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chapter 10 Political Feminism and the Problem of Sarah Palin Catherine E. Rymph As recently as August 2008, how many would have anticipated that by the end of the year, many Americans would be referring to a woman as current standard-bearer of the Republican Party? Sarah Palin’s status as a leading contender for the 2012 Republican nomination seems remarkable, given common (if exaggerated) perceptions of the Republican Party as an anti-woman bastion of white male supremacy. That there are women—and men—in the Republican Party who were genuinely energized in 2008 by a tough female candidate unapologetic about her political ambitions suggests that the position of women in the party and in American politics has shifted in the decades since Second Wave feminists sought to transform the role of women in our society. Leading up to the 1972 elections, Betty Friedan predicted that 100 women would win congressional seats that year and that in 1976 a woman would run for president. Despite Shirley Chisholm’s symbolic presidential run in 1972, and the election of a few more women to the House four years later (to raise the number to 16), Friedan’s forecast proved overly optimistic, to say the least. But her prediction reflected the goals of the emerging political feminism: that more women be elected to public office and serve as leaders in the political parties, and that feminist issues be advanced through the political system. Political feminists clearly understood these goals to be connected. Getting more women elected was a feminist goal in and of itself, because it would mean opening seats of political power to women (not to mention expanding to them yet another traditionally male career option); but electing women also was understood to be a step toward enacting legislation in line with feminist thinking—electing more women would mean electing more feminists. A certain amount of the debate about Sarah Palin indirectly centered on the question of whether or not her candidacy was in line with those goals. Was her historic run to be celebrated as a milestone for women—or not? Her status as a Republican was not necessarily a problem when looked at historically. Political feminists in the 1970s were found in both political parties, and the most prominent organization of political feminism at that time—the National Women’s Political Caucus—was a bipartisan organization .The idea was to advance both Democratic and Republican women and nurture a feminist movement with adherents on both sides of the political aisle. For the most part, this vision failed. Since roughly 1974, Democratic women have far outnumbered their Republican counterparts in the House, and the same has been true in the Senate since 1992. Democrats today dominate among women in both houses of Congress and hold slightly more governorships. And while the ranks of Republican women elected include pro-choice moderates like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, most Republican women don’t describe themselves as feminists. It wasn’t always that way. Republicans made up a greater number of the women serving in the Congress in the 1940s and were about evenly matched with Democrats in the 1950s and 1960s. One of their number, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, even made a brief bid for the presidency in 1964, becoming the first woman in a major party to officially do so. Furthermore, as recently as 1976, women who proudly and openly identified as feminists enjoyed influence and leadership positions within the Republican Party. Their numbers included Audrey Rowe-Colom, who headed the National Women’s Political Caucus; Congresswoman Margaret Heckler of Massachusetts; Jill Ruckelshaus, who worked in the Nixon White House; and“Feminist Betty,”the wife of President Gerald Ford. (The Catholic Heckler opposed abortion, but this position did not prevent her from identifying as a feminist.) Although their pearls and their hairdos made them seem stodgy to plenty of women’s-rights advocates at the time, Republican feminists accepted many of the insights and objectives of the women’s movement that enjoyed wide support in the 1970s. Importantly, Republican feminists urged their party to embrace a women’s-rights agenda that included support not only for the Equal Rights Amendment (which the Republican Party platform had first endorsed in 1940, four years before the Democrats, and which was now awaiting ratification by the states), but also for reproductive rights, affirmative action, federally funded child care, reform of discriminations in the tax code, and job training for “displaced homemakers.” They...

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