That lovely blog that started the maelstrom against Taylor Swift decided to go interview women waiting in line for the Palin book signing in Fairfax, Va. and incorporate the cover article on feminism in Newsmax this month. The author, Amanda Hess, forgot to mention that the Newsmax article was written by S.E. Cupp, a young female conservative. Since young, female conservatives don’t exist in feminist-land and are only the creation of old, white men in the GOP, she had to  snidely attack the women waiting in line:

In “newer feminism,” every woman’s choices are valued—no matter what those choices mean for other women. Schlessinger isn’t an enforcer of rigid gender roles; she’s a facilitator of women’s choices. Palin’s opposition to abortion rights and comprehensive sex education isn’t anti-feminist; it is her choice to deny reproductive choices to other women. Under this model, Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis isn’t an exploiter; he’s a liberator of women’s breasts.

Umm…no. Joe Francis is a pornographer and will be to the vast majority of conservative women. But ladies — and I sincerely hope that Amanda Hess and her colleagues find this post– let me spell it out for you. Sarah Palin is simply a marriage of conservative values with the watered-down version of feminism that you gals sold in the 90s in order to save a crippled and dying movement. Until Palin appeared, no one on the right had represented a liberated woman “making choices for herself,” successfully balancing the family and a career, and enjoying a modern marriage with her not-so-metrosexual husband. You were operating under the assumption that the Gloria Steinem vs. Phyllis Schafly dynamic still worked.

Despite my staunchly anti-feminist upbringing, I’ve gotten familiar with the f-word. I worked for a quasi-feminist organization. Well, it’s an organization determined to train little feminists, but it gave me a solid crash course in all things liberal women. After I left that job, I decided to get to the bottom of this feminist issue. I had been blogging anonymously for nearly a year but had danced around the subject. After I moved back to the DC area, I dove into reading feminist theory, history and anything from the women’s studies genre. I was determined to understand what feminism was. The only problem was that feminists were asking that too.  Sadly for them, Palin arrived on the scene before they could reach an answer.

To understand it, let’s go back to the beginning. Hopefully, this history is familiar to most of you.

Feminism got its start on the radical left. It grew directly out of the the civil rights movement. However, these weren’t the average people who wanted to see racial equality, but a complete restructuring of our country. Many of them were children of Communist Party of America members and had grown up as “red diaper babies” as Susan Brownmiller lavishes in her memoirs, In Our Own Time.

From the earliest moments, which could be traced back to Simone de Beauvoir, a radical leftist and often-abused significant other of Jean-Paul Sartre, when she penned the Second Sex in 1949 or even when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication on the Rights of Women in 1792, the women’s rights movement was aligned with the political left. A little-known fact about Betty Friedan–when she wasn’t pining away at the “problem with no name,” she was active in Communist Party activities and had been since her student days at Smith. In fact, she joined the party in 1940.

Thus, feminism wasn’t this nice, “lets talk about our click moments and fight for equality” but a movement that desired to reshape our entire culture, society and economic systems into something that eliminated the vague “patriarchy” and the evils of capitalism. Essentially, feminism is the gender version of Marxism.

Almost immediately, the women’s liberation movement started splintering. The radical feminist wanted nothing less than a societal revolution. The liberal feminists were much more content with fighting for abortion on demand, workplace discrimination and liberating those beleaguered housewives. However, they were a rather homogeneous group of females. Anytime someone from the outside tried to join — and  outside being anyone who wasn’t white, middle class,  heterosexual,  bi-coastal, highly educated, professional and with an axe to grind against men due to daddy issues or boyfriends unwilling to commit — ultimately left. Early divisions were painstakingly  marked by African-American women and lesbians starting their own versions of the movement.

Later on when multiculturalism got popular in the 1980s, feminists embraced it because the philosophy fit them so well. It covered a multitude of sins, namely that at no point had they been able to unify all women simply by being women. No women’s movement has ever been able to do that, even suffragists who fought for the 19th Amendment were split across numerous issues. However, issues with identity politics are for another post.

