Sarah Palin and the Old Girls' Club

Sarah Palin’s nomination this week did more than just energize the Republican base and draw all the media attention away from Barack Obama. What her nomination did was to call the old-guard feminists out and make them prove that they’re really not pro-woman at all. She’s supposed to be a feminist’s dream—a smart, athletic, intelligent woman who’s beauty did not tempt her to be satisfied with “traditional” female roles. (Remember the sanctity of Title IX funding of girls’ sports and how we were told we should revere and encourage the young woman athlete?) She rose through the tough, intimidating male world of frontier Alaska politics, taking on big oil, political corruption and a deeply entrenched Old Boys Network and won! Her career accomplishments overshadow her husband but neither she nor he seems to mind. With infant in tow, she governs a state and then hits the campaign trail and does it all with grace and poise. This story is every feminist’s dream. In fact, feminists did dream it up into a television drama which they had hoped would rival West Wing. Remember Geena Davis in Commander in Chief, a young, smart, inexperienced vice-president whose baby threw up on her blouse right before her inauguration as President after her predecessor died in office unexpectedly? That’s Sarah Palin!—with one big glaring difference: Palin is a conservative.

This one fact alone is enough to make Maureen Dowd and the entire Old Girls’ Club seethe with sarcasm, contempt and ridicule of Palin’s femininity. Dowd’s Labor Day column pulled no punches, sneering at Palin’s motherhood, wifehood, her husband whom she called a “hunky Eskimo”, her children’s names, her good looks, her state and all of her professional accomplishments. Palin has shown that what feminists really want is not what we thought. They don’t really want to encourage women to succeed in a man’s world; they just want to make sure that the only women who do succeed are the ones who have kissed the ring of the feminist establishment. Since Plain didn’t come up through the ranks of the Club, didn’t get approvals and endorsements from the New York Times and Meet the Press, isn’t pro-abortion, isn’t demanding equal pay for similar work and hasn’t eschewed marriage, she is to be laughed off the public stage. Their vehemence is understandable. If someone succeeds without their aid and approval, they’ve lost their power. They’re shown to be ineffectual, irrelevant and out of touch with the bulk of America who seem to love Palin all the more for her being hated by the feminists.

We shouldn’t be discouraged by this; we should take all this vitriol and all the shrieking hatred by the establishment as a sign that America is still working the way it’s supposed to. Way back when we began, we decided that Americans would not be ruled by an aristocracy, but that each man or woman could sink or swim according to his own merits. Although aristocracies have non-the-less arisen in America in the form of the establishment press and party machines, once in a while someone breaks the machine apart and makes it to the top by her own merit, and reminds us how America was meant to be. The establishment screams and cries foul but there’s nothing they can do about it. We’re the voters and we get to choose for ourselves who we find admirable and who we find empty. As for me, I admire Sarah Palin.