Will Sarah Palin show American girls a way out of the grim, cramped, resentful world of gender feminism?
I think she’s doing it already. Palin’s eruption on the national scene is giving American girls a picture of can-do womanhood that probably hasn’t been seen since the Beecher daughters were stirring up trouble in the 19th century. Such moxie, such political gusto, and with an apparently happy marriage and large family, besides!
When I was a girl in the late sixties and early seventies, there were no women like Palin. For sure they existed – more on that later – but for us the avatars were supposed to be women like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. Wrathful feminist views of men and marriage and, ugh, offspring, were the prevailing narrative of our girlhoods.
If teenagers of an earlier generation enjoyed speculating about what they’d wear on their “special day” and what they’d name their future sons and daughters, girls in the 1970s talked big about getting their tubes tied so they would be “free.”
The girls of my era were taught disdain for traditional family life and the compromises of nuptial normalcy. Marriage was slavery, divorce was liberation, and children were a type of anvil around the necks of women who might otherwise be wearing cool sunglasses and self-actualizing.
Of course, throughout the weirdness of those decades, millions of Americans pursued normal lives. Couples met, married, and began families.
Perhaps Ms. Friedan’s unsavory fumes never reached Alaska and other remote, unhip, backward places; more likely, the people living in those places had a little more resilience to destructive fashionable ideas than excitable coastal types.
In any case, the idea of what made a successful and admirable woman manifestly did not include a state governor taking meetings while wearing her baby in a sling.
It did not publicly include a woman who combined forcefulness with femininity, derring-do with good cheer, who worked with her hands and used her brains and unabashedly rejoiced in her family.
Now, for my daughters – and everyone else’s – it does.
Not for them the role model of the childless career woman, with her floppy bow tie and buried sorrow. Not for them the tired NOW victimology that to this day insists that American women are forever shortchanged, forever underpaid, forever oppressed.
Not for them the craziness of feminist radicals who slid so far down their own ideological drains that they refused to distinguish between marital intimacy and rape.
In just over a week, Palin has smashed and trod underfoot these cracked old idols. It’s not what she’s saying, it’s what she is.
Through Palin’s example, American girls are seeing that it’s possible to seek office when you are still young and lovely. They’re seeing that a woman expressing pride in her husband does not diminish her, but enhances them both.
They see that a resourceful family can find ways to accommodate the needs of all its members. And crucially, she is showing that children are not necessarily an impediment to women’s power, but can be a source of it.
It’s perverse, in a way, because Palin is not actually an exotic creature the type of which we’ve never seen. Some women have always lived big – seeking lives of action and purpose that include domestic entanglements. They exist now (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised five children; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has twins), and they existed long ago.
Across American history, tens of millions of women have put family and work together and made something great and lasting – not least, our country itself.
Those Beecher sisters, for instance: Harriet bore seven children and, through her novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” woke the American conscience to the vileness of slavery; Catherine, the reformer and educator, never married but argued passionately that women’s influence in society – through home and children — was grossly underestimated.
One of the greatest calumnies of 1960s-era gender feminism was to derogate this deep part of female identity. Well, that’s over now. Palin is showing just how over it is.
Sure, we don’t yet know Palin’s views on foreign policy. We don’t know whether she favors liberalizing the yuan, or giving Syria the Golan Heights.
What we do know is this: She’s showing American girls just how rich and meaningful a modern American woman’s life can be.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
