Sarah Palin and Feminist Hypocrisy

The selection of Governor Sarah Palin by John McCain to be his presidential running mate has been a great success. She has energized Republicans and helped McCain gain in the presidential polls. But her selection has also revealed the blatant hypocrisy of the feminist movement. Palin has come under vicious attacks from liberal women who supposedly value the empowerment and advancement of women.

Take Gloria Steniem. She is one of the founders of the modern day feminist movement in America. She has spent her life arguing for the equality of women. So you would think she would be supportive, if not excited, that a woman has a real chance to be the Vice President of the United States? Nope. Steniem thinks Sarah Palin is unqualified to be president, though she is a Governor. Yet she supports Barack Obama for president who has been a Senator for little more time than Sarah Palin has been a Governor. Steniem clearly wants to undermine Sarah Palin because her success reveals that women can and are successful without having to be feminists.

Then consider Eleanor Clift of Newsweek Magazine. After the John McCain selected Palin to be his running mate she said “[i]f the media reaction has been anything, it’s been literally laughter in many places…in many, many newsrooms.” Or consider that Salon magazine Cintra Wilson labeled Palin a “Type A, hyper-conservative, Christian Stepford wife in a sexy librarian costume.” Many others, including Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe joined in belittling the female Governor. Wendy Doniger, a Divinity professor at the University of Chicago, even claimed that Sarah Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.” Yet the selection by Walter Mondale of Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate in the 1984 presidential election was hailed by liberal women as a breakthrough in American politics.

And Sarah Palin represents what liberal women have always claimed modern women should be: successful and independent, with the ability to raise a family if they so choose. Why such vitriol? The obvious and simple explanation is liberal women will only have praise for those successful political women who are, in fact, liberals. Conservative women such as Sarah Palin are judged under a different set of rules. The selection of Sarah Palin has revealed the hypocrisy of the feminist movement. A woman is to be praised for succeeding in politics, but only if she is a liberal.

If one had to focus on the one issue that drives the feminist hatred of Sarah Palin it would certainly be abortion. Those feminists in America who do not see an unborn baby as a human life, but as an easily disposable clump of cells realize what the threat a strong pro-life women is to them and their push to normalize the act of abortion. Governor Palin clearly holds the moral high ground on this issue. She chose to give birth to her son Trig, even though she knew he would have Down syndrome. Her choice of life infuriates liberal women because they constantly insist having an abortion is no big deal and should be mainstreamed into American society.

But Governor Palin also represents a threat to the broader concept of liberalism. For years, liberals have insisted that they alone represent the American woman. Yet Sarah Palin shows women they can succeed without believing in the liberal orthodoxy of abortion on demand, larger government and weakness abroad. Many American women believe in the same ideals Sarah Palin believes in and that scares liberal women, who now fear their hold on the definition of feminine success is slipping away.

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~ The Conservative Guy