August 30, 2008 8:57 AM
Sarah Palin background
I love this picture! I love how children add an element of the unexpected. This little girl looks like she's headed in the no-nonsense direction of her momma. You can find a photo gallery of Sarah Palin in different settings at this Photo gallery.
As regular readers here know, I introduced Sarah Palin here last spring.
But for anyone wanting to get up to speed, read more at links below:
Sarah Palin: Former beauty queen a straight shooter
Sarah Heath Palin, an outsider who charms (New York Times)
'Suburban mom' who took on her own party
Palin is known for bucking 'old boy' mentality
Dr. Dobson Interview: "I would pull that lever"
Posted in Campaign 2008 | Permalink
Comments
I know what you mean about finally feeling pumped. I know it flies in the face of the "color blind" theory many conservatives have, but I actually think a minority in the white house will do AN ENORMOUS MOUNT OF GOOD for race/sex relations in this country.
I almost felt slightly guilty voting for yet another old white guy, but yet I had to because Obama's world view is so opposed to my own.
But now I get my cake and eat it too. Not just a woman, but A MOTHER OF 5! Take that- feminists! See, a woman can use her uterus and her brain all at the same time. Go fig.
A beautiful testimony to the fact that embracing the culture of life doesn't have to revert us back to the stifling gender norms of the 50's.
Posted by: paigeu | August 30, 2008 12:03 PM
Except you all conveniently forget that without feminists, Sarah Palin wouldn't have gotten this far.
I know you won't post this. You never post a dissenting opinion. I don't know why you are so afraid.
Posted by: Robin | August 30, 2008 7:13 PM
Actually, Robin, I have never forgotten our debt to feminism. And the wonderful part about having been an author before I blogged is that I can pull out stuff I've written to prove how wrong you are.
I am certainly not afraid of publishing dissenting opinion - and actually enjoy it as it gives me a chance to expound further. I have a lot of opinions, and because my background is diverse they are usually more nuanced than those who like to trash conservatives - as you just tried to do - could ever be themselves.
Unfortunately, I don't have the opportunity to publish a lot of dissenting opinion because leftists don't seem to be able to put together a dissenting opinion without throwing in a heavy dose of hatred or ad hominem attack - as you yourself just did.
My own previous writing - a book published in 2005 - proves you are very, very wrong. I have acknowledged our debt to feminism. Here is a very long excerpt from my book Reaching the Left from the Right (the book has boxes scattered throughout the text, which I've tried to replicate here):
It was there [going back to college in 1970 as a young mother] that I made the evolution from antiwar activist to radical feminist – with some thanks due to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex which seemed to equate womanhood with imprisonment. Though I didn’t feel quite that bad off, de Beauvoir’s dissection of society and the secondary status of woman resonated with me. My work experience was all about male bosses and female workers. And ironically, counterculture men were no more egalitarian than the capitalists they reviled. To the guys in the antiwar movement we were just “chicks.” They hogged the microphone and never let us rally the crowds, just expecting the chicks to make coffee, copies, and love on demand. The Rolling Stones were singing “Under My Thumb.” The sexual revolution seemed to have worked largely to men’s advantage, removing much of the reason for even pretending they respected women as equals.
In addition, raising a daughter was alerting me to the cultural subtleties of sexism, like the lack of women role models. When I looked at the library for picture books about girls for Samantha, there were just none to be found. It seems so hard to believe since today there are so many, but it was a very real problem way back when. It wasn’t as though girls were presented in a negative way – it was as though they didn’t exist at all.
Eager to address all social inequities in my first child’s upbringing – I’d even bought Samantha a black baby doll – I spent hours with her story books changing pronouns from he to she and adding hair to male characters, human or animal. Picture the bird in Are You My Mother with brown curls.
It’s hard to fathom in today’s egalitarian society – actually a society now skewed a little too much against men and boys – how little affirmation there was for girls and women before the Second Wave of Feminism. But it’s important to recognize these roots and to acknowledge that something was amiss in the culture which needed to be addressed – and important to credit feminism – which with its rabid fixation on abortion has now become a almost a caricature of itself – for the good it did accomplish in opening up opportunities for women, establishing equal pay for equal work, and allowing our daughters to enjoy the benefits of full inclusion in the culture.
The Second Wave feminists were angry – and in many ways they had reason to be. That the culture was male dominated – making it difficult for girls to have role models and women to find outlets for their creativity – is a given. That there were double standards – justifying unequal pay for equal work as well as denying women with leadership ability the chance to use it to use it – that also is undeniable. Unless you’re over forty, it’s hard to imagine how much more difficult it was for women to become doctors or lawyers, to be published or recorded.
