Sarah Palin
Average feminist
Posted on 09/08/2008 6:52:18 PM PDT by Mr. Brightside
Note to mainstream media: Sarah Palin is NOT a feminist
The mainstream media seems confused these days. It appears that because Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is a woman, she is also a feminist. And not just a feminist, but THE feminist - a sign that all is right in the world when it comes to gender equity.
But how could that be, you ask? How could anyone paint Palin - whose policies make it all too clear that she's about as anti-feminist as they come - as feminism's second coming? Well, by pithy misleading headlines - that's how!
The Wall Street Journal: Sarah Palin Feminism
Townhall: Sarah Palin: A Liberated Woman
LA Times: Sarah Palin's 'new feminism' is hailed
NPR: Sarah Palin: New Face Of Feminism?
Adweek: Feminism's Next Wave
The New York Post: A Feminist Dream at the GOP
Even more interesting is that the reporters touting this Palin-as-feminist nonsense are people who pretty much know jack shit about feminism.
Take Wall Street Journal reporter Naomi Schaefer Riley, who writes that progressives should rest easy about Palin's candidacy because "most American evangelicals have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of women in the workplace." A radical feminist sentiment if there ever was one! But perhaps one should take Riley with a grain of salt, considering she's the same reporter who wrote that murdered NY college student Imette St. Guillen should have known better than to be out drinking at 3am. Victim-blamers aren't exactly bastions of feminist thought.
Karin Agness, who wrote the piece for Townhall, calls Palin a "success of feminism" and "truly a liberated woman." Agness is also the President of the Network of Enlightened Women, an anti-feminist college organization that lurves Elizabeth Hasselbeck and even (sigh) mocked a NOW conference attendee in a wheelchair on their blog.
Really, most of the "feminism" talk is coming from conservatives appropriating the language of the movement to push a ridiculously anti-feminist candidate. This, of course, is nothing new (cough, IWF, cough) and fairly transparent.
But what I find even more upsetting is the Palin/feminist talk coming from mainstream outlets who are demonstrating absolutely no knowledge of feminism. Take the Adweek article, for example, which says "Palin is a classic third-wave feminist, benefiting from all that came before her in terms of the women's movement..." So by this definition, any woman who has benefited from feminism is a feminist. So, all women are feminists? Uh, yeah.
So, please, esteemed members of the mainstream media - if you want to write about Palin and feminism, how about you get a feminist to do it? Or at least interview one of us for goodness sake - there's plenty of us around and we'll be happy to talk to you about what the movement is about. (Hint: It's a lot more than thinking any woman is a good choice for all women.)
Sarah Palin
Average feminist
In the past, I’ve been to talks by several members of Feminists for Life and they are what feminists would be if they weren’t anti-religion, anti-unborn, anti-motherhood, and anti-femininity.
Oh, or anti-man.
She’s a member of Feminists for Life, so you might want to rethink this.
That deserves repeating, say it again.
Sarah Palin is a feminist, she’s just not a feminazi.
ok so Sarah Palin is a working woman who wants to get in the WH...but she’s not a feminist.
A real feminist would support a man who picked Biden, a guy who won a couple thousand votes over Hillary, a woman who won 18 million votes.
Who can take this seriously, outside of college campii? Too funny. I say, don’t stop now, keep digging!
Once upon a time, the feminist movement was a challenge to the dominant masculine ideology, when women were considered the 'Internal Others'. As time goes by, feminism has been accepted and become the dominant discourse about women (at least in the academics). As such, its proponents become 'conservative' in their own way and resist any meanings to the term 'woman' other than the one they approved.
By running as a succesful woman who not only personifies many old feminist dreams (certainly no traditional gender role in their family) but rejects abortion (one basic tenet of the today's feminism), Palin's candidacy subverts this dominant ideology, and serves as an Internal Others to the feminist orthodoxy. Like in all movements that become institutionalized, the activists will try hard to resist challenges, but they cannot fight one of their own (albeit not being acknowledged) forever.
The idea of multiple realities, which often offers a mask for feminists (you cannot fully understand what it means to be a woman, unless you are one), cannot be used again Palin because she, too, is a woman.
“Palin is a classic third-wave feminist, benefiting from all that came before her in terms of the women’s movement...”
like Maggie Thatcher and Jeane Kirkpatrick
The dude from Aerosmith is a feminist?
Huh.
:-)
BTT
Why can’t she prefer men and STILL be a feminist??? Is that what disqualifies her? Or just the fact she is attractive? Or maybe the fact that she is younger than 80 and is not filled with hatred?
The Feminists for Life are about equal treatment for women (as in the whole “equal work for equal pay” angle) and about given women choices that don’t involve killing their unborn children. Seriously, they are the good parts of feminism that most people support, not the nasty parts that have made most women run from that label.
Susan B. Anthony, the prototype of the American feminist, was anti-abortion.
One of the features of modern academic thought in leftist and radical circles is the emphasis on no absolutes...everything is relative. It is that line of thinking that get some feminists to say that the unborn baby is not a person until the mother accepts the baby as such, which is why the schizophrenic Washington Post refers to the unborn children of AIDS sufferers as unborn children. In all other instances they demoted back to being fetuses and less.
Whether they like it or not, this thinking allows Sarah Palin to call herself a feminist, and they have no authority outside of themselves to contradict the statement. It doesn’t matter what they think. With the modern way of thinking, if two men want to call institutionalzed sodomy marriage, we must let them do so. If a man in the UK insists that he needs a cervical cancer screening (true story), he must be taken seriously. Given their own readonsing, whatever their definition of feminism might be, it might be very interesting, and very academic, but it cannot interfere with Sarah Palin’s personal autonomy to define herself for herself!
She is a feminist the way it was meant—i.e. that a woman can add work, be happy, love children, learn a bunch of different nontraditional roles, be in business, play sports in college—it has little or nothing to do with being gay or the “right to choose” death for another.
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