Somehow, small groups of noisy women managed to make policy changes.  By infiltrating the Federal government through the EEOC, academia and the media (a large number of the early leaders were writers and journalists), they made sweeping changes through sheer willpower, litigation and scare tactics.

However, where they failed and continue to fail was winning the hearts and opinions of American women.

When the Equal Rights Agenda failed after the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, feminists were at a loss. Much soul-searching went on. Numerous books were written, including Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women, which asserted that conservative women were under the thumbs of their men, had no minds of their own and as slaves to their Bibles and kitchens, would advocate against anything Phyliss Schafly described as “anti-family.”

They never stopped to think that conservative women actually believed that they were already equal, relished being mothers and caretakers and were quite happy with the capitalistic system that made America great. The women’s movement never even contemplated that a large voting bloc of women were more concerned liberty and the individual than tolerance and the collective.

Conservative women were lamented and dismissed, not to be contemplated again until the rise of Sarah Palin. Maybe if they had been a bit more intellectually honest and circumspect, today’s problems wouldn’t be going on.

Nevertheless, the feminists shifted agendas and went to work on issues relating to higher education and did some good things with domestic violence and rape issues. However, by the late 80s, the movement had lost steam. Feminist debates were dragged into mommywars, the myth of the Supermom and the wailing of single women with ticking biological clocks.

They didn’t realize that a new generation of women had grown up without gender discrimination and really didn’t identify with the second-wave grand dames. Instead, they had grown up with MTV and decided to somehow merge feminism with raunch culture.

This third-wave that sprung up in the 90s had a lot of public fights with the old school, namely over sexual liberation. Since they wanted to appeal to young women, they watered down the message that their mothers had told them. For example, in Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards define feminism as:

Of course the goals of feminism are carried out by every day women themselves. Maybe you aren’t sure you need feminism, or you’re not sure it needs you. You’re sexy, a wallflower, you shop at Calvin Klein, you are a stay-at-home mom, a big Hollywood producer, a beautiful bride all in white, an ex-wife raising three kids, or you shave, pluck, and wax. In reality, feminism wants you to be whoever you are-but with a political consciousness. And, vice versa: You want to be a feminist because you want to be exactly who you are.

The 3rd wavers consisted of sexually liberated women, riot grrls and women who loved to create ‘zines. All political movements– no matter the issue– always lose nuances in the media, and the media was rather silly with third wave women. Images such as the Spice Girls, Ally McBeal and “girl power” came to capture what feminism meant to modern women. The watershed momement of the third wave was the Clarence Thomas hearings that catapulted sexual harassment to the front page. However, when a liberal Democrat with a penchant for oral sex in the Oval Office took over, feminists completely sold out and lost their remaining strand of credibility with Gloria Steinem famously declaring “it was consensual!”

Between the late 90s and now, not much happened. Compared to terrorism, feminism just wasn’t that important. Then John McCain picked La Palin, and the head-spinning started.

You see ladies, what the feminism movement missed was that a lot had changed in conservative politics. Conservative women weren’t doormats, we just never had anyone that espoused our values with the “picture” of feminism before. As Leslie Sanchez notes, women will only vote for candidates who share their own views. The concept that women will vote for another women simply due to shared chromosomes is ridiculous. If Geraldine Ferraro had been conservative in the 80s, we would have supported her. The nice thing about basing your values on invididuality, merit and talent is that you don’t have to promote superficial labels.

For us, Palin was the real deal. By 2008, most women worked outside the home and led very similar lives to the Governor. Again, they were very different from the still white, middle class, highly educated, bi-coastal feminists. When you combine the fact that many of us grew up with thirdd-wave “you go girl!” feminism, it made sense that Palin ushered in a era of conservative or libertarian-leaning feminism.

