Palin and 'conservative feminists'

Perhaps you may have heard that former Gov. Sarah Palin spoke last Friday at a gathering of abortion rights opponents hosted by the Susan B. Anthony List. In the speech (video), she nudged wider the gulf between contemporary American feminisms. Palin encouraged "conservative feminists" to "rise up" and take a more active role in guiding the country, pitting them against academic, urban and (one would think liberal) feminists. Palin based the conservative feminist tradition on a story of women helping to tame the American frontier (a story which, we must say, sounded rather romanticized). The Atlantic has posted an extremely sympathetic reaction to the speech, a reaction which has been reposted on just about every pro-Palin blog in Cyberspace. According to the commentator, Palin's recent address contained perfect examples of her four-fold "genius."

The position of these "conservative feminists" is probably best exemplified by this piece published at News Real Blog. One (laughable) central claim there is nicely summed up by a particular sentence: "True feminists are women like Sarah Palin and [South Carolina gubernatorial candidate] Nikki Haley. They are the new faces of feminism. That has a great built-in bonus, too — they are far easier on the eyes and exhibit none of that irksome hysterical screeching like the already irrelevant and soon to be extinct femogynists." That's right, ladies, equality can finally be yours if you'd just stop being so frumpy and hysterical.

No doubt, Palin's statements in support of this new approach to gender equality are having an incendiary effect, and perhaps the most comprehensive response to them and other connected developments (plus an embedded video excerpt from Palin's speech) comes from The Huffington Post's Taylor Marsh, here. Marsh's main claim? "You simply can't be a feminist if you don't support a woman's individual rights."

No matter what comes of this debate among advocates for women, the abstract forces of inequality and domination will remain foundations of our society. Could it be that the real enemy is the notion that we diminish ourselves when we don't exert power over someone else?