santorum schooling us about pervasive sexism; Hillary Clinton’s 18 million cracks have weakened not only the White House’s glass ceiling, but the wall protecting Roe v. Wade; the potential first female vice president in America’s 200-year history describes her early career as “your average hockey mom” who “never really set out to be involved in public affairs”; and teen pregnancy is no longer an illustrative example for sex educators and contraception distributors but for those who seek to eliminate sex education and contraception.

In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism — a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin’s potential power — means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children’s books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.

In this “Handmaid’s Tale”-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we’re witnessing “a new creation … of the feminist ideal,” the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it’s now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: “put a skirt on.” “I want her watching my kids,” says Deutsch. “I want her laying next to me in bed.”

Bushian epistomological relativism has finally hit the culture wars.

Politically, this is incredibly easy of course. Palin is just another anti-intellectual, hypocritical, right wing freakshow, to whom I react with the same level of shock and disgust as I did when I first saw George W. Bush. Here’s someone who has no more business running for high office than my cat. It’s mind boggling that our system seems to regularly produce such candidates — and that they have such appeal. It makes you question democracy itself. But Palin is riding in on the hopes and aspirations of generations of women and to have the “first” be someone who has been chosen in order that feminism itself could be used as a shield for social conservatism and retrograde policies is almost too much to take.

I always thought the first female president would be a Republican. It’s a Nixon goes to China thing. Only a Republican female could be assured of not being gender-baited by Republicans. But I assumed she would be someone of stature and accomplishment — that they’d demand that much, if only for their own sense of pride. But they have so lowered their standards and bastardized the presidential campaign into a sort of professional wrestling match, that they don’t feel the need to present any candidate of substance.

I suppose that’s a sort of progress. If they could pick George W. Bush, it would have been unfair to expect any more of the first female candidate. Sadly, however, George W. Bush’s failure won’t be held up as an example of why you shouldn’t vote for a man for high office. I’m afraid Sarah Palin will be. Firsts are important.

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