That appears to be one of the more surprising aspects of the rise of Sarah Palin in national prominence:  A solid unabashed Conservative is now the new Poster Child for American Feminism.

Feminism has long been a Democrat stronghold.  They owned exclusive rights to the world of Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown.  The battle of the sexes was fought between Billie Jean King and Bobbi Riggs and family values redefined by the sniping between Dan Quayle and Candice Bergen (Murphy Brown).

Republicans and conservatives have long been the enemy with the baseless accusation that conservatives want women to be subjected to a life of subjugation akin to the Yearning For Zion religious community in Texas.

Now, suddenly, the new role model is a former beauty queen turned hockey mom, a mother of 5 and a woman who rejects the #1 feminist issue, abortion.

And yet, despite that, feminists in droves are hailing her accomplishments.

And great they are.  She was married in 1988, but in 1992, with two young children she ran for City Council and won, they ran for Mayor of her town in 1996 serving until 2002, now with 3 children.  And she successfully was elected Governor in 2006, with 4 kids in tow.

Tell me, how is she not an inspiration to women?  And now, she is a nominee for the office of Vice President?

How can anyone look at her life and not see a wonderful story and a strong willed woman?

It is easy to see why people like Camille Paglia love her:

 Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy — one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama’s triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football — or one of the great light-saber duels in “Star Wars.” (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in “The Phantom Menace.”) This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

Camille see Palin as a redefining of feminism, and I agree:

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women’s studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me — and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).

Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Indeed.  While Palin does not subscribe to the platform and agenda of NOW or other feminist organizations, she embodies the spirit of what feminism is.

And even more relevant, it punctures one of the core values of liberal feminism ala NOW:

The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.

If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society’s acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism — one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

And so she skewers the reactions (knee jerk) to Sarah Palin.  As I said previously, she scares the Democrat establishment because she represents a rebellion in the traditional role of feminists, and intrudes something as mind boggling as independent thought.

Democrats and feminists cannot stomach someone who will not toe the line and recite the creed.

Feminism has been pigeonholed by the Democrats, it has been defined and reduced to a set of talking points that ignores the women it claims to support and outright condemns dissent.

And Sarah Palin is the Bull in the china shop of their comfort zone, a public figure larger than life due to her success who defies this attempt to force her to adopt their stagnant dogma, and stands as a true role model to feminism.

Its no wonder they want to reduce her to just lipstick, just window dressing on John McCain’s campaign.

The sheer brilliance of McCain in picking her stuns me.  Sure, I am a realistic, and i know he evaluated how well a woman would play to the disaffected Hillary voters, but I wonder if he foresaw how well his pick would be received overall, how powerful she would become as a role model and how many women in all corners would see in her something they can flock to.

And it is working.  Anne E. Kornblut writing for the Washington Post has more on that aspect:

Susie Baron is a Republican, a mother of two and a home-schooler. She voted for Mike Huckabee in the Ohio primary, but now — because of Sarah Palin — she thinks she is part of something much bigger.

“I wouldn’t even call it a Palin movement, I’d call it a sleeping giant that has been awakened,” Baron, 56, said at a rally here Tuesday. She described its members as a silent majority of women in Middle America who “are raising our families, who work if we have to, but love our country and our families first.”

“And until now, we haven’t had anyone to identify with,” Baron said, adding that traditional feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women do “not represent me.”

That has long been a disconnect in feminism, as some feminists look down at women who are comfortable with traditional roles, who feel fulfilled in their family first approach to a career. 

Such women represent a slap in the face of their ’struggle’, women who don’t want and didn’t ask for the interference in their lives.  These women celebrate their feminism in ways the feminists cannot comprehend.

And the Democrats may be making a tactical error in attempting to wedge Palin into a box, and return feminism to a single issue definition:

Other Obama advisers said that once women across the board begin considering Palin’s stands on social issues such as human embryonic stem cell research and legalized abortion — she opposes both — their interest will fade. That was a line of attack used by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic vice presidential candidate, when he was asked Tuesday whether Palin’s election would mean a step forward for women. “Look, I think the issue is: What does Sarah Palin think? What does she believe? I assume she thinks and agrees with the same policies that George Bush and John McCain think,” Biden said. “And that’s obviously a backward step for women.”

But even they admit it is not an easy task to define her:

While Democrats reject the notion that Palin will somehow transform gender politics once her views are known, a few acknowledged that they have had little success in trying to define her. “I think there may be some hand-holding, but nobody’s gone on a date yet,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (Mo.), a prominent Obama supporter who predicted that female voters will eventually return to his camp.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) said the issues that matter to female voters, not Palin’s sudden rise to the national stage, will determine their votes in November, but she said the Democrats need to explain those policy differences. “I think it’s our job to show the truth. They are more focused on an agenda than a gender,” Klobuchar said.

I think they may find that Palin still resonates with women of all stripes who reject abortion as the only issue of relevance.  The Democrats continue to insult women by assuming this is their only substantive issue.  Do they think women do not care about any other issue facing America right now?  Do Democrats really think a woman is only defined by her uterus and what she can do with it?

That sounds just a bit sexist to me.

Like other women in the crowd, Baron, the home-schooler from Maineville, Ohio, expressed frustration that feminism and women’s issues have seemingly been owned by Democrats whose values she does not share.

Julia Burns, 72, a Republican from Lebanon, cut in: “Men had better jump back. Women are going to take over. We’re sick and tired of playing by men’s rules. We’re coming out of the ground, and they had better move out of the way.”

And that is the gap that Sarah has stepped into, the women who believe in feminism and empowerment, but despise the limitations the Democrat and Feminist establishments try to force them into.

And they could be the voting bloc that will make or break this election. 

And the Democrats with their barrage of sexist attacks on Sarah are playing right into Republicans hands. Every attack on her for some aspect of her gender, or some other sexist area is a slap in the face of all feminists, though many will turn a numb cheek to the offense as they did in supporting Bill Clinton.

The more they attack her this way, the more she becomes the ideal of feminism, and they prove themselves to be the real oppressors.

Other praises of Palin:

Barbara Kay: Sarah Palin, a feminist revolution without the feminists

Rebecca Johnson: ‘I am a liberal, but I’m blown away by Sarah Palin’

Previously:

What PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome) really shows Part 1

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