Palin is at odds with feminist ideals

By: Katie Collins

Posted: 10/9/08

Sarah Palin's vice-presidential bid has brought a confusing maelstrom of criticism and fervent support from women across the country. The debate over Palin's qualifications, political views and personal life reflect deep-set and bitter social issues that characterize gender relations today.

But let's start with confessions. I think I am one of the few 20-year-old American women today who will admit to being a feminist. At some point in the journey from the 1960s women's movements to our own generation, in which many kids our age watched mothers juggle careers and families, it has somehow become taboo to be a feminist. The stereotype today is that a feminist is a militant liberal who refuses to shave her legs. I do shave my legs, I am not a militant liberal, I am a feminist and although I decided long ago to vote for Obama, I liked John McCain up until the day he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.

While Palin's religion-infused ideology is abhorrent to many women, I think what really bothers us about her is not so much what she says, but who she is, and how the McCain campaign has tried to manipulate this identity to win women voters. It is the fascinating issue of Palin's own femininity, her identity as a "hockey mom," her photo shoots and the famous picture of her wearing an American flag bikini and shooting a rifle that makes her so interesting to us all.

A Sept. 7 spread in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, declared: "Sarah Palin brings the Hillary Clinton era to an End." The editorialist, Anne Applebaum, opines that Palin has broken the "powerful woman" archetype laid out by Hillary Clinton's style of "frequently chilly, determinedly frumpy, visibly calculating, pointedly humorless," as the norm for powerful American women. For the women of Clinton's generation, motherhood and public power sat in an uncomfortable and often unmanageable arrangement.

Palin however, according to Applebaum's analysis of our society, proves that women can attain political power without "wearing shapeless trouser suits and looking frosty," but instead by engaging their femininity as an asset and fighting point. Palin's generation of "post-feminists," born at the tail end of the baby boom, was the first generation able to take a woman's right to a college education and a career for granted.

Much of Palin's appeal is that she seems fundamentally unscathed by what Glamour magazine termed as the "Mommy wars." She calls herself a "hockey mom," yet seems to have no qualms about running for one of the nation's highest offices with five children, one of whom is expecting her own, at home. This makes many women, who themselves have suffered through choices between family and career feel at once belittled and enraged by a woman who they see as flouting her familial obligations while touting her own family as an asset.

It is that Palin's family and motherhood have been made so central to her character and campaign that make her so interesting, and often despicable, to women across the country. During the month of September, scarcely a day went by that I didn't receive a forwarded e-mail from my mother, aunts or one of their friends decrying Palin as a threat to the women's rights that their generation found so dear.

These women, all of whom consider themselves feminists, find the nomination of Palin offensive. They believe that she was chosen in "shameless pandering," as one e-mail put it, to win women voters simply by virtue of Palin's sex. We feel that Palin has been trotted out by the Republican party as the new prototype of a powerful woman in America - and it's not one that we want to live with. According to the Palin model, motherhood, family and politics all exist in so comfortable and close proximity that the domains bleed into each other and motherhood and "family values" themselves becomes perhaps the most important and only viable reason to elect a woman.

Palin's stance on abortion is particularly significant in this election, as up to five Supreme Court Justices are seen as likely to leave the bench during the next four to eight years. Palin has frequently criticized Roe vs. Wade, and many women's groups fret that should McCain and Palin win the White House, we would see the appointment of socially conservative justices liable to overturn the landmark 1973 decision.

The idea that government should be able to deny individuals the right to either use or not use a life-altering technology is offensive. Abortion is a sensitive and personal issue, even those who call themselves "pro-choice" don't always agree that abortions are a good decision for an individual. I respect others' religious views, but they should in no way enter into the governing process, and I'm getting nervous that starting in January, they might.

As a non-militant liberal feminist who does indeed shave her legs, I am voting for Obama, and against Palin more so than McCain, and I hope that other women my age, feminists or not, will do the same. As we come of age in a society that is tumultuous enough as it is, I think we all need paths to prominence for women that do not include touting childbearing and hockey ring cheering skills as essential resumé-builders.