Living The Feminist Dream, Not Preaching It

LIVING THE FEMINIST DREAM, NOT JUST PREACHING IT

Andrew Bolt

As I suggested on Wednesday, Sarah Palin is the female politician that most feminists hate – one who exudes strength, not victimhood, and presents as an individual, not a symbolic petitioner for a tribe with a grievance:

She’s just a token woman, cry the critics, who assume that female politicians succeed best by appealing to female voters, when the very reverse tends to be true…. Palin – a huntin’, fishin’, fundamentalist Christian pro-lifer – isn’t at all a magnet for feminist votes. She’s more a man’s woman whose strongest support – like that of Margaret Thatcher and even Pauline Hanson – will come from blue-collar white males and small-town conservatives.

In short, she’s a conservative – the surest way to success for a woman in politics. Anne Perkins is inclined to agree:

SO why is it that women get more chances on the political Right than it seems they do on the Left? Is there something not very progressive about progressives, is the Right really gender-blind or is there something else going on? Long before Feminist for Life Sarah Palin, with her extraordinary biography, burst out of Alaska, we had become accustomed to Condoleezza Rice bobbing into every shot over the shoulder of the most right-wing US President in living memory. In Germany, Angela Merkel single-handedly revived the Christian Democrats’ internal and global standing (although journalists still comment on her dress sense). What does the Left have to offer? The women on the Right (who make it) share a common disregard for gender politics. The women on the Left (who by and large haven’t, or at least not yet) have made feminism an integral part of their public personality.

Or as Peggy Noonan puts it:

she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way…

Julia Gillard, I suspect, knows this well, and is repositioning herself accordingly.

UPDATE

A profile of Palin confirms she’s not interested in the Left’s traditional politics of victimhood and gender:

Mrs Palin emerges as a tough-talking, self-made and determined “people’s politician”, who insists she was never a victim of sexism …

Adds Miranda Devine:

Palin calls herself a feminist. As a member of the “Feminists for Life of America” pro-life group, she’s just the wrong type. “I believe in the strength and the power of women, and the potential of every human life,” she says.

Which is a creed of individualism that horrifies the tribal feminist:

Which is why the largest American feminist group, the National Organisation for Women, wasted no time issuing a statement saying it did not endorse Palin because she was not the “right woman” and did not speak “for” women.

TonyfromOz adds…

Julia Gillard is the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.

Some of the links here take you to articles in another of Australia’s news outlets, The Sydney Morning Herald.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt.

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.