Feminism Palin style

In today's Boston Globe is an op-ed piece by Cathy Young in which she argues that "feminism" should be broadened to include people like Sarah Palin because otherwise it "risks losing valuable allies for the women’s movement".

I couldn't disagree more with her stated conclusions, yet I think Palin-type "feminists" do in fact mean something important. This paragraph is the key one for me:

But is a feminist like Palin, who has pursued an ambitious career and raised a family, really a feminist? In her autobiography, “Going Rogue,’’ Palin writes, “I didn’t subscribe to all the radical mantras of that early feminist era, but reasoned arguments for equal opportunity definitely resonated with me.’’ She voices a sentiment most American women would embrace.

The picture used to illustrate this column has Palin doing her famous wave next to Rosie the Riveteer rolling up her sleeve. That's a perfect picture: Rosie was less a feminist than Palin is. Palin at least expects equal opportunity; she'd be incensed if her daughter was fired because some man showed up looking for a job; she'd be horrified if a boss made sleeping with him part of her job duties; and I doubt she thought Alaska should pay her less when she was governor than they're paying her successor. Rosie, on the other hand, meekly unrolled her sleeves and went back to the kitchen once her boyfriend/husband came back from the war: she wasn't a feminist, she was a patriot. She was a main-stream American who wanted to win the war.

So, too, is Palin mainstream on this topic. "I'm not a feminist, but -" is a conversational gambit you hear all the time. It annoys women old enough to remember the fights these girls, and women like Palin, take for granted as won. But perhaps they're the surest sign of those victories.

No one would actually dare to say in a political campaign that he (or she) actually believes that women's work is worth less, or that the glass ceiling is God-ordained because Paul said women shouldn't "usurp authority over" men. (Tim 2:12) Setting aside the arguments about what Paul actually said (woman? wife? man? husband?) or what "authority" or "teach" meant, we can acknowledge that there are plenty of people out there who believe that women shouldn't run for President. But none of them advanced that argument against Clinton or Palin - but it's an argument that certainly used to be made, back in the old days.

A parallel argument was once made about race. Witness the trouble Rand Paul encountered when he tried to make a core Libertarian point, one which isn't, in its pure libertarian form, about race (Libertarians don't care what race, color, creed, sex, gender, religion, or anything else you are: the government shouldn't be able to force them to serve you in their restaurant if they don't want to). Yet only a few days went by before Paul was backing away from his statement as fast as he could.

Why? It's not because no one in Kentucky - or anywhere else for that matter - isn't racist. Of course they are, some of them. It's because you simply can't say that sort of thing in so many words - or even slightly near the count - in public in any more. Nowadays you have to speak in code to signal your real meaning. Nowadays you have to at least pretend to agree with the absolute minimum of the original civil rights agenda. Nowadays, a black man can be president.

In the same way civil rights activists aren't out demanding that blacks be allowed to sit at restaurant counters, vote, or attend public schools, feminists too have moved beyond voting, education, or equal opportunity in jobs. This isn't to say, of course, that women always get paid the same as a man would, or that there isn't a glass ceiling, any more than one can say the race relations picture is all rosy. It's to say that the notions that they should be, and there shouldn't be one, are common - so common that "I'm not a feminist but -" always precedes some basic feminist notion.

Young says

Feminism, [Jessica Valenti] says, is “a structural analysis of a world that oppresses women, an ideology based on the notion that patriarchy exists and that it needs to end’’ — presumably in America and not, say, Afghanistan. But this definition dismisses out of hand the can-do feminism that celebrates female strength and achievement and appeals to vast numbers of women.

Perhaps that's because the feminists get to decide what feminism is? And perhaps that's because the Palin variety of feminism is just Americanism now, like the can-do notion that blacks are people isn't a core part of civil rights activism any more. Perhaps feminism has moved on to something besides the now ordinary, everyday idea that women, too, are people.

If so, whether Palin gets to call herself a "feminist" or gets to continue dumping on them is beside the point, surely. If we're going to call Palin a feminist, then people like Valenti will pick a new name. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not; but don't fool yourself: Valenti and Palin will never co-exist inside the same movement. They can only co-exist inside the same overarching, common ground of being Americans and humans. If Palin wants to co-opt the label, that doesn't mean she's a feminist. It means that the core feminist ideals of a generation ago have finally taken hold of even the most conservative minds.