Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin

Cathy Young in today’s WSJ - - --

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.

On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a "Christian Stepford Wife" and a "Republican blow-up doll." Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog2, "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

You'd think that, whether or not they agree with her politics, feminists would at least applaud Mrs. Palin as a living example of one of their core principles: a woman's right to have a career and a family.

Yet some feminists unabashedly suggest that her decision to seek the vice presidency makes her a bad and selfish mother. Others argue that she is bad for working mothers because she's just too good at having it all.

In the Boston Globe on Friday3, columnist Ellen Goodman frets that Mrs. Palin is a "supermom" whose supporters "think a woman can have it all as long as she can do it all . . . by herself."
In fact, Sarah Palin is doing it with the help of her husband Todd, who is currently on leave from his job as an oil worker.

But Ms. Goodman's problem is that "she doesn't need anything from anyone outside the family. She isn't lobbying for, say, maternity leave, equal pay, or universal pre-K."

This also galls Katherine Marsh, writing in the latest issue of The New Republic4. Mrs. Palin admits to having "an incredible support system -- a husband with flexible jobs rather than a competing career . . . and a host of nearby grandparents, aunts, and uncles."

Yet, Ms. Marsh charges, she does not endorse government policies to help less-advantaged working mothers -- for instance, by promoting day-care centers. …

The rest of Young’s column’s here.

Comments:

Many feminists are not only smearing Gov. Palin’s character, they’re misrepresenting her position on a number of public issues and government services.

But who’s surprised any longer by that. It’s all been happening since Sen. McCain selected her to be his VP running-mate.

BTW - Remember when Margaret Thatcher began her rise in Britain, the left and some on the right there dismissed her as “just a greengrocer’s daughter?”