America by Heart

by Sarah Palin

  What the American people are showing they understand is that the rise of the mama grizzlies is a healthy development, not just for women but for our country. It’s the women’s movement coming full circle, from demanding a seat at the table to sharing control of the table to provide a better future for our kids.

  I believe that some in the radical feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s became too heavily invested in the idea of women as powerless. They were preoccupied with themselves and their frustration to the degree that they made victims of themselves. But as columnist and former White House speechwriter Mary Kate Cary explains, mama grizzlies reject the notion of women as victims. They aren’t winning votes just because they’re women but because they are offering real solutions and a real alternative to the status quo:

  Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique, opens with these words: “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question— ‘Is this all?’ ”

  And so the “problem that has no name,” as Friedan put it, was born—and with it, modern feminism. Fast-forward forty-six years to the beginning of the twenty-first century in the United States. There’s a new generation of women my age who, while chauffeuring the Cub Scouts and Brownies, have silently watched out-of-control government spending, massive deficits left for our children, bailout after bailout of bankrupt industries, shady deals to win health care votes, and ethical and moral lapses from all types of politicians. Those women have also asked the question “Is this all?”—and not liking the answer, they are running for office.

  And voters, also not liking the answer, are voting for them.

  For more than 150 years the women’s movement in America has been advocating for more women in public office—and they’ve been right! Women have a unique perspective. Typically, they are less ambitious for superifical power than men and more focused on providing for the needs of others. I think we appreciate, more than some men, the fullness of American life, everything from raising decent kids to protecting our national security. If I do say so myself, most women have the stamina for endless multitasking and the ability to bring about consensus on tough issues. And we’re not afraid to work hard and get our hands dirty. We’re busy enough to know that time must be spent efficiently; in fact we’re too busy to waste time with typical political games and power struggles.

  One of my personal heroes is former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Her life and career serve as a blueprint for overcoming the odds and challenging the status quo as a woman. She started life as a grocer’s daughter in a small English town, living above the store with her sister and parents. From these humble beginnings she went on to Oxford and a seat in Parliament. In the 1970s she was secretary of state for education and science in a conservative government that sold out virtually all of its free market principles. Disgusted, she ran for the Conservative Party leadership in 1975 and became the first woman to lead a Western political party and the first female leader of the opposition in Parliament. From there, all that was left was the prime ministership itself. She served as British prime minister for more than eleven years, from 1979 to 1990, the first woman to lead a major Western democracy. In addition to being prime minister, she was a wife and mother.

  But it isn’t just the series of firsts that Lady Thatcher represents as a woman that draws me to her. She is a truly transformative figure. She became the leader of Great Britain at a time when that country was on the verge of bankruptcy, mired in unemployment and deficits at home, and cowering before the Soviet bear abroad. I remember first hearing Mrs. Thatcher speak when I was in high school. I was amazed. I had rarely heard a political figure—and never a female one—speak with so much conviction and so much moxie. Her message was one that America could use today.

  It is sometimes said that because of our past, we, as a people, expect too much and set our sights too high. That is not the way I see it. Rather it seems to me that throughout my life in politics our ambitions have steadily shrunk. Our response to disappointment has not been to lengthen our stride but to shorten the distance to be covered. But with confidence in ourselves and in our future, what a nation we could be!

  . . . If spending money like water was the answer to our country’s problems, we would have no problems now. If ever a nation has spent, spent, spent and spent again, ours has. Today that dream is over. All of that money has got us nowhere, but it still has to come from somewhere. Those who urge us to relax the squeeze, to spend yet more money indiscriminately in the belief that it will help the unemployed and the small businessman, are not being kind or compassionate or caring. They are not the friends of the unemployed or the small business. They are asking us to do again the very thing that caused the problems in the first place. We have made this point repeatedly.

  I am accused of lecturing or preaching about this. I suppose it is a critic’s way of saying, “Well, we know it is true, but we have to carp at something.” I do not care about that. But I do care about the future of free enterprise, the jobs and exports it provides and the independence it brings to our people. . . . To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the “U” turn, I have only one thing to say. “You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

  “The lady’s not for turning.” If it weren’t taken already, wouldn’t every woman want to make that the title of her memoirs someday? What a lady. What a leader. I cherish Margaret Thatcher’s example and will always count her as one of my role models. I am not alone, of course. Ronald Reagan considered Thatcher his closest ally abroad and relied on her advice at many points. And it was Thatcher who famously said to George H. W. Bush during the first Gulf War, “Don’t go wobbly now, George.” There was a woman to reckon with.