Without role models in the community and without encouragement in school, girls grew up without the options they have today. Although now I would argue that the pendulum has swung too far to the other extreme – producing a generation of girls brainwashed into giving up or postponing motherhood for careers, and producing a plethora of social ills.
Getting Real
The first fallout from feminism – helped along for the past three decades by public schools – was the denigration of stay-at-home moms. After all, the proponents of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” aren’t thinking of having them stay home to cook and clean.
But working moms lead to daycare, and daycare is not good for children. According to the National Institutes of Health, children who spend most of their waking hours in daycare are three times more at risk for behavioral problems in kindergarten.
Their study – which followed 1100 children in 10 cities in a variety of settings, from care with relatives and nannies to preschool and large day care centers – found a direct correlation between time in childcare and traits like aggression, defiance and disobedience. These correlations were true regardless of the type or quality of care, the sex of the child, the family’s socioeconomic status or the quality of mothering at home.
Dr. Jay Belsky, a principal investigator in the study, reported, “As time goes up, so do behavior problems,” adding that children who spend more than 30 daycare hours a week are “are more demanding, more noncompliant, and they are more aggressive.”
Specifically, daycare kids “scored higher on things like gets in lots of fights, cruelty, bullying, meanness, as well as talking too much, demands must be met immediately.” (Endnote 1, Chapter Two)
In There’s No Place Like Work: How Business, Government, and Our Obsession with Work Have Driven Parents From Home, author Brian C. Robertson concludes that children who grow up in daycare “exhibit some of the same debilitating emotional, psychological, cognitive, and even physical problems displayed by children adopted from Romanian orphanages.” (Endnote 2, Chapter Two)
Let’s face it. No matter how unfair the situation of women pre-Second Wave, the outcome for today’s children has been a disaster. Throughout history and cultures, parents have sacrificed to raise the next generation, but the Boomer generation turned this tradition on its head. Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver caused an almost visceral reaction among counterculture types. Sneering at those who had sacrificed for them – the generation that had fought World War II, then come home to marry and buy a house in the ’burbs where they could “be fruitful and multiply” – a significant portion of my own generation refused to do the same.
Perhaps if there had been no antiwar movement, there would have been no Second Wave. Yes, there would have been the hysterical voices of Betty Freidan calling the home a "comfortable concentration camp" and Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown – who encouraged young working women to have affairs with married men – labeling the stay-at-home mom "a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger, a bum". (Endnote Three, Chapter 2) There would have been the first whining women writers and the heavy academics, but there would have been no cohesion among their readers.
But the counterculture arisen from the antiwar movement had united the hearts of anyone with a gripe about our culture or a predilection for selfish living. “Do Your Own Thing” replaced the Ten Commandments, anointing selfishness as the higher path. And indeed, selfishness would be the basis for feminism and for all the spin-off moral/cultural dilemmas which flowed out of it: abortion, homosexuality, reproductive technology, euthanasia and even stem cell research.
Yes, feminism was that important. Without it, the seeds of these other culture clashes would not have taken root. And because Second Wavers tilted in one direction and not the other, feminism has proven to be the central destabilizing movement which led to the moral and cultural meltdown of the last quarter century.
An important part of the mix was the sexual revolution, which really didn’t start so much with the hippies – though they certainly ran with it – but with the introduction in 1953 of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, which strategically captured the hearts and minds of a large portion of American men. For some idea of its range of influence, consider that the November 1972 issue sold 7,161,561 copies (Chapter Two, Endnote 4) while there were approximately 62 million males over 20 in the country. (Chapter Two, Endnote 5)
Even before the self-centered philosophy of feminism, there was the serious seduction of a sizeable portion of American men who fell for the hedonistic, beautiful-women-and-lots-of-sex beckoning of an over-the-counter, not-hidden-in-a-seedy-adult-shop magazine – a magazine which published not only pictures of voluptuous naked women but also works by modern literary giants and interviews with very important men (including even born-again President Jimmy Carter), giving the whole package an undeserved air of respectability. The complexity of the package may have provided camouflage, but it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the theme delivered was plain and simple debauchery. Plenty of men did their best to emulate Hugh Hefner’s glorified libertine lifestyle in whatever ways were available to them.
As far as Playboy’s effect on women, this may have been the beginning of women’s feeling that they’d never measure up to the paper doll ideal which over the coming decades would see every aspect of woman’s natural modesty broken down completely, (Chapter Two, Endnote 6) so that today teenage girls no longer don T-shirts to hide their bikinis, but flaunt their bodies and seem unconcerned when their body parts pop out in public.
