When I first saw the headline go past on NPR’s feed, Daum Says Call Palin What She Is: A Feminist, my initial thought was… Say what now? Then I realized that NPR’s story is really reporting about a story in the LA Times and went and read it as well. And it made a little bit more sense, sort of.

(I’m having trouble finding a transcript of the actual speech that Daum is commenting on, which is unfortunate. I would have liked to read it and form my own opinion about Palin staking her claim to feminism based on firsthand knowledge of what she said rather than commentary on it. As it is, I guess I’ve got to go with what I’ve got.)

Daum argues that Sarah Palin’s political ideology does not disqualify her from being a feminist. That “feminism” simply means “[seeing] your gender as neither an obstacle to success nor an excuse for failure”. I get the sense from her column that what she’s getting at is that feminism means letting a woman be whoever she wants to be and do whatever she wants to do. That includes being conservative if she so chooses. A feminist doesn’t have to be a pro-choice, bra-burning, glass-ceiling-busting superwoman. And in that sense, yes, I can agree with her. I feel very strongly that feminism shouldn’t mean that we all have to be girly-girls, or that we all have to be tomboys, but rather than we should all be allowed to find our own individual places and make our own individual decisions about our identities and our selves.

At the same time, though, I can’t help but remember this Salon article, written when there was still an election on and Sarah Palin was the symbol of the alleged progressiveness of the Republican Party. (A woman! They had a female candidate! How radical!) A direct quote from the article illustrates my point:

In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism — a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin’s potential power — means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children’s books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.

(Thanks to Jen, who pointed me to that article way back when it was published.)

I’ll ignore the creationism and the library issues for the moment, because although I find those things distasteful they largely fall under the “conservative politics” heading and have little to do with women specifically. Even the sex ed can go that direction; it affects boy-children as well as girl-children. The rest of it? That’s a problem.

It’s one thing to go your own way and believe your own thing without worrying about what society says and call that feminism when you’re an average Jane like me who has little if any control over the lives of others. Sarah Palin is not an average Jane like me, and she did have control over the lives of others. She may again in the future; last I heard she hadn’t ruled out a 2012 Presidential run completely. Even now, she exercises some control by doing a lot of high-profile campaigning, presumably for candidates who will have the same legislative goals that she would if she were in office. That makes a difference. If this article is correct, she has used that power to prevent other women from making their own choices, and she has used that power to limit the resources that other women have available to set their life back on track when something goes wrong. She has defined what it’s appropriate for a woman to be, to do, and she has attempted to make sure that other women conform to that whether they want to or not.

It’s been a year and a half since that article was written. Sarah Palin is no longer in elected office, no longer making the laws herself — for the moment. Maybe things have changed. If so, I have seen no evidence of that yet. I agree that feminism doesn’t have to imply liberalism, but I cannot in good conscience call this woman a feminist.

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