FOR better or for worse, John McCain's gutsy selection for his running mate of Sarah Palin, a 44-year-old mother of five, signals a new era for women in America and perhaps the world.
Being a powerful woman poses special difficulties: Americans may pretend to enjoy (or aspire to) racial blindness, not gender blindness. Women leaders must forge personal strategies for combining "feminine" with "powerful" - even while living in a society like ours that pays lip service to the idea that gender doesn't matter anymore.
Newsflash: It does. Sex is one of the more consistently powerful forces in the human psyche, and both men and women notice whether someone is female or male.
Generally, powerful female politicians fall into one of two archetypes: Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi.
Indira Ghandis come to power through their female family role, not in spite of it: They rise as daughters or wives in powerful political families to become mother figures - playing off the "lady bountiful" ideal in traditional societies.
Margaret Thatchers are post-sexual figures: They're tough old biddies whose days as wives and mothers seem well behind them. Schoolmarms, crones - they're classic female authority figures who can be trusted to exercise power "like men" because their disturbing and complex female sexual persona has largely dissipated.
Interesting, and where does Palin fit into this?
But Palin is something completely new. She is still young, still beautiful, still in the middle of all the messy complications that the sexual role of being a woman brings - a Down-syndrome baby, a teen daughter's pregnancy. The downsides are obvious; the potential for delegitmating hecandidacy remains intense.
But the potential upside for American women who are tired of pretending to be men, while remaining anxious to contribute all we can, is also intense.
What we need here is a new sexual archetype for female achievement. And in Gov. Palin, I think we have an extraordinary one: pioneer woman.
A pioneer woman is a traditional figure. She stands beside her man, not at war with him. She takes care of her home and her community. If her man is around, maybe she lets him kill the bear. But if he falls, or fails, she picks up the rifle and gets the job done - whatever job needs to be done.
Here's the larger message of the Sarah Palin story:
Life is messy. First things first: Take care of your babies. Do what you have to do, and deep down you never give up on life. You refuse to choose. The unexpected will happen, but that's OK - you can deal with it. You are resilient, optimistic, competent and caring.
How did McCain know? A moose-hunting pioneer woman is the perfect choice to be our first female vice president.
Is Sarah Palin up to being president? Hey, anyone who can raise five children while governing Alaska successfully enough to earn over an 80 percent approval rating - I'm just not worried about.
Gov. Sarah Palin can do whatever she has to do, and she can do whatever needs to be done.
I couldn't agree more. Women are falling into the typical liberal trap of divide and conquer. Usually it is the class warfare, or the race warfare, now they are doing woman warfare, pitting women against each other because of one isolated issue, or turning a woman who chose to have children into some type of mindless babyfactory. This is disgusting all the way around. If only women would get past the 30 years of talking points as "liberals are the people of women" and look at the reality, they could see we might be on the verge of something historic.
