The XX Factor: What women really think.

• « Prev | Main | Next »

  
  

  Sarah Palin and The Devil Wears Prada

  Posted Thursday, September 04, 2008 3:59 PM | By E.J. Graff

  I haven’t posted yet on the Sarah Palin Show, mainly because it’s all just been too darn entertaining to stop snorting and say anything intelligent. Last week I persuaded a twentysomething family friend to tune into the Obama speech by telling her that political conventions were no different from reality TV. My young friend has been texting me with every new Palin-palooza, as astonished as I have been by how correct that assessment was.

  But I do want to comment on this false idea: that just because Palin is a woman, she is also a feminist. Or that just because she’s a woman, her nomination is a feminist act. Or that just because she’s a woman, Hillary-mourning women everywhere will vote for her, inspired simply by sharing chromosomes with a candidate. As my nephews would say, nuh-uh.

  Love her or hate her, Hillary wears standard-issue feminism proudly. It's based on the idea that women and men should be treated equally; that the odds are still stacked against women (and many others) in many areas of life; and that these structural issues—say, the lack of early childhood education or health care for all families—are problems we should address together, and in fact, can fix only together. That's why she got called all those nasty sexist things, like "hysterical" and "bitch": because she was trying to shake off the femininity box.

  What Sarah Palin is pushing is something quite different. She's milking a kind of feminine chauvinism: I am mother (hockey mom? hot mama?), hear me roar. She's using womanhood and all its trappings to further her family and her career. Of course, many of us at least occasionally use womanhood to our advantage—can you do the Helpless Female Gaze and duck a speeding ticket? But Palin appears to have no interest in knocking down structural barriers to female (or human) flourishing. Contrary to what Anne said awhile back, Palin wouldn’t have been nominated without feminism; there just wasn’t a market for a female veep candidate until Hillary and the White House Project and all those tiresome discussions of unequal pay created that market. Now that she's nominated, though, Palin appears happy to reap that advance without expanding on it. Her gleeful meanness last night made me think of her as the infamous Queen Bee type, so brilliantly captured by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, with its philosophy of I’m glamorous/you’re a germ. She’s got hers; you get your own, and get out of her way.

  As an example of her anti-feminism, consider her line-item veto of funding to support teen moms, reported by the Washington Post. The project she slashed would have given "young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives" and help teen moms "become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families." It’s not that Alaska didn’t have the money for the project. Under Palin’s leadership, the People’s Republic of Alaska redistributed oil tax revenues, sending every one of its 670,000 residents a $3,200 payout this year. And in 2005, the state took in $1.81 in federal monies for every federal tax dollar paid by its residents, making it look like a welfare state. No, Palin was sending a clear message: Back off talking about my pregnant daughter, that’s my family’s business. Your pregnant daughter is on her own.

  Palin stands for tribe-, class-, and biology-as-destiny, for letting pregnancy and poverty and group membership determine your life course. If you are dumb enough to let anything bad hit you, too bad for you. She may be a hit with the base, but she’s not gonna win over PUMAs or moderate women—at least, it hasn't happened yet. Having the right chromosomes is not enough to swindle all of the women all of the time. And I hope not most of the women at all.
  

  Filed under: women, feminism, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Palin's convention speech

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

PRINT DISCUSS