It Takes a Woman
This post was first published in OPEN LEFT.com on September 5, 2009
When I first heard about the Sara Palin announcement, I was incredulous. Like many, I was stumped as to why John McCain would choose a vice presidential running mate who was completely lacking qualifications for the position. The obvious reason, the effort to pick up Hillary Clinton supporters, made no sense. Anyone who supported Hillary did so not only because she was a woman, but certainly because of the causes which she has championed and the positions for which she stands. Sara Palin simply did not fill the bill.
Within minutes of the announcement, I received a call from my eighty-three year old father who has always been a close follower of politics. After the primaries were over my dad was on the fence. He wasn’t sure if he was going to vote for McCain or Obama. This was particularly irritating because he votes in Florida, a state where each vote carries a great deal of weight. And so I was very interested to hear what his reaction to the Palin announcement was.
“He doesn’t deserve to be candidate for President if he could make such a dumb decision. How could he pick someone with no experience when he’s seventy-four years old” (even though McCain is seventy two, not seventy four, I chose not to correct him) Obama’s got my vote.” This brief conversation made my day and I happily relayed it to everyone I know who cared about its significance. If my father thinks like this, so do a lot of older Jewish voters in Florida I thought, and now we have a fighting chance in that important battleground state.
But as the weekend has passed, I realize that I had submerged what was as bothersome to me as Sara Palin’s utter lack of qualifications and that was McCain’s proud pronouncement that “Sara Palin is a feminist.”
I consider myself a feminist. I started volunteering on women’s’ rights issues at the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination in 1972 when we were fighting not only for equal pay for equal work but on issues that many have forgotten, the right for women to get credit and credit cards, and the right to have gender neutral newspaper listings for jobs, not “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs” as they were then classified. From there I went on to work for the Office for Civil Rights for the federal government’s Department of Health Education and Welfare where we were enforcing the first Title IX investigations to help ensure equal opportunity to male and female high school and college students . We also took on the challenges of enforcement of some of the first sexual harassment guidelines issued by the government. Because of my dedication to civil rights issues, I went to law school and have been working through the years along with so many others at enforcing the rights of women to be treated equally and fairly in the workplace.
So let me just say it. Sara Palin is no feminist. Just because she has children and works does not make her a feminist. In fact, I think that she sets feminism back fifty years.
She is vociferously pro-choice. She is against termination of pregnancy in all circumstances, even rape and incest. She has never that I know of championed the rights of women. She is a creationist and believes that creationism should be taught in schools a view which hardly encompasses the teachings of equality of the sexes.
Finally, her choice to work with five children is one that does not advance the rights of working women. Sara Palin went to work four days after she gave birth to a physically and mentally challenged baby. Her teenage daughter is pregnant. They are both in obvious need of their mother as are the rest of her school age children. She has chosen to place herself in a position just a heartbeat away from the most demanding job in the country and plans to do so while having the concerns of five children to worry about.
I have worked very hard as a trial lawyer and raised two children while doing so. Let me be the first to say, I can not imagine working at a job as full time as the one I had and taking care of five children at the same time. I could barely handle two. In my heart I know that that with five children and the demands of the position something or someone would have suffered. What’s more, the scenario I am imagining does not even contemplate the additional time required for the medical needs of a downs syndrome child.
And so when we have been fighting so long and so hard for the rights of working women, it’s my gut feeling that there is nothing about Sara Palen that advances our cause. For one, she’s seeking a position for which she is not qualified. Two, if her proposal to be mother of five, including a pregnant teenage daughter and a severely handicapped child raises doubts in my mind about her capacity to be President, I can only imagine the doubts it raises in the minds of many employers whose minds and views we have been trying to influence for over a generation. When we fight for our belief that we can do it all and that others can too we simply can’t be bluffing and we can’t afford to be wrong. It’s too important and too much rides on the outcome.
I am in complete awe of any woman who could handle this challenge. But the fact remains, it takes a woman to know a woman, and most of us know this is jut too much. She’s a bad example, she’s not qualified, and she’s wrong on the issues. As important, she’s a setback for all of us who have worked so hard to strike the balance and advance the cause.
Image: courant.com
