Three views on Mama Grizzlies and the debate over feminism

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In the wake of the victories of a number of female candidates in the June 8 primary elections, pundits continue to weigh in on the significance on the mama grizzlies-versus-liberal-feminists debate. Here are excerpts from three opinion pieces on the topic, all of which mention Sarah Palin...

Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review, "If Mama Ain’t Happy, She May Just Run . . . for Office":

Women are people too. We see the world differently than men because we are different, and complementary. But women also see the world differently from one another, woman to woman.

This is the breakthrough we’re seeing in American history right now, and it’s becoming next to impossible to deny these realities. The evidence is there, from Sarah Palin to Meg Whitman or even Democrat Blanche Lincoln. In the wake of a series of primary elections this June, there has been much talk that we are in another year of the political woman. And this time, she is frequently more right than left.

In truth, this is nothing shocking or new. The celebrated model of the female politician may have been a liberal, like Democrat Barbara Boxer, fighting against the rights of the most vulnerable among us, the unborn. But she was never every woman. In fact, those who fought for female suffrage were a different type, whether women who have voted subsequently realize it or not. They brought a maternal instinct to their activism.

When you meet a Sarah Palin or a Carly Fiorina, or the next woman the media goes into a frenzy over, you’re not actually meeting someone who appeared yesterday or who is somehow contrary to nature. When you look at some of the issues we’re debating today — issue such as preserving who we are and protecting those innocents — we’re in exactly the place as a nation where a few good women of this kind might do a world of good alongside a few good men.

The Left willl try to pretend a woman who doesn’t buy the party line of the professional-feminist sisterhood is somehow an oddity, even a traitor to women or a misogynist. (I’ve heard them all.) But the truth is that she may simply represent a commonsense backlash. The feminist movement tried to deny so much that women, uniquely, can bring to the cultural and political table. And America is moving on, Ms.

Ross Douthat at The New York Times, "No Mystique About Feminism":

When historians set out to date the moment when the women’s movement of the 1970s officially consolidated its gains, they could do worse than settle on last Tuesday’s primaries.

It was a day when most of the major races featured female candidates, and all the major female candidates won. They won in South Dakota and Arkansas, California and Nevada. They won as business-friendly moderates (the Golden State’s Meg Whitman); as embattled incumbents (Arkansas’s Blanche Lincoln); as Tea Party insurgents (Sharron Angle in Nevada). South Carolina gubernatorial hopeful Nikki Haley even came in first despite multiple allegations of adultery.

But mostly, they won as Republicans. Conservative Republicans, in fact. Conservative Republicans endorsed by Sarah Palin, in many cases. Which generated a certain amount of angst in the liberal commentariat about What It All Meant For Feminism.

“Do you still cheer,” Slate’s Sara Libby wondered of Whitman’s and Carly Fiorina’s California victories, “if the [glass] ceiling is crashed by two conservative businesswomen?” On “Good Morning America,” Tina Brown fretted that “it almost feels as if all these women winning are kind of a blow to feminism.” Writing in The Daily Beast, Linda Hirshman declared that support for abortion rights and Obamacare were litmus tests for true feminism, as opposed to the “selfish” variety that triumphed on Tuesday.

These conflicted responses echoed a similar debate that broke out a few weeks earlier, following a Palin speech in which she repeatedly laid claim to the feminist mantle — praising the “mama grizzlies” currently running for office as conservative Republicans, and hailing an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity.” Half the women in journalism, it seemed, weighed in on the address, with reactions ranging from “you’ve got to be [expletive] kidding me” on the Web site Jezebel to Meghan Daum’s declaration in The Los Angeles Times that if Palin “has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she’s entitled to be accepted as one.”

The question of whether conservative women get to be feminists is an interesting and important one. But it has obscured a deeper truth: Whether or not Palin or Fiorina or Haley can legitimately claim the label feminist, their rise is a testament to the overall triumph of the women’s movement.

The Washington Examiner's Barbara Hollingsworth, "Pro-life women take political center stage":

In 1869, being a feminist didn't automatically mean declaring war on unborn children. "When a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is a sign that, by education or circumstances, she has been greatly wronged," said suffragette Susan B. Anthony.

The Susan B. Anthony List, an Alexandria-based political action committee named after this heroine of women's rights, spent nearly $2 million to keep federal funding of abortion out of the recently passed health care bill. When that attempt failed, the group then commenced a $215,000 independent expenditure campaign on behalf of its top priority candidate: California Republican Carly Fiorina, the only woman ever to run a Fortune 20 company.

Last Tuesday, Fiorina -- whom SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser calls "the perfect pro-woman, pro-life contrast to Sen. Barbara Boxer" -- won her primary, as did other pro-life women such as gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman in California and Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Senate candidate Sharron Angle in Nevada, and House candidate Kristi Noem in South Dakota. Dannenfelser called the results "an historic win for pro-life women candidates ... the greatest affirmation of our mission in the history of the organization."

In November, Fiorina will square off against Boxer, whom Dannenfelser describes as "the most aggressive champion of abortion rights in Congress."

Thirty-seven years after Roe v. Wade, abortion is at the heart of the fury directed against former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who had the audacity to appear on stage at the Republican National Convention holding her Downs Syndrome infant and who pointedly refers to the pro-life women she endorses as "mama grizzlies."

The SBA List plans to spend $6 million more in the months before November's mid-term elections to support mama grizzlies and to punish "pro-life" Democrats who voted for Obamacare, which includes the greatest expansion of abortion since the 1973 Supreme Court decision.

Like their namesake, these grizzlies bite.

Follow the links to read the unedited original articles.

- JP