Women vs. Women on Sarah Palin
by Latoya Peterson, originally published at Feministe
I hate being in this position.
I truly do.
The blog I edit is an anti-racist one. That is our focus. It is staffed entirely by women. We prefer not to deal with sexism, either. So, in a nutshell, covering this election has been a pain in the ass. As the main moderator, I get in fights all the time with readers about everything under the sun.
“No, you don’t have to like Barack Obama to be on our site. No, we didn’t think that was sexist. Okay, I’ll put up a thread about it. No, that’s not true. No, I said stop that now. WTF? Why are you comparing him to OJ?!?”
“No, you shouldn’t use sexist language against Hillary Clinton. Yes, I can read, I saw those remarks. I don’t care if you don’t like her, there are other ways to make your point. No, that nickname is not cute. I don’t give a damn what you *think* you’re saying in the comment, spell her name right or it isn’t getting approved!”
The election cycle threw a spotlight on the uneasy territory alliances we have working around issues of prejudice, and every couple minutes, there is a new hotspot waiting to flare up.
I got sent an article last week, which basically read “Black women can’t complain about the sexism aimed at Michelle Obama because you didn’t stand up for Hillary!”
I had Nadra respond. In an even handed response, she notes: “It wasn’t that black women felt that privileged white women couldn’t speak out against sexism. It was that, during the primaries, such white women seemed to be doing so at the expense of blacks.” And even in that comment thread, tempers flared around all the past dealings and past hurts. (If you comment on that thread, please read *all* the submissions first, so you have an idea of the flow of the conversation.)
So, when Sarah Palin hit the scene, I was expecting a break.
She’s a Republican. An anti-choicer. She fully drank the kool-aid about Iraq, Oil, Iran and everything. There is no way I am going to have to argue against her AND defend her, right?
Wrong!
Carmen called it out first, noting in the comments section to the open thread:
Carmen Van Kerckhove wrote:
A few random thoughts:
1) Palin (or her speechwriter) has a killer instinct for soundbites. There’s a reason every single media outlet is repeating that line about pitbull and lipstick ad nauseum.
2) I’m not down with criticism of Palin centered on her ability to balance the VP job and her large family and young baby (e.g. the last point in John Riley’s piece). She has a stay-at-home husband for god’s sake. We would not be asking these questions if she were a man.
3) Related to point 2, Obama supporters really need to avoid falling into the trap of using sexist and racist attacks on the McCain camp. I’ve seen a couple bloggers I otherwise respect using words like “cracker” and “ho” to describe McCain, his wife, and Palin. You can’t criticize sexist/racist attacks on the Obamas if you’re doing the exact same shit.
Posted 04 Sep 2008 at 12:00 pm ¶ (Edit)
Some readers agreed - some pushed back hard.
Nina wrote:
Carmen, I have to disagree that questions about Palin’s family and how it will afffect her leadership are off limits. Palin constantly brings up her son going to Iraq, her special needs newborn, and now her pregnant teenage daughter. She even gave a cover interview to People Magazine about these topics. Why should she not be asked about these situations and why should such questions be considered sexist? John Edwards was questioned about continuing to run for office when his wife’s cancer returned and that was far less of a political issue than the war in Iraq, abstinence-only sex education or the abortion debate*.
Furthermore, as a mother in the workforce, Palin should shine a light on the challenges faced by working mothers and possibly champion change in that area. She should not shy away from these questions nor claim they are sexist. These are womens issues. Millions of women have to make tough choices everyday about when to become mothers, whether to stay at home with their children or whether to work. If Palin can’t bring these issues to the forefront what kind of a maverick is she?
*I always find it interesting that Republicans refuse to respond to questions about their families (Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Bush’s daughters’ drunken antics) but have no problem attacking the families of democrats (remember the mud heaped on both Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s wayward brothers?)
Posted 04 Sep 2008 at 5:52 pm ¶ (Edit)
Winn wrote:
@ Nina: cosign! I find it interesting that Palin has used her family as evidence of her conservative and traditional family values bona fides, but questioning her about how she will balance the demands of that family, particularly with respect to a special needs child and a pregnant teenager, with the responsibility of holding the second highest office in the land, is sexist and off-limits?