Is it really that hard to understand that the American women rejected your politics in the 1980s, so you massaged the message in the 90s and now have to live with the consequences? Had the movement not changed its views so much, not many of you would exist, but you’d have some credibility left.

Since my college years almost 20 years ago, I’ve considered myself a feminist. It is usually assumed that feminists are left-leaning liberals, but I am a feminist who is politically to the right of center. So, at many feminist gatherings – especially as my politics have changed – I’ve often felt like an ideological version of the ‘sister outsider’ outlined in the work of the late lesbian feminist Audre Lorde: theoretically part of the group, but a case apart. However, there are many other black feminists like me.

While abortion and LGBT issues are the focus of feminism in America, the economy and government intervention are concerns in other countries. Today, I stumbled upon this article about conservative black feminists from around the world. Now, right, left, conservative and liberal mean many different things outside of America, but the feminists mentioned in this article emphasize personal responsibility, limited government and capitalism.

There is an opportunity for us black center-right feminists to build upon Hurston’s work and to continue to bring different perspectives to black feminism. Liberal feminists often ask for big government goodies, but that can’t happen without production and wealth creation by individuals freely trading their products and services.

As a social conservative in America, you would think that my main issue with feminism would be abortion. However, it is feminism’s deep commitment to socialism that bothers me the most. Feminists believe that to empower women, you need to weaken men. In order to help the poor, you have to take away resources from the rich through taxes, lawsuits, anti-discrimination laws or quotas. Feminists believe that in order to change society, the federal government has to step in and pass a law. It’s as though freedom, wealth and liberty are in limited quantities and must be rationed out to the masses in different levels determined by arbitrary perceptions of discrimination.

If feminists spent more time trying to alter society’s perceptions instead of bullying people through lawsuits, mandates and laws, I believe that a lot many more Americans would embrace the movement. However, feminists have allowed their cause to be co-opted by the Democratic party in order to maintain political power and relevancy. They’ve sacrificed the “principles” of their movement for short-term gains. Allowing a political party to take oever your movement only weakens it. (Sadly, that comes from watching Republicans all but destroy the fiscal conservatism on the right. )

In developing countries, it’s the much-hated “patriarchal” capitalism that is liberating women. Micro-loans and social entrepreneurship are helping women in the most impoverished countries develop businesses and establish better lives for their families and communities. Think the Girl Effect* or Ten Thousand Villages.

While I disagree with the author’s views on abortion and gays, I can’t help but want to shout a third wave “you go girl” here:

Another area that libertarian feminists look at is how more modest dress is now the counterculture, and how hip-hop culture has undermined the richness of black American culture that once placed more value on black women. We are also interested in how government policies – such as the Great Society, the war on drugs, prostitution laws that prosecute women but not the male customer, military rules barring women from certain positions, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military and state crackdowns on informal babysitting arrangements – have disproportionately impacted black women’s lives and undermined black women’s freedom.

Choice is an underlying theme running through black center-right feminism. However, this pro-choice stance doesn’t end with abortion, but extends to economic issues and other social issues.

We believe that women should have the right to make any choices that we desire (while enduring the full repercussions of those choices), so long as it doesn’t harm others. With our choice mantra, black center-right feminists can increasingly bring more energy and vigor to the feminist arena.

If feminism believes that women should be empowered by choices, we need to stop the nannystate encroachment. Fewer laws, less government intervention, greater freedom and liberty are the answer. In the words of my college roommate, that requires you to put on your big girl panties and take responsibility for your own actions. Liberty and capitalism make a better society for everyone rather than a rigid, litigious society that all but mirrors the far reaches of the right that feminists so eschew.

*I really like the Girl Effect video not only because it’s one of the best web videos out there, but it has a strong capitalistic message. Through education and capitalism, a girl helps her family and village. It’s not through the government or the UN, but through investing in a small business and giving her the freedom to make choices with that business.