  The tragedy of contemporary American feminism is that it’s had the example of Margaret Thatcher to put forward as a model for over three decades now, and yet feminists have championed a very different type of female leader. Modern feminism’s idea of a “real” woman isn’t so much a woman as a liberal. “Real” women must be in favor of government-run health care, of restricting Second Amendment rights, of curtailing free speech in universities and in political campaigns, and other liberal causes. In the name of liberating women, modern feminism has wrapped us in a one-size-fits-all straitjacket of political correctness.

  This liberal ideology is so sacrosanct among feminists that they label women who don’t agree with them as not “real women.” Typical was a remark by a Democratic Tennessee lawmaker complaining that Republican women in the state legislature don’t share her liberal views. She snarked, “You have to lift their skirts to find out if they are women.”

  These critics either need a lesson in anatomy or a guide to contemporary politics. Today’s self-proclaimed feminists have (more than once) accused me of not being a “real woman” because I don’t share their leftist views. (The same sort of insults are hurled at black conservatives like Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell who don’t view themselves primarily as victims of racism.) But it’s actually the liberal women’s groups that have little in common with the majority of American women. Most women love their families and cherish motherhood. But all too often the leaders of the modern feminist movement seem disdainful of traditional family life and the joys and fulfillment we find in motherhood.

  Remember Hillary Clinton’s famous rant, when her husband was running for president, that she wasn’t, in her words, “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette”? Hillary is someone I like and admire personally
in many ways, but she came across then as someone frozen in an attitude of 1960s-era bra-burning militancy. She told us in no uncertain terms that she “could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas” but preferred to pursue a serious career. Well, Hillary (many of us wanted to say at the time), some of us like to bake cookies. Some of us also think we can do that and still have successful careers. And most of us don’t think we have to run down stay-at-home moms in order to make ourselves feel good about our choices.

  The women’s groups and mainstream media have greeted the rise of the conservative mama grizzlies in much the same way they treated the vice-presidential campaign in 2008: with disbelief that people so alien to them could win the support of the American people. Back then, left-wing feminists didn’t know what to make of an Alaskan chick out on the campaign trail talking about the Second Amendment, kids (the more the merrier!), and America’s urgent need for greater security through energy independence.

  Today, left-wing feminists and their allies seem to be similarly perplexed. Commenting on the victories of commonsense conservative women in primaries earlier this year, liberal editor Tina Brown complained, “it almost feels as if all these women winning are kind of a blow to feminism.” Another liberal commentator said that the true test of feminism is a belief in abortion rights and government health care. It was a new, “selfish” variety of feminism, she declared, that was coming to the fore with the victory of conservative women candidates.

  What kind of feminist is it who declares that a diversity of political opinion among women (but not men!) is somehow “selfish”? And what kind of advocate for women is it who laments the success of female political candidates? The fact is that it’s these feminist and media elites who are out of touch with American women. They claim to speak for us all, when in reality they speak for a very narrow liberal fringe. The bad news for them—and the good news for America—is that the country as a whole is waking up to this fraud. So many of the voices that claim to speak for American women simply don’t have our best interests at heart. We’re coming to realize that the empress isn’t wearing any clothes. No single group can speak for all women any more than a single group can speak for all men. To suggest otherwise is no less than old-fashioned sexism.

  Not long after commonsense conservative women started winning elections earlier this year, National Review columnist Kathryn Lopez put it this way:

  Women who are running these days as center-right candidates are not Sarah Palin clones, and they’re not anomalies. They’ve been around, and they’re fed up. Many tea-party groups have been started between children’s tee-ball games by women who see their country in danger. They see so much of what they have always loved about the United States being underappreciated and trampled on legislatively. And so they do the “mama grizzly” thing and work toward protecting it. But you don’t have to be an outdoorswoman from Alaska to appreciate that. There’s a maternal gracefulness about it. And it manifests itself in different ways, on different issues, because women, just like men, have different issues and different styles and different thoughts and ideas. . . . The “National Organization for Women” could never actually represent us all, and now we’re at a point where that’s hard for anyone to deny.

  And who, by the way, do you think has been raising all those male candidates for all these years? Conservative men and conservative voters weren’t raised by savages. Mom might have had something to do with how they turned out.

