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.

Bottom line, this is a definite read. Sanchez takes a much more nauanced view of feminism and modern electoral politics. As a Republican Latina and DC insider, she has a unique take on the role of women in politics and examines the quest for getting a woman in the White House. Unlike many other conservative books, she doesn’t waste half of it continuing the “feminists are the cause of all that is evil in this world” mantra. Instead,  she analyzes Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the effect of Sarah Palin and compares Michelle Obama to other First Ladies. She also asks key questions that I’ve been wondering, such as why do feminists hate conservative women like Palin who represent views such as mine and what will it take to get a woman elected POTUS?

Throughout the book, I scribbled and highlighted notes. She provided some perspectives that I’ll be thinking about for a while. She wrote a grownup book that doesn’t take potshots at disagreeing sides. I rarely find books like that. While she does disagree with liberal policies that feminists take, she doesn’t demonize them.

I spend a lot of time attacking feminism on this blog, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with some of their positions or value what they’ve done for women in society. I am thankful that I had an opportunity to play sports in high school, vote, pursue my education and a career, and I don’t fear being a victim of sexual harassment. I’m thankful that I earn the same as my male peers and didn’t find my job under the “female jobs wanted” section. I appreciate that I can sit in a meeting with other men working in politics and my opinions and talents will be respected. Those are the positions of feminism which I agree. What I don’t understand and what I spend so much time writing and Sanchez devotes a significant part of her book questioning, is “why do feminists hate conservative women?”

After examining a number of polls and surveys, interviewing advisers and pundits from all across the spectrum, Sanchez wrote a statement that deserves further study and gets at the essence of the women’s movement problem:

However deep into Clinton’s psyche these voters may have wanted to go, what I am taking away from all the polls and comments is that women want to vote for other women who reflect their own life experience — perhaps a bit chillingly — are suspicious of a woman who has opted to follow a path too far departed from the one they themselves have chosen. And they are particularly unforgiving of a candidate who would go so far as to disparage the lifestyle that they  themselves have chosen: it’s my contention that Clinton has never really been forgiven in some quarters for the “cookie” comment. It lost her the support of women who actually had stayed home and baked cookies –and enjoyed doing it.

This makes sense. Older, second wave feminists supported Clinton because they identified with her politics and struggles. They saw themselves represented in her. They came of age in the 70s and 80s and fought a very different battle than young women, who overwhelmingly supported Obama. Similarly, conservative women finally saw a role model in Palin. Conservative women, by and large, have drastically different demographics than Hillary supporters. They’re more likely to be married with larger families, churchgoers and either not as educated or educated at state schools. They’re middle class whereas Hillary supporters are going to be much more affluent elites. Ask any Palin supporter why they like her and they’ll echo, “Because she’s just like me.” They would never dream of voting for Clinton just because she had two X chromosomes. Why would liberals or moderates do the same with Palin?

It also reflects how deeply women view politics on the personal level. Sanchez’s opinion works both ways. Women on the right were antagonized by Clinton way back in 1992 and have never trusted her. Women on the left were antagonized by Sarah Palin and made all kinds of noise about how she did not represent feminism. This was after they spent the ninties telling women in their teens and twenties (my generation) that a feminist was anyone who made choices for herself. There had never really been anyone on the right to challenge their assumptions, and it wasn’t very pretty when it happened. Turns out they lied to both themselves and the entire world. As Sanchez notes in an interview that Rep. Tom Cole did with Politico:

…to be a leader in the women’s movement, you have to be a liberal. This is clearly a very liberated woman [Palin] who is not a liberal. And I think there is some tension with that because again, she breaks a lot of stereotypes and molds.”

Sanchez continues on why the feminists did not defend Palin from sexist attacks:

In the case of Palin, it was a bit of the opposite: if you don’t support the “right” policies, you forfeit your right to our indignation — no matter the treatment you recieve.

And on Gloria Steinem’s comments:

In Steinem’s view –and one in which she was unfortunately not alone — Palin’s own issue positions and beliefs are so heretical to the rights of women that they simply cannot be for real. They are only politically expedient. This points to a fundamental problem, as Paglia and others have discussed — namely, that the feminist movement has become, more than a movement for change and the promotion of opportunity and fair treatment for all, a collection of policy stances to which all members must dogmatically conform. And to me, this doesn’t feel right.

Amen! I’ve often complained that modern feminists have lost credibility by selling out to the Democratic Party for short-term victories. They no longer represent (if they ever did) the equality of all women but only the equality of liberal women. However, this fragmentation problem is hardly a second or third wave issue.

Sanchez also captures a historic problem regarding women in politics– we’re too fractured to ever be one sizable voting bloc. The first wave feminists- Stanton, Anthony, Paul and others saw this. Every time a women’s organization got off the ground, it fractured again. Even when Alva Vanderbilt put her considerable fortune and social clout behind the fight to get the vote, women were in disagreement over the methods and strategy. Paul created the National Women’s Party because she believed that once women got the vote, they would vote together as a single sex. That proved to be a naive view.

If Sanchez is right — women will not just vote for a member of their own sex but only for a woman who represents her own walk in life — we’ll never solve the “feminist” issue. Women will always be fractured and hateful on both sides. Conservatives will never trust liberal women, and liberal women will never trust conservatives. Trying to find someone with middle ground, such as a pro-abortion Republican like Christine Todd Whitman, just doesn’t seem worthwhile. Pro-life women would only reluctantly vote for her, if they did vote. Many would choose to sit it out.

On a smaller level, we’ve seen this at play since the 1970s through mommywars. Both sides have dug in their heels. Women who choose to work are supposedly wracked with guilt or are judged by women who stay at home. Women who do stay at home are judged for wasting their education or not “contributing” to society. While I’m not a mother, I’ve seen both sides. I’ve found myself judging women for not working, and I’ve seen the judgement on other women’s faces when they talk to my mom.

After reading this book, it’s doubtful that we’ll find an answer. However, Palin’s popularity does show that conservative women should be represented and vocal. Sanchez also makes another point: it’s highly unlikely that a Boomer will be the first female president. Now that Millenials are voting, it’s far more likely that the first female POTUS will come from the Xers or Millenials. That puts an even more interesting spin on feminism. Second wave feminism will likely never reach the Oval Office. Third wave, and possibly the fourth wave that we’ve entered, will determine the future of women’s issues. Given the sad and whiny state of third wave feminism, I’d say we have the upper hand.

Update:  Kathleen McKinley at Right Wing News also has a review of Sanchez’s book.