By Betsy Newmark
High School Government and History Teacher/Blogger

Michelle Cottle has an essay in the New Republic that is really a cri de coeur about the failures of feminism. First she views the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was supposed to be such a high water mark for feminism degenerate into the same sort of complaints of the Obama campaign and media being unfair to the girl:

Then, amid the snows of Iowa, it all fell apart. To be fair, New Hampshire may be more to blame. Iowa was where Hillary’s inevitability narrative unraveled, but New Hampshire was where she got the idea that redemption lay in the legions of gals who rallied ’round when the (mostly male) political establishment and punditocracy began salivating at the thought of her imminent demise. That much of the animus toward Hillary had more to do with her last name than her chromosomes did not matter; women objected to seeing one of their own kicked to the curb with such haste. Hillary’s now famous moment of teary-eyed vulnerability fueled their fury. Sisterhood is what resurrected Hillary in New Hampshire.

The nomination fight degenerated into which candidate would become the tradition-busting first in our history: an African-American or a woman? And the woman lost.

Now the feminists have to deal with Sarah Palin.

Cottle makes the same mistake that others have been making to be insulted that the McCain campaign is playing gender politics and hoping to pull in Hillary voters by putting a woman on the ticket despite all the contrasts between policies that Palin and Clinton endorse:

The Palin pick is disheartening on so many levels. For starters, even what little we know about the Alaska governor’s policy views is enough to make a traditional feminist weep. The staunchly conservative Palin not only opposes abortion rights (even in cases of rape or incest), she also supports abstinence-only sex education and takes a strict free-market approach toward health care.

I’ve never thought that the Palin pick was to pick up those sorts of Hillary voters. Women who vote based on abortion are never going to support McCain-Palin. But there are lots of other potential Hillary voters that McCain could pick up. He’s aiming at the Reagan Democrats, those blue-collar workers or Catholic voters who supported Reagan in the 1980s and have drifted back into the Democratic column under Bill Clinton. Those are the Democrats who helped Clinton to the victories that she had in states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. And those are voters who aren’t appalled by Palin’s position on abortion.

Next Cottle bemoans that Palin is such an inexperienced and unqualified candidate who makes women look bad.

By far the most insulting aspect of Palin’s candidacy is the McCain team’s hope that placing a ballsy female on the ticket will attract some former Hillary supporters by stoking their gender-based resentments against Obama and the DNC. Palin has been happy to encourage this strategy by cheering Hillary’s “eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling” and offering herself up as a way to help women go even farther. Sadly, some Hillary dead-enders may be so blinded by bitterness that they fall for this nonsense. The rest of us should be outraged by a strategy so nakedly founded on the premise that Hillary gals were driven more by identity politics than by any interest in their candidate’s values, ideology, or qualifications. It’s not just that Palin stands on the opposite side of so many issues dear to Hillary; she is also vastly less accomplished and engaged than the senator from New York. (As political consultant Dan Gerstein has quipped, many Hillary supporters will think Palin “not worthy of carrying their candidate’s pantsuit.”) In Team McCain’s eyes, however, female candidates are pretty much interchangeable and women voters too addlepated to know the difference. We don’t care about issues or experience; we just want someone with the same reproductive parts as ours.

The irony of Cottle bringing up the experience issue against Palin by assuming that Clinton was so clearly more qualified is amusing. How did Hillary get her experience? She was married to the president. Are feminists going to count her experience as being a spouse as part of her experience? That argument fell apart during the nomination battle when it became apparent that, as first lady, Hillary Clinton hadn’t had the security clearance to be involved in crucial decisions of foreign policy. And in the one big policy area that she had been given responsibility for — health care — she was a failure. Then she was elected senator, and face it, a lot of her support and popularity to win that election was based on sympathy for her as the cheated-on spouse. She was reportedly a good and hardworking senator, but still was quite inexperienced compared to some of the other also rans in the Democratic race such as Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Bill Richardson. She was more experienced compared to Barack Obama but still didn’t represent a terribly experienced leader. And yes, she does have more experience on the national stage than Sarah Palin, but then Palin isn’t running for the top of the ticket and John McCain’s experience dwarfs both Hillary and Obama.

And is Hillary Clinton really the feminist icon that the movement feminists want to tout? She built her career both as a lawyer in Arkansas and as a politician based on her husband’s position. And she showed a non-feminist lack of interest in the female subordinates who were hit on by her husband. Aren’t feminists supposed to be concerned about men using their position of power to score with women?

While Cottle bemoans the blows that feminism has taken in this campaign, what Cottle should really be complaining about is how the movement feminists have been revealed to care more about liberal policy positions than women per se. In many ways Sarah Palin is a model of what feminists have long said they wanted – women who are able to build a successful career on their own without depending on their husband’s position to get where they want to go. And to have a family with a husband who fully shares in the parenting duties. Yet now we know that that is not enough. A woman also has to be a liberal to be a true role model: When Gloria Steinem takes to the pages of The Los Angeles Times to tell us that Palin is not the right woman for other women because of her positions, I guess that is a step forward that Palin can be evaluated on the basis of her positions more than on her gender, but it also helps clarify that organizations like NOW were never really about women but only about liberal women. And what they’re now horrified to discover is that there are a whole lot of women out there who don’t ascribe to that agenda.

And feminists like Cottle and Steinem should be horrified at some of the discussions going on in the media and around the water cooler about whether the mother of five children can have a position of responsibility. Yesterday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Sally Quinn and Ellen Rooney both asserted that they didn’t think that a mother with a baby and two other young children plus a pregnant teenager could do an adequate job as vice president. When asked if these questions were unfair and wouldn’t be asked of a male candidate such as Barack Obama, they both chimed in that of course it was unfair, but it was the way things are. Whenever women have jobs that take them away from their children, they suffer from guilt and divided concerns that a vice president shouldn’t have.

Wow! Feminists certainly have flipped on whether women are able to do it all — have a career and a family. And when faced with the sort of husband feminists have been saying they long for – a guy who gave up one of his jobs on the North Slope because of his wife’s career and now has stepped forth to take care of the day-to-day child care so that his wife can take care of her career, they totally discount that sort of contribution and come back to attacking the mother.

Well, feminists can spend their time wondering what has become of all that they have argued for in the past. The rest of us can move on and choose to take each female candidate as she comes and judge her on her own individual merits rather than simply her gender or her ideology.

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