Post-Palin Feminism

It also energizes activists in an unexpected quarter—the Christian Right. Some young activists say they have been waiting for a woman like Palin for a long time.

For David Schmidt, 24, the media director of Live Action Films, which goes “undercover” to investigate abortion providers, “the word feminist has so many different meanings. I don’t think the term in and of itself is a turnoff to conservative voters. It’s a good thing to see women advance. I think it’s a wonderful thing.

“I’m more open than someone who is older about women’s role. But I haven’t seen any push back against it. People may be wrestling a little internally.”

And people were struggling, particularly the conservative evangelicals who believe women’s submission to men is theologically given. The Promise Keepers continues to bring men together in fellowship to assume their God-given role at the head of a marriage. The Southern Baptist Convention banned women from serving as pastors in 2000. And some conservative evangelical Sunday schools still refuse to allow women to teach boys, though men can teach both boys and girls.

Christian nationalist author and lecturer David Barton waged a vigorous defense of Sarah Palin against fundamentalists who saw her candidacy as “un-Biblical.”³

“We don’t need enemies, we have friends,” Barton told interviewer Brannon Howse. “There’s some basis for their concern,…but you can take scripture out of context.” The key Biblical issue, Barton argued, is, “is the wife in rebellion to her husband or are they in accord?”

“If [Sarah’s husband] Todd is supportive, then Sarah is not usurping authority over men,” said Barton. “They’re doing this as a family.”Barton continued that, “Sarah may be like an Esther or a Deborah that God raised up” in extraordinary times when men didn’t step up to the plate.

“You can’t say God didn’t call her to be a Deborah. I don’t think God just calls people. He calls families. If he has told Sarah to be vice president, his children will have an extra measure of grace.”

While Barton defended Palin as an extraordinary woman raised up by God, some conservative evangelical women used the debate to argue that the scriptures do not mandate their subservience to men. After the Los Angeles Times covered this controversy (one of the few mainstream media outlets to notice), the comments section was full of conservative evangelical women supporting this view (as well as Barton’s). Phyllis Nelson wrote:

A woman named “Lynn” supported Barton in focusing on Palin’s continued submission to her husband’s authority:

Feminism is a step too far for these women and for some young people I interviewed at September’s Values Voters Summit. Angelise Anderson, 22, admitted she would have to “look into” Palin’s Feminists for Life membership. Kirsten Dalton, 22, is pregnant with her first child and married to a staffer of Generation Joshua, an initiative training conservative evangelical youth to “reclaim” America through the political process. She had heard about Palin’s membership “and it does bother me. I don’t know what to think about it.”

But it was only enthusiasm from Emily Buchanan, the young executive director of Susan B. Anthony List, a prolife version of the Democrat’s Emily’s List that focuses on electing prolife women to office and claiming 145,000 supporters.The group’s pink and blue Palin Power stickers were stuck on hundreds of Values Voters conference goers and stacked high at its booth. The group’s Team Palin website and network was soon to become home for women at the grassroots inspired by the candidate’s politics. From behind the table, Buchanan said about Palin’s claimed feminism, “That’s great. The early feminists were prolife.”

Another staffer, Justin Aguila, 23, said “There’s a great picture of her with her son in a sling signing a law,” adding, “My mother is not usually involved in the political process and now she is.”

Buchanan agreed, “She’s paved the way for traditional women in office. I hope we see our mothers running for office, that they see the connection starting at the community level. That’s a place in their life you can relate to.”

To these activists, Palin is “normal,” a word heard as often as “traditional.” She wears makeup. She is pretty. She is an evangelical Christian. She is anti-abortion. She is also White. That is normal within the sphere of these conservatives. But “traditional” for these young people is no longer a woman who stays home with the children while the husband works, or who submits to her husband. Todd Palin’s active domestic role is not so unusual—on stage at the Values Voters conference was Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, whose husband, a retired military man, is well known in this community for taking care of their child who was born with Down syndrome.

There has been a surprising transvaluation of ideas revealed by the Palin campaign. Traditional now seems to be someone who embraces the belief in a heterosexual nuclear family and a conservative Christian embrace of “family values,” not a stay at home mom.

