Palin vs. feminists

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Cathy Young touches on what I wrote last night on Sarah Palin, but goes further into the subject in her column “Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin“;

On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a “Christian Stepford Wife” and a “Republican blow-up doll.” Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog, “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

Imagine the uproar if someone suggested that Obama’s greatest hypocrisy is in his pretense that he is a Black man.

In the Boston Globe on Friday, columnist Ellen Goodman frets that Mrs. Palin is a “supermom” whose supporters “think a woman can have it all as long as she can do it all . . . by herself.” In fact, Sarah Palin is doing it with the help of her husband Todd, who is currently on leave from his job as an oil worker. But Ms. Goodman’s problem is that “she doesn’t need anything from anyone outside the family. She isn’t lobbying for, say, maternity leave, equal pay, or universal pre-K.”

This also galls Katherine Marsh, writing in the latest issue of The New Republic. Mrs. Palin admits to having “an incredible support system — a husband with flexible jobs rather than a competing career . . . and a host of nearby grandparents, aunts, and uncles.” Yet, Ms. Marsh charges, she does not endorse government policies to help less-advantaged working mothers — for instance, by promoting day-care centers.

So what do feminists want? Do they want a candidate that “made it” by hanging to her man’s coattails (ala Hillary) or do they want a woman whose husband subordinates his own career to that of his wife so she can make it under her own power without his name to hold up in front of her like a shield (ala Hillary)?

Why can’t they just say what they mean; They don’t want a Republican woman in any place of authority or with any role in government. Instead of playing word games, instead of sounding like hypocritical shreiking harpies, instead of demeaning every woman in the country who busts their metaphorical ass to meet the incredibly high standard of the word “success” as defined by the feminist movement…why can’t the feminists just admit that they’re in the bag for Democrats?

Category: Politics