Over the past several weeks, feminist writers across the media have worked valiantly to describe what about Sarah Palin’s selection as vice presidential candidate is so offensive and frightening to progressive women. In the face of giddy Republicans cross-dressing as women’s libbers, striking poses of outrage over “lipstick” colloquialisms and questions about Palin’s parenthood—staples of GOP attacks for the past thirty years—and taking Rosie the Riveter signs to McCain-Palin rallies, feminist journalists and bloggers have reminded readers that anatomy aside, Palin presided over a town that forced its rape victims to pay $200 to $1,300 for the cost of their own rape kits, cut funding for a shelter for pregnant teens, opposes abortion in all instances except to save the mother’s life, and has joined the ticket with McCain, a man who has opposed efforts to institute wage equality, saying instead that women need more education and training.
This twisting of feminist history and rhetoric to protect a champion of anti-feminist causes, traditionalism and sex-kitten objectification, is particularly unnerving for exactly the reasons that Palin’s biggest supporters claim it is: for its elevation of antifeminist “real women” as icons of rebellion against a supposedly powerful and elite feminist status quo (however depressing it is to begin untangling that premise). Rebecca Traister of Salon writes perceptively about this new ideal:
In this “Handmaid’s Tale”-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we’re witnessing “a new creation … of the feminist ideal,” the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it’s now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: “put a skirt on.” “I want her watching my kids,” says Deutsch. “I want her laying next to me in bed.”
JoAnn Wypijewski, Carnal Knowledge columnist for The Nation, argues that the ideological appeal was secondary and after the fact, and that McCain’s choice of Palin was really meant to offer voters a more traditional womanly appeal: part Angel in the House, but larger part sex icon. Indeed something like Chris Matthews’s unusually astute observation that Palin is “running as kind of like the other partner, somewhere between a VP and a First Lady.”
Here was McCain, the angry old warrior, deploying sex as a central political weapon to recharge his potency, his party’s fortunes and the cultural oomph of the right. Not gender. The Republicans didn’t need just any woman to compete with Obama for the Wow factor, the Mmm factor, the stable, loving family factor. It is a calculated bonus that adherents can now speak loftily of making history, but for different reasons, drawing deep from the well of their identities, and not for the first time, both McCain and the right needed a sexual icon.
Taking stock of McCain’s marital history and reputation for both unkindness to his wives and restlessness in fidelity, Wypijewski sees his pick of Palin as following a scriptural precedent: McCain choosing a new Queen as retribution against an unsubmissive wife as in the biblical story of Esther.
Like King Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther, who asserted his mastery by decreeing male headship and then held a kind of beauty pageant to replace Vashti as queen, McCain found his new “partner and soulmate” in Miss Wasilla 1984. Even Cindy, who suddenly let her hair down in bed-head style, perhaps at last relieved of the burdens of wifely duties, calls it “a perfect match.”
That Esther’s biblical fame is actually due to her subversion of that submissive role—using her beauty in order to save her people from genocide—seems fitting for the sort of adulation conservative Christians have for Palin in hailing her as the right woman for the times. They linger on her victimization at the hands of a cruel media—with Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America demanding that the media “Stop Bullying Sarah!” and offering Palin, post Charlie Gibson-interview, comforting words against Washington, D.C. “data robots” who know nothing of heartland values—while at the same time crowing about the hidden power that Palin will tap into. As Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition declares, trying his hand at coining demographic catch phrases, arguing that Palin has energized a groundswell of “Faith Moms.”
“These ‘Faith Moms’ are the millions of women that attend weekly Bible study and discussion groups, coordinate church activities, drive their children to youth group and choir practice and are literally the lifeblood of thousands of churches across America. Both Catholic and Evangelical churches would have a hard time functioning without these dedicated ‘Faith Moms.’ … I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say these millions of ‘Faith Moms’ could make the difference in November. Their passion and energy, which has been ignored in past elections, will be front and center this November. To paraphrase an old expression, this year ‘maybe the hands that rock the cradle’ will help decide who rules this nation.”
“Faith moms,” “hockey moms” or “real women,” the formula for the campaign is the same, yet another twist on the Esther story: the conservative argument that not only can traditional submissive wifehood hold unexpected possibilities of power, but a step further to the coercive promise that women’s return to more traditional roles is the only avenue through which they will find power.