The transformation of the definition of “traditional” builds on larger shifts seen among evangelicals including but not limited to the most conservative who are considered part of the Christian Right. Scholar W. Bradford Wilcox says White evangelical Protestants “typically talk right and, often unwittingly, stumble left,” saying they support “traditional” families while living messy family lives with levels of divorce even higher than other groups of Americans.⁵ They live the same economically challenging lives of the rest of the country,where two-income families are a necessity. The redefinition was inevitable, rendering Reagan-era battles against Title IX irrelevant.

This redefinition was supported by Joy Yearout, Susan B. Anthony List’s legislative and political director, in explaining the continued enthusiasm for Palin a few weeks after the Republican ticket’s defeat. “I’m certain there are going to be more women in the political process.”

If you look at most of the leading women in politics today, they’re older, very liberal. She [Palin] balances work and home, and she embraces conservative family values standing up for human life. She supports traditional marriage. It’s a different paradigm than what we’ve seen at the national level. She doesn’t see gender as something that is victimizing. She doesn’t see it as a barrier.”

This suggestion that progressive feminists peddle victimology courses through the Right. It helps distinguish the rightists’ acceptance of women’s equality in the workplace from their opponents’ politics. When I asked Phyllis Schlafly, the leader of the Stop ERA battle and longtime anti-feminist campaigner, a specific question about what she thought of Palin being a member of Feminists for Life, she briefly sidestepped to say the problem is feminist victimology not women’s aspirations to equality. She said, “There’s some good people in Feminists for Life….The big difference is attitude—women are discriminated against. Victimology. She’s not the kind of person who is complaining because she is a woman. I think women can do what they want.”

You also hear this victimhood story line from the neoconservative feminists operating from the Independent Women’s Forum(IWF). The five core program staff of IWF do not all identify as feminists, though its director, Michelle Bernard, prominently does when she appears on talk shows throughout the country. Until Sarah Palin hit the scene, IWF was the lonely home of the “free market” feminists who say the key issue is choice and women now have choice so why complain? IWF’s staff say the group offers a feminist alternative to the progressives at National Organization for Women who exaggerate their victimhood to support big government policies.

Founded in 1992 after the Clarence Thomas hearings, IWF champions “limited government, equality under the law, property rights, free markets, strong families, and a powerful and effective national defense and foreign policy.”⁶ With only a $1.5 million annual budget—tiny for a beltway conservative group—its small staff promotes school choice, conservative women’s groups on campuses, and women’s issues in the Muslim world. The group refuses to take a stand on abortion or gay marriage (like its sister organization the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute, which trains young conservative women as leaders). And while O’Beirne, an emerit IWF board member, trashes feminists in general (while saying she always supported equal opportunity in the workplace), others on the Right criticize the group for continuing to identify with the women’s movement at all.⁷ Maybe that’s why its staff so vigorously attacks liberal feminists.

“It is not surprising to see feminist organizations like the National Organization for Women dispute the term ‘feminist’ as it applies to Gov. Palin,” Carrie Lukas, IWF’s vice president for policy and economics wrote on a blog the group set up around the Palin candidacy. “After all, groups like NOW have worked for years to redefine ‘feminism’ to fit their liberal agenda. Anyone who exposes conservative views is not welcome in their feminist club.”⁸

IWF Director Bernard was a popular speaker during the presidential campaign with her message that there can be such a thing as a “limited government feminist,” or a “red state feminist.”⁹

“We are in the midst of third wave feminism,” she said during a radio discussion with Marie Wilson, director of the White House Project, an explicitly feminist and prochoice group that trains women for public office, and Kim Gandy of National Organization for Women. “Young women look at it very differently than Gloria Steinem. Feminism was about women’s right to choose the way they want to live.”¹⁰ When Wilson suggested choices are more circumscribed for women juggling work and home unless public policies make that balance easier, she exposed the divide in their notions of feminism.

“Equity,” or free market feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute, supports women’s equal capacity to men and their right to be treated equally in the workplace and schools, while opposing affirmative action, family leave laws and other government programs to ensure that this equal treatment happens. Like other conservatives, they see it as up to the individual to compete in the market, no matter what background or resources they bring to bear. That goes for women, working class people without resources for college, or a group that had faced a history of discrimination. Sommers took up the gauntlet against “gender feminists” who support government action back in 1994 with her book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. Interestingly, Sommers broke with her friends at IWF to admit about Palin that she is “not certain about her qualifications,” while adding somewhat contradictorily that “as a role model for women—she’s superb.”¹¹

“Feminists further[s] a leftist agenda, not the rights of all women,” an intern with the conservative Clare Booth Luce Institute wrote in a Washington Times essay posted on the Institute website.¹² Women have won power through struggle and now have the power of choice, as do other middle class Americans, is the storyline. This feminism mirrors the feminism you will find in modern women’s magazines, such as Self. It is a sort of pop bottom line for more liberated young women. And in its focus on choice, it overlooks the way choices are structured—for low income women or privileged women, for Whites and people of color—and how real gender equity could be supported.

