By femocracy • 15 years ago

Sarah Palin’s “have-it-all” version of feminism

[This is the third in a five-part series about politics, feminism, and reflections on conservative women. Tune in tomorrow for thoughts on using gender during campaigns. Cross-posted to Femocracy.net]
Yesterday, I wrote about Sarah Palin’s “new” feminism and how it co-opts both a historical and traditionally conservative language of motherhood-as-empowerment and tries to fashion into something new – the “real feminism,” which is, of course, a heady cocktail of the old feminism before it evolved into a progressive social and political movement, and with a twist of anti-feminism for good measure. This brings me right to another element of what feminism means in Sarah Palin world, which is namely “having it all” – except not in the way I always thought of it, but lone-ranger style, with just a gun and nobody but yourself to pull a salary, put food on the table, and raise your kids mama-grizzly style on the frontier.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out how Sarah has been refining her message. Remember the brouhaha over the Superbowl ad featuring a very special collaboration between Tim Tebow and Focus on the Family? She took to her Facebook page to say that the National Organization for Women is:

“looking at the pro-life issue backwards. Women should be reminded that they are strong enough and smart enough to make decisions that allow for career and educational opportunities while still giving their babies a chance at life.”

I don’t really understand how NOW objecting to an ad they believed was an inappropriate injection of the culture wars into such a widely-viewed venue, particularly when the implicit message behind this pro-life ads is demeaning to a lot of women, is telling women that they CAN’T have a child and career – but I’ll come back to my quibbles later. She delved during her Susan B. Anthony speech:
[They] send this message, that ‘Nope, you’re not capable of doing both. You can’t give your child life and still pursue career and education. You’re not strong enough; you’re not capable.’ So it’s very hypocritical,” she told the anti-abortion-rights crowd. Palin’s “pro-woman sisterhood,” however, “is telling these young women that they’re strong enough and smart enough, they are capable to be able to handle an unintended pregnancy and still be able to . . . handle that [and] give that child life.
Of all the things Palin has ever said, of all the deliberate misinformation she has spewed, of all the vile and pernicious lies, this is the one that strikes the closest to home for me. You see, I never saw as “having it all” as something that was out of reach. I never thought I would have to choose children and family versus a full career – I always knew it would be a difficult balance, that nothing would probably ever go just perfectly, and that there were some days I’d have to give an inch in my work life and some days I’d have to give an inch in my family life. And I knew what made this all possible for me – feminism. It was feminists who fought for women to have a life outside the home and beyond marriage, it was feminists who fought for workplace gains and helped other women climb up the career latter to get where they are today. I found this empowering, and this is why I am a feminist – but in the old, apparent passe style.
  
