Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times:

She’s talking not about your mom’s or Gloria Steinem’s feminism but, as she put it, an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity.”

Using grizzly bears as a metaphor, Palin seemed to imply that the tenets of feminism — or at least the word itself — need not apply solely to liberal, abortion-rights supporting (and, by implication, gun-eschewing, gay-marriage-advocating, reusable-eco-bag-toting, dangling-earring-wearing) women. Red-state PTA moms with a love of God and country can get in on the empowerment act too.

“The mama grizzlies, they rise up,” Palin said, adding that such women “can give their child life, in addition to pursuing career and education and avocations. Society wants to tell these young women otherwise. These feminist groups want to tell these women that, ‘No, you’re not capable of doing both.’ ”

Now, there are a lot of ways in which this logic is contorted, not least of all the suggestion that supporting the right to choose represents a no-confidence vote for the idea of mothers leading fulfilling professional and personal lives. But putting that aside, I feel a duty (a feminist duty, in fact) to say this about Palin’s declaration: If she has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she’s entitled to be accepted as one.

Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon Broadsheet responds:

In many ways, the debate over Palin’s feminist cred boils down to whether an anti-choice feminist is an oxymoron. It certainly is in my mind, but the label doesn’t belong to me any more than it does to Palin. Besides, I’m less concerned with labels than I am with actual arguments about what is truly best and just for all women. I say, let Palin hide behind her favorite new buzzword; we all well know she’s better with catch phrases than actual policy.

Me? I find Palin’s antichoice position per se less disturbing than her overall libertarian exceptionalist brand of politics as individualist triumphalism, where her feminism slides right in alongside all her other policy positions as I can do it all on my own, so you should be able to do it all on your own, so I don’t need to show solidarity with you. This political position simply doesn’t acknowledge that institutional oppression even exists – it’s just a few bad apples that you ought to stand up to, by golly gosh darn, and government needs to keep its hands out of her pocket.

Within the bounds of that extreme individualist libertarian position? I guess she’s as feminist as possible within those limits – that she is just fine and dandy with exceptional women proving themselves to be worthy of public acclaim and social rewards just as much as exceptional men. But for those who aren’t exceptional? She wants them to vote for policies which punish them for being ordinary by cutting revenue to the public purse that provides support infrastructure to people who don’t have the capacity, for whatever reason, to be exceptional. It’s astonishing how many choices to pursue individualist exceptionalism you don’t have when you don’t know whether you’ll have a roof over your head tomorrow, but libertarians always gloss over these inconvenient truths.

While Palin remains a libertarian she’s not helping the fight against sexist or any other sort of oppression, so whether she calls herself a feminist or not, she’s not on my side.

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