  It surprises some people to hear that I consider myself a feminist. I believe both women and men have God-given rights that haven’t always been honored by our country’s politicians. I believe women and men have important differences, but those differences don’t include the ability of women to work just as hard as men (if not harder) and to be just as effective as men (if not more so). I also consider myself a grateful beneficiary of the movement for female equality, particularly Title IX, the federal law that mandates equal opportunity for women in high school and college sports. So I proudly call myself a conservative feminist. One question liberal feminists would do well to ask themselves is why most American women today reject the label “feminist.”

  Maybe it’s my upbringing in Alaska that leads me to challenge the feminist stereotypes of what a woman ought to be. I grew up in a place and time where women did the same work as men—but were still allowed to be girls. My sisters and I were expected to work just as hard as the boys. We hauled wood to stoke the stove heating our house, we hunted, we fished, and we played sports. But at the same time, we were taught to be proud of the fact that we were girls. There was a time for dressing up, playing the flute in the band, and doing some traditionally “girl” things—and there was a time for getting into dirt clod fights.

  For most American women, the feminist movement actually lost its appeal decades ago. The reason, I think, is that somewhere along the line feminism went from being pro-woman to being effectively anti-woman. I mean “pro-woman” in the sense that it was once pro–women’s capabilities, strengths, and judgments. Our foremothers in the women’s movement fought hard to gain the acceptance of women’s talents and capabilities as equal to men’s.

  As a matter of fact, the original women’s movement fought for women’s rights in the same way the Founders advanced the cause of human rights: by affirming that we are all, men and women, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. I once had the privilege of visiting Seneca Falls, New York, the hometown of one of the original leaders of the women’s rights movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton is one of the authors of what is considered the founding document of the American women’s movement: the Declaration of Sentiments. It was written in 1848 following a meeting of women’s rights advocates in Seneca Falls. In writing this Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton deliberately echoed the words of the Declaration of Independence:

  When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

  Can you imagine a contemporary feminist invoking “the laws of nature and of nature’s God”? These courageous women spoke of our God-given rights because they believed they were given equally, by God, to men and women. They didn’t believe that men were oppressors, women were victims, and unborn children merely “personal choices.” They believed that we were children of God, and, as such, we were all—men, women, our littlest sisters in the womb, everyone—entitled to love and respect.

  The original feminists were interested in securing equal rights and opportunity for women in a man’s world. But at some point feminism began to be about emphasizing women as victims. Instead of being seen as fully capable of taking care of ourselves, we began to be portrayed as in constant need of protection. In the new feminist vision of America, women are perceived as constant victims of beatings by their husbands, date rape by their boyfriends, and self-induced starvation by society as a whole. The message the founders of the women’s movement had worked hard to convey was, to borrow a phrase, “Yes, we can.” Suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony argued that all that women needed were the same rights as men and they could succeed on their own as well as men. But at some point the message of the women’s movement came to be one that seemed designed to support not independence for women, but dependence . . . on government. In short, the message of feminism became “No, we can’t—at least not unless government helps.”

  And liberal feminists and their allies in the media pulled no punches in trying to convince American women that we are all victims in need of rescue by big government. I remember being astonished back in 1993 to hear about a study released by a liberal women’s group claiming to show that Super Bowl Sunday “is the biggest day of the year for vi
olence against women.” Forty percent more women, the study reported, would be battered that day. The mainstream media jumped on the finding and spread it widely, without bothering to check if it was accurate. Broadcasting the game that year, NBC pleaded with male viewers to stay calm.

  But I remember hearing all this and being very, very skeptical. Based on my own extensive experience watching games with my dad, Todd, Track, and other men over the years, and what I knew about my friends and other women, the data just didn’t sound right. Football driving men to violence against women? And women just passing the cheese dip and taking it? It turned out, of course, that the statistic was unfounded. When one brave journalist from the Washington Post bothered to check it, he found out it was completely unsupported—but only after women’s groups and their allies in the media had milked the myth for all it was worth.

  The “football is dangerous to women” urban legend was so successful for liberal feminists that they’re at it again today, but this time their target is the World Cup. Author and feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, who first reported on the Super Bowl hoax, has written about how authorities in Great Britain during the 2010 World Cup issued a press release claiming that “cases of domestic abuse increase by nearly 30 percent on England match days.” This, too, was revealed to be a misleading statistic. But, as Sommers points out, these manipulations do more than just serve the big-government agenda of liberal feminists; they serve the anti-woman agendas of tyrannical regimes everywhere: