Quote:
Originally Posted by infinite monkey
I think Sarah Palin was a willing participant in a campaign to make women in politics look unstable and stupid. Too many women were going too far, shaking up the status quo. Hillary scared the hell out of them, so let's just remind everyone how cocoa puffs women are.
She's a big giant shame.
Yes, I have tinfoil hat on. That is my own personal conspiracy theory.
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I don't think there's a conspiracy. That said, I do think we see in Palin's role, a continuation of a much older pattern.
There is (and has always been) in American, and in British, culture a sense of disquiet over politically successful women. It's a pervading disquiet and applies almost equally to female voters/audience as male. Politicians like Hilary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi come in for all the usual political attacks in the media, but there is the addition of a kind of meta criticism of them as women standing in men's shoes.
Many of the attacks on them in the media are centred around their femininity or lack thereof. Their suitability as mothers, wives and sexual beings are at the centre of their political identity, whether they choose that or not.
Meanwhile, without doubt the most damaging attack that can be made on a male politician is any hint of femininity (either in terms of sexual orientation, or in the sense of being 'soft').
In many ways this just mirrors society in general. But in the political sphere it takes on an added urgency.
In the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, the criticism most commonly levelled against women who participated (or attempted to do so) in political life was that they were 'unsexed' by that activity. That in taking part in political culture they were setting aside their womanly identity and adopting a male one. We no longer use the word 'unsexed', but the core of that critique remains in force.
Throughout this period, from time to time, a figure like Palin emerges. Sometimes that woman is a nutter. Sometimes she's cleverer than her male patrons. But she is usually very conservative, pro 'proper' female roles and yet, is waltzing comfortably through the male political sphere as she advocates a return to true femininity.
Margeret Thatcher is a classic example of this. She carried her traditional femininity like a badge of honour, and rose to the top as a stronger figure than any of her male colleagues. Politically, she did much to damage the quest for gender equality in the UK, even as her very presence at No.10 broke down walls.
Hannah More, writing in the late 18th/early 19th century is the person that usually springs to mnind for me on this. Uber conservative, strong advocate of proper gender roles for men and women and yet even as she was advocating it she was herself employing a political voice, and acting in the public sphere. She was the cultural and political antidote to writers like Wollstonecraft, whose ventures onto the public stage earned her the soubriquet of 'Female Politician' and 'Unsex'd creature'.
Women participating in the political sphere were lumped together as a 'monstrous regiment', echoing the 16th century treatise by Knox, who wrote specifically against the two female monarchs who reigned in Britain (Scotland and England).
Palin is/was the acceptably feminine antidote to the unsex'd, monstrous regiment of Clinton and Pelosi.