Yet I also recognize there are going to be some roadblocks. Even though women are getting more college degrees and are climbing up the career ladder, so quickly in fact we’re somehow worried men are going to get left behind, our wages still lag – a white woman will make 77 cents per dollar that a man makes, while it’s round 70 cents if you’re an African-American woman, and 58 cents if you are Latina. I also acknowledge that I will have to contend with a daycare system should my husband also work, because we do not have state-provided daycare (which gives conservatives shudders at the idea of a literal nanny state), and many workplaces do not provide it. If one spouse does stay home, society will expect it to be me – because even though stay-at-home dads are on the rise, remember, mothers are supposed to be the nurturers and any woman that chases her career (because, say, she out-earns her husband) is just denying her feminine nature! And if both of us work, women still do the majority of housework, including cooking, cleaning, laundry, and helping the kids with homework – that exhausted and dreaded gem we know as “the second shift.” (If you feel that I’m leaving gay couples out of my model, it’s for the sake of argument – to conservatives, legally recognized gay couples should not exist with legitimacy. The recognition of all types of families is not welcome.)
Now these statements are all the standard feminist response to the work-family tension that many women face. Let’s take a step back and look at what conservatives beyond Sarah Palin say. Now, I’ve been reading a lot of conservative blogs because apparently I have a strong masochistic bent – it’s sort of the same impulse that my very-liberal mother has when she turns on Fox News just so she can be horrified. To conservatives, a parent staying home is always preferable to daycare, which ruins your child for life, natch. Yet they turn around and say the wage gap doesn’t REALLY exist – it’s due to choices women make to stay home and raise children. We bring it on yourselves, you see! Yet I would like to point them to an interesting set of data that looks at MBA graduates starting – women make an average of $4,600 less than their male peers. I will assume this is not become they immediately took time off after B-school to start giving birth, but followed the same track the men did. This leaves me with two conclusions – either the work that women do is undervalued (and probably not due to the quality, but due to a persistent work culture that values women less) or an employer is paying a woman less because he suspects she MIGHT one day take time off to have kids – which is an illegal penalty system that springs from a thought experiment. So conservatives, please explain to me – why do women start out making less? You cannot attribute this to choices they have already made, surely.
Yet to conservatives, feminists who point out real-world facts and make rational arguments are playing the victim. (For the record, anytime anyone critiques the status quo, they are claiming victimhood – this doesn’t just apply to women.) See, I think there’s a large difference between begging for handouts and making strong, reasoned criticisms of structural systems and social attitudes that create two different status levels for men and women. But apparently that’s a result of my inwardly-held belief that women are weak and can’t handle the real world, that they need society to hold their hands and pet them and tell them everything is going to be okay. To which I say horseshit. Of course I believe that women are strong, intelligent, and capable. I am one of them, and I know many. I am unafraid of taking the difficult path in life, of juggling kids with work – yet this does not preclude me from realizing that there are persistent obstacles that will make it just a little bit harder for me to reach my full potential because I am a woman.
This brings me back to the Sarah Palin rah-rah sisterhood. I think she fundamentally misunderstands the point of feminism, without which she probably never could have been governor of Alaska and current millionaire due to ghostwritten books and a vapid pundit job. Feminism is not saying to women that they must choose, that work and family life is an either-or proposition. It’s not telling women they are not “strong enough and smart enough” to do both, or to handle an unintended pregnancy. And it’s definitely not telling women they can’t give their children life while pursuing career and education. Being pro-choice isn’t weakening to women, it’s allowing them to decide when to focus on their career, at what point to have kids, and to have it all fall into place when they feel 100 percent comfortable and capable of handling children. I know Sarah is looking at her teen mom daughter Bristol when she says these things, but frankly, Bristol is an outlier. Sarah herself had a big family around to watch her kids while she was running Alaska, and Bristol has reaped the benefits of a strong family support system as well. And I encourage women to take advantage of a strong family support system – yet recognize that not every woman will have one. There will be teen moms like Bristol that will not have millionaire parents, but will come from poor families – and they will have to choose between working a minimum wage job or putting themselves through school, because they will always have to juggle this with raising a child. And perhaps they won’t have a cadre of relatives that can help out, but be totally on their own. Yet Sarah Palin, in her support for small government, would cut funding to help out teen mothers with housing and daycare, would cut educational grants to help poor women get an education, would cut funding for social support systems for single mothers, and welfare for poor mothers. This reminds me of my friend who is a young mother that I mentioned in yesterday’s post, who is a strong social conservative – for a while, she posted links to articles online slamming the welfare state and saying poor women who benefited were soaking up taxpayer money just because they didn’t want to get a job. Yet at the same time, she had to move back into her parents’ house with her husband and child, because she was a stay-at-home mother and her husband could not financially support them. Never once did she indicate she realized her luck that she had a family that could provide her with private welfare – but not every has that privilege, which is why we need more public welfare. Sarah Palin offers a lot of feel-good rhetoric about womanhood and strength, but so much of it seems to be said in a vacuum.
Tell me, Sarah, who will tell teen mothers they can give their child life and get an education when they can’t afford both? Who will tell a mother she is strong enough to support her child alone on a minimum-wage job? Who will tell a mother she is capable of getting an education, having a career, and  raising her child when she has no family and can’t afford daycare? Who will tell her she’s being weak when she says sometimes it’s too hard to do it all alone? It’s easy to say you support women, and offer empty words of empowerment. And it’s easy to forget your own privilege, and what it was about your own life that allowed you to have everything when other people might not have the same benefits. It’s much harder to offer actual policy remedies that will advance women’s equality and really empower them – cutting taxes isn’t the answer.

Disclaimer: This post was written by a Feministing Community user and does not necessarily reflect the views of any Feministing columnist, editor, or executive director.

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