The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Return of Regency

A guest post from Yale law professor Judith Resnik and Yale law student Allison Tait:

Sarah Palin as ferocious political mother-where have we seen her before, depicted with child (and an occasional dog)? In portraits on museum walls. Think Catherine de Medici. These are the 16^th-century women who, as either queens or regents, reigned after the death of a man (their husband, the former king) and on behalf of their children. Barring exceptions like Elizabeth I, male heirs, not widow-queens, inherited the power to govern. But if the male heir was too young, his mother, as regent, had the power to rule. And once in power, these women sometimes plotted to try to keep it, while seeming to serve in a temporary and secondary capacity. Catherine de Medici acted as regent and adviser to three sons, effectively ruling France for almost 30 years. Fifty years later, Anne of Austria, the queen made famous in the Three Musketeers, challenged her late husband's will in order to claim exclusive power of the regency and broaden the scope of her powers.

By selecting Sarah Palin as regent-to-be-a heartbeat away from constitutionally holding the power of the president-McCain positioned her as the vibrant guardian on behalf of a candidate whose age raised questions. Palin is a coup because she enables McCain to send a double message: that women can be rulers but only temporary and secondary ones, more mom than monarch. (McCain, by the way, showed off at the convention his own lineage as son and grandson of admirals. Never mind that at the Naval Academy, he was at the bottom end of the class.)

Palin is playing the regent role to the hilt. The image of her holding her new son shows that she derives authority from motherhood and also invokes her particular Christian beliefs and opposition to abortion (provided through the back story of his birth). Palin's Christianity is much in evidence in other ways: See this New York Times article, which concluded that "her foundation and source of guidance is the Bible, and with it, has come a conviction to be God's servant."

This mixing of church and state also has an anchor in the Renaissance. As Princeton historian Theodore Rabb explained in his recent book, The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity, during the 15^th and 16^th centuries, leaders looked to God for guidance and invoked God as justification for their actions. Modern democratic leaders look to facts, expert advice, law, and popular will. But McCain-Palin, like Bush, seek to entrench a modern version of returning to rule under the grace of God.

The other distinctive facet of Renaissance leadership was the glorification of war. From art to literature, it was the destiny sought by leaders. Rabb argues that the development of gun powder undermined that premise, as explosions of human flesh undid the romance of combat. Images of war's horrors, like Goya's corpses, displaced rococo portrayals of war's heroics. Yet in her acceptance speech for the nomination, Palin referred not only with pride but almost with joy at the war her son was soon to see. McCain went further by asserting that war had made him better-that he went away reckless and self-interested and returned committed to his country rather than to himself. But now we have not only too much gunpowder, but also nuclear and biological weapons. The right icon is Picasso's Guernica, reminding us that we should be far from these Renaissance notions of leadership and war, not reviving them.