That’s not to say there hadn’t always been women desperate enough to break the normal rules. Think of Helen Gurley Brown’s readers, who sought out in the pages of Cosmopolitan graphic guides on how to seduce and secure men, married or not. In some perverse way, Brown’s drooling over the challenge of landing a married man made what had been off-limits now seem the prize catch.
My own father fancied himself a playboy and left my mother with three kids – only to start another family with a ten-years-younger wife. After four kids there, he moved on to an even younger “trophy” wife. I guess we could call this franchise fatherhood. My mother, unprepared for single motherhood in the 50s latched on to one married man after another. I come from a long line of selfish people.
My parents, who split in 1954, were on the cutting edge of the rising divorce rate, but that was back in the days when one partner had to accuse another of wrongdoing. What really sent the divorce rate soaring was the 1975 no-fault divorce law. Once it took effect, 77% of divorces were filed by only one partner – and the incidence of divorce has quadrupled since 1960.(Chapter Two, Endnote 7).
My intent here is not to draw a pie chart with slices of responsibility divvied up among different forces which shook the foundations of the American family and sent it spinning from its Father Knows Best cocoon and into the plethora of forms we see today (in one Sesame Street song children learn that “any group of people living together and loving each other are family”). Rather I’d like to convey that while the Second Wave of Feminism can be pegged as a turning point in the history of the American family and while it did indeed open a Pandora’s Box of cultural problems, the turn feminism took early on had already been pioneered by other forces.
From my own point of view, as a feminist I was largely motivated by a desire to make the world a better place for my daughter. And as I’ve discussed, much of that has since been accomplished. Just a couple examples: Women are no longer second class citizens, invisible in the media and the arts. The opening up of the medical profession – more women than men now study to become doctors – has given medicine a kinder, gentler face.
Yet when I steer my 12- and 15-year-old daughters through aisles full of provocative clothing in department stores, or when a TV show I’m watching with my kids is interrupted by a Victoria’s Secret commercial, or when aging feminists defend libertine politicians just because they support abortion-on-demand, I’m aghast at the large part of the early 70s feminist agenda that wasn’t accomplished at all.
Digging Deep
In the beginning, feminists were very concerned with the imbalance of power in male/female relationships. Their secular approach and measuring perspective saw womanhood as a type of slavery.
From the get-go feminism was on a collision course with the sexual revolution. So as the pill was supposedly giving women more freedom, it was also making them more vulnerable to exploitation. Feminists simply shrugged and pretended that women could enjoy no-strings-attached sex as much as men. I think in our hearts, every woman knows this isn’t true.
But really, there was no attempt to deal with such subtleties, as for the majority of older feminists, the issue that early on became the number one focus and which today seems to be the only issue that matters anymore is abortion. Today’s younger feminists seem to feel no discrepancy at all between expecting to be taken seriously in school and the workplace and dressing like prostitutes if they wish. And woe betides anyone suggesting that male students or coworkers might get the wrong idea!
What’s truly sad is that the early feminist movement could have gone in a different direction, thus changing the course of the culture.
Many of the early Second Wave feminists were motivated as I was, by ideals of making the world a better place. In so many ways, they worked to better the condition of women.
That kind of sacrifice is what I see sadly lacking in feminism since it turned a corner in its evolution – the corner where abortion became the defining issue and all debate was dropped. The issue of abortion brought out the worst in feminists. The next chapter will go into more depth on this, but the point that needs to be made here is this: the bottom line of abortion was the taking of one individual’s life to avoid inconveniencing another. And so the immense capacity of women for selflessness was short-circuited. Instead of ascribing to a heroic ideal of sacrifice for the good of another, women’s rallying point became an act of complete and utter selfishness.
This selfishness, magnified by the counterculture’s Me First! mentality became the signature attribute of the Boomer generation, affecting everything that touched our lives.
Yes, I know there were decent, hardworking people who were raising traditional families and doing well by their children, but they were not the movers and shakers of culture.
The movers and shakers were working themselves into culture shaping positions such as university professors and public school teachers, newspaper reporters and TV anchors, anywhere there was influence to be had. Soon they were writing books and producing movies that reflected not so much the American dream as the American nightmare. Which is why today instead of Ben Hur or The Sound of Music winning Academy Awards, we have dark dysfunctional meditations like American Beauty and Pulp Fiction.
Virtually every media family for many years has been dysfunctional. Perhaps that has made the actual breakdown in the family that’s been taking place seem okay by comparison.
And the family has been breaking down. The infiltration of feminist thought into mainstream culture – making fathers seem superfluous – plus the skyrocketing divorce rate and the faithlessness of many fathers have brought us to a crisis with ramifications for children even more serious than the daycare dilemma.
