DEFINING FEMINISM IN AMERICA

By H. N. Burdett

Palin Envy may be pushing and shoving its way into our national consciousness. It is high time.

An epidemic of laryngitis seems to have overtaken women of progressive persuasion who mainly sit in silence on the sidelines as Sarah Palin puts her brand on feminism. Her long-running road show is at very least a cash cow for the less than righteous right.

Perhaps the decision to ignore Palin reflects the fact that liberal Democrats are perfectly content with two extremely competent women in the roles of Speaker of the House of Representatives and Secretary of State. An attitude of let them fume, flail and fumble, while we're the grown-ups intent upon leading by example.

Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton are hands down the most mocked -- and dare we say despised? -- contemporary American political figures, after Palin, of course. Then again, it depends on who is doing the mocking and despising.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister dissect with near surgical precision the Palin conundrum and the urgency for progressive Democrats to find or create their very own version of the Sarah phenomenon.

Traister is the author of the forthcoming, "Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women." Holmes is the founding editor of the blog Jezebel.

The two feel that what the Democrats need is nothing less than: "A female candidate on the left who speaks as angrily and forcefully about her rivals' shortcomings as Sarah Barracuda does about the Pelosis and Obamas of the world. A smart, unrelenting female who unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women."

Holmes and Traister then introduce the proverbial rub: to achieve this goal would "require a party that is eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin." There are grave doubts that such a party exists.

A lesson from the women's liberation days of the 1960s was that all women did not sing from the same hymnal regarding feminism. The Betty Freidans and Gloria Steinems spoke to one audience of women, Phyllis Schlafly to a quite different one. Schlafly was an army unto herself.

As the antichrist of liberal feminism, Schlafly had a collection of bumper sticker punchlines that resonated more with the male-dominated power structure than they reflected common sense -- even on no-brainers such as equal pay for equal work (which, incidentally, remains perhaps the most basic and yet elusive goals of the women's rights movement). But how could the logic and fairness of this issue, which even on its worst days never drew a convincing counter-argument, compete with Schlafly's full-throated concern that equal rights for women would lead directly to unisex public restrooms?

Gender equality enthusiasts naively postulated that the justness of their cause guaranteed that the women's movement would be a political monolith. Schlafly was equally determined to prove that this was an absurd misreading of the minds of American women. As much as so many women believe their most fundamental right is to have control over their own bodies, Schlafly presented the argument that no husband could ever be guilty of raping his wife because marriage implies sexual consent.

Furthermore, Schlafly can hardly be accused of the crime of inconsistency. She has through the years demonstrated remarkable fidelity to the conservative playbook: opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she feels will, among other things, deny Social Security benefits for housewives and widows, as well as opposition to the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and Arms Control. For good measure, she believes -- and I'm not making this up -- that Congress should impeach Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy for casting the deciding vote to abolish the death penalty for minors.

Those who feel Schlafly is an anomaly even among conservative thinkers, should try reading her literary descendants: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham (when she resumes writing, which she surely will) and Michelle Malkin. That formidable trio would have been regularly skewered when Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins were alive and well. These days Rachel Maddow pretty much has to set the record straight alone.

Meanwhile, though there may be two distinct ideological groups who think of themselves as feminists, the hearts and minds the Maddows and Coulters are even more driven to win and keep are those of the men who control the levers of power, from boardrooms to courtrooms to legislatures and governors' offices, as well as major political party platforms and coffers.

Not too long ago, the grievances presented by liberal women did not at all jibe with the world as most men knew it. Any number of men who considered themselves proudly liberal could readily associate themselves with the womanifesto of the '60s -- basically, equality in both the workplace and at home. But there was virtually always a line that these same men did not want crossed. Whether it was a more equitable division of household chores, changing diapers, or something else, it was almost always there.

Progressives cheered to the rooftops Barrack Obama's call for change in the 2008 election. The response was overwhelming. But the change that could not be predicted was how Palin, in Holmes's and Traister's words "an anti-choice, pro-abstinence socialist-bashing tea party enthusiast," is positioning herself to become "the
21st century symbol of American women in politics." While the arguments they pose are understandable and reasonable, they may be missing the point.

Sarah Palin is easily the most visible woman political figure stumping the nation today, it would require neither very much paper nor ink to recount that her actual achievements -- Governor of Alaska, defeated nominee for Vice President of the United States -- pale when compared with those of Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.

As two of the three most powerful officeholders in the United States and, thus, the world, the Mesdames Pelosi and Clinton are making their mark. While Palin prattles on about the evils of tax-and-spend Democrats who refuse to cut taxes but can't resist funding any cockamamie social program that will plunge the country into ever greater indebtedness, Pelosi keeps steering the Obama administation program through the House of Representatives and Hillary Clinton keeps mending overseas fences the Bush administration with its neoconservative cohorts toppled recklessly and regularly.

The more success Ms. Clinton and Pelosi have in their respective endeavors, the more they will be demonized by the well-greased and oiled GOP smear machine -- Clinton as a ruthless combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Therese Defarge and Pelosi as "a San Francisco liberal," right-wing vernacular for the vilest, most depraved members of the most contemptible of all species.

The latter characterization is particularly amusing considering that Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi was born and reared in Baltimore's Little Italy which resembles Haight-Asbury about as much as Manhattan compares with the crater of the moon. But nothing rouses the contempt of an opponent more certainly than success and Pelosi's record for steering Obama administration legislation through the House of Representatives nearly matches Tiger Woods's string of successes on the fairways before his fall from grace.

Hillary Clinton is regarded by the GOP as the personification of evil, despite her ability to work productively with some of the more conservative members of the U.S. Senate when she represented the State of New York in that august body. But Mrs. Clinton remains a convenient punching bag for rightists, in no small measure because she happens to be married to none other than the devil himself. It matters little to the disloyal opposition that Madame Secretary is making headway in restoring the global goodwill in which the United States spent more than 200 years investing before the Bush administration squandered it in only eight years.

With the American economy still on the ropes and unemployment -- when those who have given up even looking for work are counted -- above 10 per cent, the mood of the electorate can best be gauged by the as yet unknown quantity of the staying power of the Tea Party, the dissidents that Palin leads spiritually if not officially.

There remain legitimate questions regarding whether the tea-baggers can outlast their historic aberrant forebears, the Liberty League and the John Birch Society, whose notoriety was at least equally fearsome but relatively short-lived.

The durability of the Tea Party hangs by a tenuous thread that nevertheless will require significant change to unravel. Unless there is a dramatic economic and employment upward surge within the next two months, the Democrats can expect to take a pounding in the midterm congressional elections -- if for no other reason than they are there and have not yet fixed what was broken.

That a Republican majority bears at least equal responsibility for the damage, through waging a costly preemptive war, through borrow and spend profligacy and through slashing taxes for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, may be irrelevant.

It requires a greater degree of political sophistication than voters generally demonstrate to comprehend that without the overly maligned economic stimulus packages and choosing instead the Republican option of continuing to cut taxes for the deserving wealthy and allowing the market to seek its own level with as few rules and regulations as possible would likely have had us digging out of a considerably deeper hole.

The misguided machismo which perpetuates the myth that only men are capable of running the country, compounded by the belief that the nation would be in better shape had we just left everything alone and done nothing about the economy,brings to mind the immortal question Will Rogers once posed: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't stupidity get us out?" A return to the conservative agenda would be a supreme test of that kind of thinking.

If the most inspiring leader for a back-to-the-future platform two years hence turns out to be Sarah Palin, with her Twitter wisdom ("Who hijacked the term 'feminist'? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree. . ."), the Republican party is in real trouble, and maybe even the country.