Sarah Palin: Making Over Feminism?

Every morning, I listen to NPR as I prepare to take on a new day of classes and teaching. Well, today I happened to hear a feminist discussion of McCain’s new VP: Sarah “barracuda” Palin. Gargling mouthwash, I nearly swallowed when I heard one  particular commentator suggest that Sarah Palin has reinvigorated feminism and essentially given it a much-needed makeover. The woman suggested that women such as Sarah Palin, and she even includes Michelle Obama in this analysis, have breathed new life into the notion of motherhood as a liberating experience. In other words, feminists have long felt ambivalent about motherhood, whether it is psychologically forced upon women as a symptom of our oppressive patriarchal culture, or whether it can actually serve as a woman-affirming experience. Many have leaned toward the former conclusion. However, the presence of women such as Palin and Michelle Obama, who speak incessantly about their roles as mothers (for varying reasons and with various cultural implications, I might add) has begun to upend this longstanding feminist assumption.

I wanted desperately to call into the station and express my deepest regrets that anyone could be so deluded as to perceive this as either urgently important or as a positive change. But alas, I was pressed for time and already running late. Instead, I channel my frustrations here.

First and foremost, how can anything so trivial (compared to immediate issues such as the current economic crisis, healthcare, the war in Iraq, etc.) constitute valuable use of airtime on a talk radio station at this very crucial political moment? I do not suggest that feminist debates regarding systemic ideologies of domination are trivial. However, I do suggest that there are at the moment slightly more urgent matters regarding very concrete manifestations of systemic domination that require attention. Let’s not discuss, for example, how our current administration continues to allow large corporations to exploit the current oil dilemma at our expense.

Secondly, it is important that we recognize the very classist nature of such a debate in the first place. The very nature of this discussion participates in a hierarchy of class, whereby middle to upper-class women (white women, particularly) have such freedom and time to contemplate the extent to which motherhood has been forced socially upon them or the extent to which motherhood needs to be reinvogorated in feminist discussions of woman-affirming experiences. It participates in the class hierarchy by ignoring some of the very real, concrete feminist issues confronted by the average, working class woman everyday. The average woman of color, living in the city, for instance, simply wants to find a way to survive and provide for her children, rather than ponder the numerous ways in which feminist discussions triply exclude her, as a poor, mother, of color. Furthermore, many other such women and girls find themselves bitter, wondering why they were refused the morning after pill by some Bible-thumping Wal-Mart pharmacist, and where they can find an abortion clinic in time or a Planned Parenthood so that they’ll know what to expect during the nine months of the swift transition from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, others simply love their babies, and couldn’t give two damns about what any other woman has to say about that love, about an experience so wholly their own and yet one that so deeply connects them to millions of other women in this world.

If we want to pragmatically begin a discussion of motherhood, rather than focusing on whether it is woman-affirming or anti-feminist, why don’t we start out by showing our girls that they have a choice? (Note: Sarah Palin would ever so love to take this choice away, by banning abortions.) We need to extract this discussion from the level of mere discourse. Why don’t we establish a direct conversation with these girls, a conversation in which these girls leave understanding the consequences of both choosing motherhood and choosing to forgo such an experience? So many young women enter into the experience with lofty ideals that eventually fade shortly after the child arrives. Why don’t we show these girls that woman and motherhood are not the same, one does not signify or demand the other? I say this because, if anything, Palin and Michelle Obama as they have come to be represented in the media, are the other extreme of traditional feminisms that negate the woman-affirming value of motherhood: the current representations of Palin and Obama suggest that motherhood is the quintessential woman-affirming experience, and that foregoing it suggests some denial of one’s womanhood.

Though I’ll refrain here from an in-depth discussion of the role of race in the representation of Michelle Obama as a mother, it is essential to ask “what does this say to young black women?” That such a strong, career-driven woman like Michelle speaks only about her role as mother and wife, and never about her Ivy League education, and her role as community organizer. Are mother, i.e. Michelle Obama, and whore, i.e. New York from the show “I Love New York”, our only options? Can we only be seen as virtuous if we are supreme mothers, like Michelle? Can we ever simply be women? If Palin and Michelle Obama are the new faces of feminism, then I certainly am at a loss to answer this question, as it regards black women and women in general.