I hate to start up something that might have to be moved to its own discussion thread (maybe this is best placed in the Fuck Sexism thread), but Lord J, I think there
might be something positive about Sarah Palin's governorship:
http://celebrity-babies.com/2008/03/06/gov-sarah-palin-2/Yeah, I just cited a site called "celebrity-babies.com." Now I wish had I found a more...respectable source for this, but moving along...
The quote from Palin in that article:
I had Piper on a Monday and I was back to work on a Tuesday. I even brought her to work with me....Is powerful from a feminist perspective, is it not? Hasn't one of the tried-and-true arguments in favor of patriarchal norms been that women need "special treatment" because they bear children? Hasn't the "mommy track" been a significant part of what erected the glass ceiling in the business world? If Sarah Palin was able to bear a child and go to work the next day, it implies that women are perfectly capable of remaining in command if given command, despite the fullest expression of their biological peculiarities. No more lost productivity than if a man engaged in computer engineering had broken his ankle -- all his functionality pertinent to the job is still there, in spite of the exhaustion he incurred that day, and he remains just as productive to the company than before he broke his ankle. So it was with Governor Palin.
What I'm trying to express there is the notion that any supposedly rational economic arguments implicitly propping up the glass ceiling simply prove nonsensical in light of Sarah Palin's example as a governing new mother. Now, I don't know how difficult it is to govern Alaska, and I sure hope Tod took a day off work that Tuesday so that at least one parent could devote complete attention to that child on its second day of life as a full human being, but moving along...
Certainly Sarah Palin will never escape
the repercussions of the interview with Katie Couric, but before that happened, she was a major force in politics because she seemed to reconcile conservative values (it's "proper" for a woman to bear children) with women's empowerment (women can be in command of a government). That's my sense anyway.