As was pointed out, John Edwards’ commitment to his family was questioned when he elected to stay in the race after the recurrence of his wife’s cancer. There were several articles talking about Rudy Giuliani’s strained relationship with his children, their failure to participate in his presidential bid, and wondering if his overarching ambition had irreparably damaged his relationship with his children. The clear implication was, he couldn’t manage his own household, so how fit was he to lead the country? I also recall reading articles questioning whether Mitt Romney’s “too perfect” family would backfire on him as the campaign wore on and people found him too difficult to identify with and suggested that something was phony about him. So how candidates present and interact with their families plays a role in how they are perceived by the electorate, for good or ill, and if carefully navigated, can be legitimate lines of inquiry to pursue.
In fact, in an article on Romney last year in the LA Times, an audience member at a stump speech in which Romney exhorted the crowd to encourage stronger families by teaching teenagers to marry before having children (natch!) nodded appreciatively and said, “If you can’t run a family, how can you run a country”? I’m not saying I agree with this sentiment, but I don’t think the people who do only feel that way about female candidates, especially ones who put their family at the top of their professional resume.
Michelle wrote:
Hey Carmen and LaToya and the rest…
I completely agree with you. No one would ask about her ability to lead the country with five kids at home if she were a man. However, and this is important to me, so far she has presented herself as someone with very traditional values. In a traditional, Christian paradigm, the brunt of the work of raising and caring for children falls on the mother’s shoulders. If that is not the case for her then she should address it. I only bring it up because of the model of parenting that she seems to present, not because she is a woman with kids. Because she is woman with kids who makes it seem like she doesn’t believe in childcare, that she can do it alone. Her husband does have a job. He has two. He works a union job and he is a commercial fisherman. I would like to know if he plans to quit both jobs and stay home with the kids. Lastly, even if he does, it takes a lot more than one person to care for an infant with special needs, a pregnant teenager, and two other small children. I think it only advances the cause of working women if Palin would say that she will need help, that her family will need adequate childcare, just like all working women need adequate childcare. I have a problem with women who make it seem like other women are “whining” when they complain about needing childcare so that they can work and care for their families. Lastly, and this is also important to me, she doesn’t believe in birth control. So, I think it is important to ask if she will be getting pregnant while in office. I think that is a very good question. While pregnancy is not a health issue in general, for someone of her age, it would be a high risk pregnancy. That is something that we need to really be clear on before her ability to lead the nation is really ascertained.
Our readers raise great points. I was still mulling over them, and trying to figure out a way to respond when I checked in with one of my favorite bloggers. Expecting a post on careers, I was a little surprised at the heading.
Penelope Trunk’s headline was “Palin’s children should take priority over being Vice President.”
Penelope Trunk has a lot of opinions. Some of them are fairly unfemininst. Some of them are off the wall. Some of them are fucking ridiculous. But I love Penelope Trunk, I bought Brazen Careerist, and I read her blog as soon as she posts something because she has a knack for thinking about things in a completely different way.
And she is the only career writer I know being honest about how hard these decisions to excel are for women. Not in a “stay at home and be happy” kind of way, but in a “understand the costs going in, understand you can’t do it all” kind of way.
So I was kind of shocked when she came out so hard against Palin, as she blogs so extensively about the issues women face trying to advance at work.
Penelope writes:
Okay. Look. I wasn’t going to tell you what I think of Sarah Palin, but so many people are asking, so fine. Here it is. She is nuts. And the Republicans are nuts for putting her on a ticket. She has a five-month-old kid with Down’s Syndrome.
Why is no one writing about this? I have a special needs kid. I have two. Here’s what happens when you have a special needs kid. You are in shock. You love the kid. I loved my first one so much that even though there was something like an 80% chance of having another kid with autism, I had a second kid.
And guess what? The second kid had a different disability than the first. Amazing. Statistically phenomenal, really. But my point here is that I’m very qualified to tell you what it’s like to be a breadwinner mom of a five-month-old special needs kid. And, it’s not just from my perspective. I am a magnet for breadwinner moms. They constantly write to me. And when I write about this topic—being the breadwinner and having a special needs kid—women come out of the woodwork. They all say exactly what I’m telling you now: it’s insane. It’s insanely hard.
She then talks about the strain on the marriage, and the difficulties with having a stay at home husband who is accustomed to working. (Penelope Trunk is currently going through a divorce with her former stay at home husband. She has also blogged about this extensively.)
I know that I’m going to be reminded me that I have a nanny, a house manager, and a cleaning woman (who actually shows up every day). But I also have a job that allows me to leave at 2:30. It’s a compromise for me. Because every parent in the world has had to compromise, and it’s fair to judge public figures on the choices they make.
Fair point. She has written about employing home help as a way to continue with your career. Many women get tripped up trying to be supermom, to do everything, to keep the house spotless, all of that - and Trunk argues it is wasted energy. Figure out how much you earn per hour, and what you can pay someone else to do for less. That frees up your time to earn more. But back to Palin -
Why is no one talking about this? The Republicans should dump Palin. She’s got too much responsibility at home.
Don’t tell me that this is not fair to women. Because you know what? People should have railed against John Edwards running for President when he had two young kids at home and a wife fighting cancer. Fine if she wants him to run for office while she fights the cancer. I get it. But I don’t get how the President of the United States was going to have time to console two school age kids about their mom’s death while leading the country. It’s irresponsible.
I know it’s not cool to tell people how to parent. I know it’s not cool because every day someone asks me how I run my company when I have two young kids and what they are really saying is “you suck as a parent.” It’s hard to hear every day, so I have empathy for the idea that everyone should shut up about how other people parent.
But it’s absurd how extreme these presidential-wanna-be cases are. I don’t want someone in the White House who has kids at home who desperately need them. I don’t want to watch that scenario unfold on national TV. So at some point, it must be okay to speak up. At some point we have to say that we have standards for parenting and we want the community to uphold them.
Penelope seems like she is on shaky ground here, but if you look at her archives, she is actually a very strong proponent of holding both genders accountable for child abandonment in the name of work:
Recently, Wellpoint dismissed its CFO, David Colby. Wellpoint cites personal reasons. The LA Times tells us that it’s the numerous mistresses he was leading supposedly exclusive relationships with. The problem here is not that executives cheat on their wives. They do it all the time. What we can take from the Wellpoint dismissal is that big companies value discretion when it comes to cheating on a wife. Three at once, and they’re all talking - that’s too much for a board to take.
But here’s the bottom line from all this corporate discipline hoopla: Senior executives must lead their personal lives in accordance with the values of corporate boards. Their personal life is no longer their own, according to Shelly Lazarus, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather.
Thank goodness these boards do not value fathering, or else there would be no one to run the Fortune 500. Because there appears to be little room for parenting if you’re at the very top.
Fortune magazine ran an article about Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony. He is married with two children and is quoted as saying at company meeting, “I don’t see my family much. My family is you.”
Fortune ran a profile of Jeff Immelt, chief executive of GE. Immelt said that he has been working 100-hour weeks for the last twenty years. He also said that he is married and they have an eighteen year-old-daughter.
I can’t decide which is more pathetic - the way these men approach their role as a parent, or the way that Fortune magazine writes about it without any commentary.
How can there be no mention of the fact that these CEOs are neglecting their kids?
We have a double standard in our society: If you are poor and you abandon your kids you are a bad parent. But if you are rich and you abandon them to run a company, you are profiled in Fortune magazine.
And she’s right.
I am absolutely chafing that Palin is being targeted as unfit for the Vice Presidency because of ideas rooted in gender norms. But I feel like Penelope (and my readers) also have a point.
So, maybe we should be changing the narrative a little.
Instead of “How can Sarah Palin run for VP and manage a family?” should we ask “How can we define family values when running for public office?” (Especially when dealing with the party that wraps itself in “family values.”) Or, should we even be asking these questions at all?
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
i, mami. » Doing It All - On Steroids. on 07 Sep 2008 at 4:46 pm
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