I generally try not to spend a whole lot of time paying attention to Sarah Palin, one of the more shallow and frivolous of political sideshows to grace our nation's "discourse" in recent memory (and that's saying a lot). But this week she took a new tack, and this one was just too personal to let slide by.
Speaking to the "Susan B. Anthony List," a group that is cynically using the feminist heroine's moniker to strip back the rights of women that Susan B. Anthony made possible, Palin embraced a new schtick to try to redefine feminism, and to frame outlawing abortion as "grizzly bear moms" fighting to protect their country. And she said this:
"I kinda feel a connection to that tough, gun totin’ pioneer feminism," she told the enthusiastic crowd of anti-abortion activists gathered to support the SBA List.
"For far too long, when people heard the word feminist, they thought of the faculty lounge at some East Coast woman’s college," she said. "And no offense to them, they have their opinions and their voice and God bless ‘em, that’s great, but that’s not the only voice of women in America."
Conservative pundits are eating it up.
Palin's feminism is more a western, pioneer feminism than an eastern, faculty lounge feminism. That is to say, Sarah Palin's feminist heroines are more like Annie Oakley than Gloria Steinem, more skilled at shooting firearms and pulling a plow than at writing polemics about the patriarchy and its oppressions.
I just want to put to rest here and now the notion that Sarah Palin speaks for anybody but Sarah Palin's bank account. She sure as hell isn't the voice of Western women. And if the punditocracy thinks that what she represents has anything to do with the Western frontier, they've got a lot to learn. Particularly if they think she would in a million years find herself pulling a plow.
As I said, I take this business rather seriously, because my ancestors, my very near ancestors, actually are bonafide pioneers. My grandmother's grandmother most likely walked the entire distance from Missouri to Oregon in 1852. She was 11 at the time, and that's what the kids did--they walked. And it was highly unlikely she was totin' her gun along the way.
Her granddaughter, my grandmother, was born in 1892, and life in 1892 in the West hadn't advanced so greatly from 1852 to 1892, particularly in isolated Idaho, where she ended up. She married my grandfather in 1912. At the time, he was a genuine, old-fashioned ride-the-range cowboy, drawing top hand wages from one of the biggest cow outfits in Idaho. Early in their married life, they moved to Flathead Reservation, Montana, still about as frontier as you can get.
There, Grandma and Grandpa had a passle of children, all girls. Grandma once confessed that early on in their marriage they decided they didn't want to have any children, that they wanted to have the freedom that being just the two of them would bring. Of course, back in those days in the frontier of Montana, there wasn't a whole lot that couples could do in order to keep children from happening, whether they wanted it or not. Ironically, that's apparently what Palin would like to take Western women back to.
While Grandpa tried wheat farming (a long drought made that enterprise futile) and ended up cowboying again for a big Montana outfit, Grandma did what frontier women all did. Pretty much everything around the homestead. She milked, she raised chickens, she gardened, she cooked, three meals a day on a wood stove. And she took care of her five little girls.
Life didn't change appreciably when they moved back to take over the McCarter family ranch and homestead in Idaho. They had another child, Dad arriving kind of late on the scene. And it's Dad's stories about my Grandma Mattie's life that have instilled in me what Western women's heritage really is. That's partly because I was raised on the same cattle ranch as my father and my aunts, so it was really easy for me to envision. I rode horses in the same mountains after the descendants of some of the cattle they chased. We had a garden in the same spot my grandmother worked. I woke up every morning to the same view of the same mountains.
But it's also because Grandma was a remarkable woman. When Dad was growing up, they still had no electricity--that didn't come until the early 1940s. They did have a well, and the convenience of a hot spring nearby that Dad would haul water from to do the laundry and the weekly bathing. She still cooked three meals a day on a wood stove. She butchered chickens for dinner every day during haying season when there were extra hands to feed--no electricity, no refrigeration (for some reason, Grandpa never built an ice house), so every day the meat had to be fresh.
She got up before dawn every morning to get the fire started for breakfast, and to use the little bit of time that she could get for herself to spend in her garden. At well over 5000 ft. in elevation, she did remarkable things in that tilled earth. She had to, to have the fresh vegetables for summer, and the root vegetables to last over the winter. She also was very enterprising in creating a family business of selling eggs and cream. She raised turkeys from setting hens, and sold them dressed.
She was, actually, gun totin', but more out of necessity than fashion. She was the best shot in the family, Dad and his sisters say. She had to keep the magpies out of her garden and away from her chickens. They'll destroy eggs. They'll also peck at the hornbuds of young calves, potentially killing them if they can poke through the skull. Grandma was a scourge on the magpie population--she had to be. See, guns for real frontier women had little mystique and probably much less charm. They were a matter of survival, but also ranked with horses and farm machinery in the danger they posed for tragic accidents. Wrapped up in the old 30-30 that's still in my parents' house, unloaded, is the gruesome history and potential of that gun's use, often as not having to have it on hand to kill an injured farm animal.
My grandmother's life was not glamorous, as interesting and as inspiring and important as it was. It was important for her generosity. One of the most touching stories of her life we only knew after her death. At her funeral, an old friend and neighbor told my aunt that the nicest thing that ever happened to her something my Grandma did for her as a little girl. Her parents had mail-ordered a special dress for her to wear to the Christmas pageant. The day before the pageant, she rode down to the general store to pick up the mail and get her dress. It wasn't there. But, as was habit, she picked up the mail for all the families on her route back home, and by the time she got to our house, was dissolved in tears. Grandma got the story of the missing dress out of her. Then, staying up almost all night, sewed a dress for the little girl to wear to the Christmas pageant, as a surprise. To Grandma, this wasn't a remarkable thing. No one even knew she had done it until half a century later, when she was gone.
Grandma probably wouldn't have called herself a feminist. That term just wasn't relevant to her life or her generation. But she lived as one, as a quintessential Western woman. The frontier spirit she had, that her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother had, is made up of courage, of responsibility, determination, entrepreneurship, generosity, and independence. All that and the willingness and ability to do really hard, dirty, and thankless work. Inseparable from all of that is a profound respect for the choices and independence of our sisters. This is an inheritance I hold dear. I was damned lucky to grow up in an environment where I was given a tremendous degree of independence, responsibility, and freedom at a young age. I am a cowgirl by birth, and I won't cede that and everything it means to anyone.
Much less to as callow a politician as Sarah Palin. She is, we would say in Idaho, the female version of a goat roper. Those are the guys you see hanging around in cities in the West in their cowboy hats and their boots, with their big belt buckles. Few of them have ever been nearer to a horse--or a cow--than at the stands in a rodeo or the meat counter in the grocery store. Palin is just like them, using the trappings of her geography to make herself more interesting. The woman who would use a turkey slaughter as a photo op, who hasn't had a job she couldn't quit half-way through, who would take away the freedom of choice of all of her sisters, is no pioneer feminist. She's a poser.
And she couldn't hold a candle to my Grandma.
Update: Dad reminds me: if you want a definition of tough, Grandma lived to be 99.