Did Sarah Palin Supporters Swing the NOW Election?

I took some Women’s Studies classes as an undergrad. I learned the lingo. My 19-year-old mind processed all the outrage. I felt the injustice of it all. I recall vividly an argument with my older brother Matt in which I explained to him how women are “subjugated” because they are “forced” to wear lipstick and high heels.

“Who forced you to wear lipstick and high heels?” he asked.

“Not me -- women in general! Women have to in order to fit the dominant patriarchal cultural norm.”

“No, they don’t. You’re not.”

“Yes, they do. Look at all the advertising!”

“If they don’t want to look nice, they don’t have to. Same thing with guys. If they want to dress like slobs they can. Who’s forcing you to do anything?”

I tried to reach back through the repertoire of grievances drilled into me by the Women’s Studies curriculum, but Matt’s simple question let the air out of my rant. It all felt a little silly after that.

However, in a world where some women are executed for the “crime” of wearing make-up or stoned to death after being raped, feminism is no laughing matter. It's sad to me that too many feminists have turned a movement founded by such courageous and principled women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony into a leftwing loon factory. They made it a punch line.

But smart and principled women like Amy Siskind of The New Agenda are trying to reclaim a semblance of sanity and purpose in the women’s movement.

They might have found a friend of sorts in the new president of NOW, Terry O’Neill.

I don’t typically follow leftwing feminist blogs, so there is a bit of the “Gorillas in the Mist” quality to my decoding of this blog post by Veronica of “Viva la Feminista” concerning the election of Ms. O’Neill as the new president of NOW:

The Sarah Palin supporters swung this election. The election was certainly close enough - less than 10 votes separated the two slates. Then again, if Latifa’s supporters had been able to bring just a handful of additional supporters, we’d have an entirely different picture to discuss. The Palin people out organized us, plain and simple.

Sarah Palin supporters at a NOW election? Whodda thunk it. You go, gals!

The PUMAs seem delighted with the election of Ms. O’Neill. So do the good folks at The New Agenda.

Perhaps Ms. O’Neill was regarded as the candidate of the “Sarah Palin supporters” because of the statement she issued last week about Letterman’s sexist jokes:

“Why did it take so long to apologize?” said O’Neill. “We agree with Letterman’s assessment that his joke can’t be defended, and you can’t really be doing jokes like that. We wish he had acknowledged why: Sexist and racist attacks on women or mothers who dare to enter the public sphere, including Governor Palin, Secretary of State Clinton, First Lady Obama and Judge Sotomayor are a form of sexual harassment.”

[...]

Letterman’s joke had started waves of speculation as to whether it referred to a statutory rape of Palin’s 14 year-old daughter actually present at the Yankee’s game, or a tasteless slur against her 18 year-old daughter who experienced a high-profile teen pregnancy. “But does it matter?” O’Neill asks. “Either way the joke was insulting to women.”

A women’s movement that defends all women – even conservative women? Wow, what a concept.

Veronica of “Viva la Feminista” still seems put off by that concept:

One of the grievances I heard about was how to address the inclusion of pro-life feminists in NOW. *big ass sigh* If pro-life feminists want to be in NOW, I welcome them. Yes, I welcome them. I welcome them and say, “Join NOW. Join us in our fight to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Join us in pushing for single-payer health insurance so that women don’t worry that even if they wanted to be a mom, they couldn’t afford to take their baby to well-baby appointments or the immunizations. Join us in winning paid family leave so women can recover from birth and bond with their newborns. Join us crafting a system where college students can be moms and students with affordable infant care on campus. Join us on making choice a real choice. You don’t have to escort at clinics, you just need to help us make everything else better.”

So, again, you're only welcome in NOW if you subscribe to a leftwing ideology. If you don’t believe that a single payer health care system is the way to go, you’re not welcome in the club.

Veronica, there are women in this world who are murdered simply because they want to wear make-up. Can’t we come together to stand against that? Can you not see that not every woman agrees with your narrow definition of feminism?

There are many things we can agree on.

I’m very proud to be a supporter of Sarah Palin because her life story exemplifies the fact that women can empower themselves. There is nothing wrong with getting a hand up from a famous husband or father. That’s traditionally the case with women leaders, and that’s why a completely self-made woman like Sarah Palin is so remarkable and praiseworthy. Sarah Palin came from nowhere and worked her way up to the highest level of power in her state. She did it on her own (and in high heels and lipstick too).

Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

When we consider, in contrast, the latticed background of careers of successful contemporary female role-model politicians, such as a Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Mary Landrieu, or Hillary Clinton — or pundits like Sally Quinn, Eleanor Clift, Andrea Mitchell, Campbell Brown, Gail Collins (the list is depressingly endless, in which marriage or lineage provides either the necessary capital, contacts, or insider influence — or sometimes all three) — then surely, whatever one’s politics, there should be some concession that what outsider Palin has accomplished, given where she began, is nothing short of remarkable.

In short, Sarah Palin is the emblem of what feminism was supposed to be all about: an unafraid, independent, audacious woman, who soared on her own merits without the aid of a patriarchal jumpstart, high-brow matrimonial tutelage and capital, and old-boy liaisons and networking.

When Sarah Palin was asked by Katie Couric if she considers herself a feminist, she answered yes and went on to mention the organization Feminists for Life, of which she is a member. In another interview she was asked about feminism, and she demurred. No doubt the left will see this as a flip-flop. I do not because I understand exactly where she is coming from. If she’s a flip-flopper, than so am I.

I too am a member of Feminists for Life. I too would call myself a feminist with certain caveats, but the question always boils down to, What is a feminist?

If by feminism you mean the movement that has been commandeered by people that Tammy Bruce, the former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, calls “malignant narcissists,” then my answer is no. If you mean someone who believes in the ideals of feminists like Susan B. Anthony and wants equal pay for equal work, etc., then heck yeah, I’m a feminist.

It should be noted that the GOP was always the party of women’s suffrage and abolition. When Susan B. Anthony voted illegally in the 1872 Presidential Election, she wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she had “positively voted the Republican ticket – straight...” The GOP was the party of the Suffragists. It was the party of freedom. It’s the party of equal rights.

Sarah Palin harkens back to an earlier feminism – an Annie Oakley meets Susan B. Anthony meets Rosie the Riveter.

She brought her 14-year-old daughter with her to New York in order to show her that shrine to American feminism -- Seneca Falls -- the birth place of the Women’s Rights movement in this country.

I'm reminded of what she said when she visited the Women’s Rights National Historic Park, where the First Women’s Rights Convention took place in 1848.

Governor Sarah Palin paused Friday afternoon in front of a monument bearing the Declaration of Sentiments, an early feminist touchstone.

“We anticipate no small amount of ridicule,” she read, and remarked: “Some things never change.”

She feels a bond with those early feminists, as she should.

This speech would have made them proud:



UPDATE by RAM: Take a look at this video of remarks by The New Agenda founder Amy Siskind. Great stuff.