Reaching Out
Despite the rosy picture painted for us in the media and diversity courses, growing up fatherless is just about the worst thing that can happen to a boy or a girl. Check the statistics. They show children from fatherless homes are:
-4.6 times more likely to commit suicide
-6.6 times more likely to become teenaged mothers
-24.3 times more likely to run away
-15.3 times more likely to have behavioral disorder
-10.8 times more likely to commit rape
-6.6 times more likely to drop out of school
-15.3 times more likely to end up in prison as teenagers.
Fatherlessness is a reality of our culture. Yet single mothers and their children are usually overlooked and neglected – even within their own church families. The mothers need help and encouragement. The children need to spend time with intact families so they grow up with a vision to work toward – coming from a fatherless home myself, I know.
Looking back, it’s easy now to see that the Second Wave of feminism from the get go had an underlying agenda: the breakdown of the family. Where it could have rallied for more respect for homemakers and mothers, it chose instead to convince us all that women who chose this lifestyle were stupid and ignorant. Thus they fell also into the men-are-superior trap, judging the traditional male role of breadwinner as superior to the traditional female role of making a home and caring for the family.
There’s no disputing that for members of National Organization for Women (NOW), who in the 70s set the agenda for the women’s movement, the traditional family was not a creative enterprise, but a prison from which women needed to be freed. The pressure was on all early feminists – and eventually on all women – to postpone or forego marriage and childbearing and to pursue a “real” career.
Housewives and stay-at-home moms were the objects of derision and ridicule. Think of Hillary Clinton’s distancing herself from such incomplete beings: "I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided was to fulfill my profession." Her proud remark said a lot about how professional career women viewed professional moms.
In this area, the Women’s Movement was far from pro-choice. Talk about peer pressure!
Since feminists defined power not as the opportunity to influence and shape the next generation through raising children at home, but only in terms of earning capacity, women were pushed into a position of envying men for their power in the outer world, rather than sympathy for men who lacked the natural power wielded by mothers in the home. As William Ross Wallace wrote in 1865: “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Did feminists think maxims such as these were just bones tossed to appease women? If so, they might consider that if men held all the cards, they wouldn’t really need to throw us bones at all. Perhaps men like Wallace saw something profound that feminists have missed all these years.
But the basic philosophical error of the Second Wave was that at some point it turned from idealistically seeking the good of all to settling for a foundation of selfishness.
Robin, I'm not afraid of anything except rollercoasters and ferris wheels. And I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who hangs around here much that I'm not afraid of words.
Now, how afraid are you of having an open mind and changing your opinion about who I am?
Posted by: barbara | August 30, 2008 7:48 PM
I cannot get enough of this woman! I have listened to her speech twice and thought about it nonstop....Each time I get goosebumps. She is AWESOME and the perfect choice for so many reasons. I am finally excited about the upcoming presidential election. I am sooooo tired of traditional and plastic politicians. Sarah Palin is real and sincerely ready to serve! I am very motivated to promote this ticket. Where do I get a McCain/Palin button? Hey, I may even get a bumper sticker, (which I never do) I feel priviledged to witness this moment in history!
Posted by: Kim | August 30, 2008 9:50 PM
Sarah's got a lot of great attributes. But this isn't her time. I can't vote for someone who may end up as President without a proven track record of significant policy accomplishments. The things people admire about her now are what they'll admire later.
Posted by: sarah,too | September 1, 2008 1:22 AM
With so many truly qualified women, I am offended by the pick of Sarah Palin. What about Christine Todd Whitmann, Elizabeth Dole, Kay Bailey Hutchison? Can the former mayor of Wasilla (pop. 600) really speak one-to-one with Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-Il? It's not about picking any female - it's picking a qualified female. Sorry Sarah - you're no Maggie Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, or Golda Meir.
Posted by: Rachel | September 1, 2008 4:36 PM
Being a born-again Christian, I can see the McCain/Palin collaboration as another "Deborah and Barak" story, only in a good way. Also, Mrs. Palin is like another "Esther," too. God has raised her up for "such a time as this." I think it refreshing, uplifting, and merciful of God to even be letting Mrs. Palin run for the vice-presidential ticket. God has shown mercy upon our fallen country many times over. It was the mercy of God that we had President George W. Bush in office when he ran for the Presidential ticket, and it will still be God's mercy if the McCain/Palin ticket wins the election. But just for the record,I want to go down as saying that God is good, God is great, and we Christians have an obligation to pray that the right person gets into office. (Oh, yeah, and by the way, Mrs. Palin gets my vote because she majored in journalism..)I love to write, so go McCain, and Palin! May God be with you, and with what you stand for!
Posted by: Jessica C. | September 13, 2008 10:31 PM
