G-L-O-R-I-A

By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008
Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.



Photos: Sarah Palin, north starJoin the reader discussion on Gloria Steinem's Op-Ed article
Sarah Palin as Alaska National Guard commander
Palin appears to disagree with McCain on sex education
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."


She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

TESTING 1, 2, 3

I am at school strangely early. I used to get here this early all the time, but since I am teaching art instead of science, I have tried this year to arrive between 7 and 7:30. This morning I was full of energy and read my twitters and my e-mails at home, gathered my things and off I went to school. I was here by 6:30a.m. The repairman is in my room fixing my phone.We are having our high stakes testing and my classroom phone will not call out, I can receive but not send. There was a boy in my class who was wanting to use his breathing machine between two tests that were scheduled without a break. That gave me a scare, he was moved to a room with a working phone and now it is getting fixed! Hooray! The phone hasn't worked all year and part of last year.

Testing week is always weird. We don't want to make too much of the academic time we have, so after a whole morning of testing and we are having classes meet one day each day of the week. Friday we will be testing all day and they should be pretty much fried at the end of that. I have a really great group of SpEd kids who are taking the test seriously and working at it very intently. I took a peek at their essays and I was impressed. Their teachers have been hitting the writing really hard and it shows. Even the ones who appeared to not be writing much did a decent job. I look forward to seeing their scores.

Last weekend I took care of the H-bomb and his new dog, Ruby. She is a rescue red boned hound, just like Little Ann in "Where the Red Fern Grows". BUT she has been abused in her previous life, and although she is a sweet,laid back, very calm animal in many ways, she is afraid of EVERYTHING. Skittish, a flutter a crackle, she flinches. That does not compute with the sweet and laid back part, but it's true.I lured her downstairs from her closet with tiny morsels of chicken, ala, "It's either me or the dog", I tried everything I have gleaned from my reading lately to try to get her to relax and be comfortable. It worked somewhat and she AND the H-bomb slept with me that night-- Ruby on the floor and H in bed, like an angel. Then Ruby decided to gnaw on her great big crackling bone. (Sleep deprived Nonnie.)
It was pouring rain, buckets of rain at 6.a.m. When H awoke and said he was hungry. The night before, I decided we would venture over to the truck stop for pancakes and we did go. By the time I got on the road I was so drenched from my unsuccessful attempts to wrest the booster seat from the pickup truck, belt the boy in, and try to open a brand new umbrella, that I looked as if someone had soaked me with a garden hose. Unsuspecting, I ordered the blueberry and banana pancakes for the preschooler, he has a good appetite, but this plate would have served two if not three adults. He barely made a dent in it, and he tried! A great time was had by all, including the two star wars characters who accompanied us. We went back to our pirate ship and played until mommy got home. When I got to my home, I was sure I wasn't tired, but it took me about two seconds on the sofa to conk out.

more later--just don't post as much now that I twitter-- oh I saw a list of books on Jen Lancaster's blog this morning that look like really good reads. Not only does the girl write, but she writes a good review of what she has been reading. I am going to go back over there and copy that list!