Far from being inauthentic, the free market feminism of Bernard, Sommers, and some of the conservative evangelicals is part of a lineage of right-wing feminists that goes back to the National Woman’s Party (NWP), which, after suffrage, became the home of more privileged women who supported a free market and were vigorously anticommunist.¹³ An NWP member, Vivien Kellems, a small businesswoman from Connecticut, even launched a campaign against the federal income tax in the 1940s, and her anticommunist women’s group took the country by storm in opposing what members saw as the dangerous socialism of the New Deal.¹⁴

Such women are entangled not just in feminist politics supporting political and economic inclusion in the system, but in class politics; for them feminism does not lead its adherents to support grander claims for economic justice.

Christian evangelicalism also has deep historical ties to feminism, since the religious movement that gave birth to nineteenth century feminism produced many prominent suffrage campaigners. Championing women’s direct relationship with God, these early evangelicals suggested that men are not their lords and masters.

Sommers reminds us of the feminism of Frances Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), who argued women had to “increase their civilizing and humane influence on society” in the name of protecting the home.¹⁵ Sommers misleadingly champions Willard as a “conservative feminist” because her maternalist politics suggested a conservative sense of women’s role as civilizers of the world. In fact, Willard and the WCTU in its early years promoted progressive social reform through government action and some members were even populist radicals. Jane Addams is another feminist forbearer and progressive champion of maternalism, valorizing women’s role as mothers.

Sommers is correct in reminding us of maternalism, but it is a tendency that weaves through both progressive feminism and right wing feminism.¹⁶ On the Left, a former NOW staffer is trying to organize progressive maternalists through a new website.¹⁷ On the Right, Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute suggests “Red State Feminists” like Palin embrace motherhood instead of demonizing it, the way progressive feminists supposedly do. “She differs from mainstream feminists in that her sexuality and fecundity are not in tension with her achievement and power.”¹⁸

The Sarah Palin phenomenon seems to be enlarging the small crew of women on the Right like those at IWF who accept free market feminism—a minimal, bottom line feminism that women and girls should be treated equally under the law, fully participate in public life, and not be discriminated against in the workplace or in schools because of their gender. Equal “rules of the game,” not substantive equality, is the goal. This is in keeping with the efforts of both the Heritage Foundation and the Christian Right’s Family Research Council (FRC) in explicitly promoting a free market and “small government” ideology among evangelicals and the Christian Right.¹⁹ The tight support conservative Christians now give to tax cuts for the rich, the flat tax (which presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee championed), and other right-wing economic strategies will make these supporters hard to shake from the GOP coalition as some of their old allies want to do in order to win back power.²⁰

For FRC and other “free market” Christians, it is important to shrink the government and institute reforms like creating a system of school vouchers so parents can use the money to pay for Christian schools. You heard this argument from the new generation of conservative Christian women politicians like Michelle Bachmann, the Minnesota Congresswoman who almost lost her seat after suggesting her colleagues should be investigated for their anti-Americanism. She and Sarah Palin both received their political training as conservative prolife evangelicals, balance a demanding public life with a large family, and merge their “family values” ideology with market friendly analysis.

These politicians and a handful of others are, like Willard, asserting new roles in transforming the public realm, and moving beyond a surprisingly egalitarian yet segregated space of women’s power that scholar Barbara Brasher discovered within conservative churches over ten years ago.²¹

Putting Palin in the political mix is either crystallizing new sentiments, or surfacing ones barely visible before.The young people I spoke with were inspired by her sense of possibility as a liberated woman embracing “traditional” Christian, heterosexual, anti-abortion—and gender egalitarian—values. Where this new energy takes them in a political moment following the greatest defeat for their movement and the Republican Party since the rise of political evangelicalism thirty years ago is anyone’s guess.